Date: 2019-07-30 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Zombies
Description: In the thrilling conclusion to Generation Z, Peter Meredith has created a work of unsurpassed vision, power, and imagination. The Queen Unchained transports us to a world filled with zombies that are unlike any we have ever experienced before. But there are worse things than the undead. The Black Captain emerges victorious at every turn. To the south, Jenn Lockhart begins her reign as queen, isolated and vulnerable. The signs all point to a coming invasion, and yet she has a fleet that consists of only one ship and an army that’s made up of broken ex-whores, a handful of children, and a few co

Generation Z

Book 6

The Queen Unchained

By Peter Meredith

Copyright 2019

Peter Meredith

Blah, blah, blah, lawyer speak, lawyer speak, blah blah, blah.

Do we really need to go into this? Here’s the deal. Looky-no touchy.

It’s as simple as that.

Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

A Perfect America

Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1

Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2

Generation Z

Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead

Generation Z: The Queen of War

Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned

Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved

Generation Z: The Queen Unchained

The Sacrificial Daughter

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five

The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

The Punished

Sprite

The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

Jillybean’s First Adventure: An Undead World Expansion

Tales from the Butcher’s Block

Chapter 1

Puget Sound, Washington

The water in the long, narrow inlet was rich, black and impenetrable. What meager light trickled down from the sky was not reflected in it, nor did it shimmer across its slick surface. It was sucked down, gone forever. The night was darker than any Emily Grey could ever remember, but that wasn’t going to save her. It didn’t matter that the moon was absent and the stars seemed further away than she had ever seen them. They were oh so tiny, as if they were trying to hide in the infinity of space, as if they were abandoning her as well.

She was dreadfully, horribly alone, except for the moaning, hungry zombies and the Corsair ship bearing down on her, that is. From its great press of sails to its long smooth hull, the ship was pure black and almost didn’t look real, like it was nothing more than a tremendous shadow. And it made no more noise than one as it slipped silently through the black water.

The instinct to flee from it was very great, and Emily grabbed her paddle in both hands before common sense took over. Even if she wasn’t already exhausted, she would never be able to outrun the boat. This left fighting, hiding, or simply giving up. Each choice was worse than the next and, in the end, fear ruled. She threw her coat over herself and huddled as low as she could in the aluminum canoe, shivering in fright.

The canoe’s silvery sides were a beacon, and had been spotted from a quarter of a mile away by the Corsairs on the fifty-foot Dead Fish. Having dropped off most of their crew along with the platoon of bandits, there were only four men on board, two of whom were pointing semiautomatic rifles at the lump in the middle of the canoe.

“Haul down the main,” the captain ordered, twisting to the side so he could keep the canoe in sight. This close to the cliff, the wind was only an intermittent sigh that came and went, making the jib look as though it was breathing. It would sag and then puff out by turns. With the main down, they drifted at an angle towards the canoe until it was right under the bow.

“Show yourself, moron,” one of the Corsairs at the front of the boat demanded. “We can see you, plain as day.”

Slowly, Emily pulled down the coat that hadn’t been doing anything to hide her. “Don’t shoot,” she begged.

“Ho-lee crap!” the Corsair cried, his bulbous, overly large features, screwing themselves up in excitement. “It’s a woman. Billy, get me one of the lanterns. Hey Cap’n, a little to port.” The sighing wind had edged them away by a few feet. Billy came hurrying up, carrying a lantern with a red lens just as the boat swung toward the canoe again. In the red glare they saw Emily, and there was no mistaking what she was. “Ho-lee crap! It’s not a woman, it’s a girl.” Both Billy and the first Corsair grinned hungrily, taking in her long blonde hair and the pert, elfin features that had been maturing from cute to beautiful over the last year.

“It’s okay,” Billy told her. “We won’t hurt you. Hold out that there paddle, sweetheart so we can get you to safety. There’s zombies all over the place. You don’t want to get pulled under, do you? Come on, hurry.”

Now all four of them were gazing at her, each trying and failing to mask their true intent. It didn’t help that the first Corsair nudged Billy and whispered, “I got dibs.” She wasn’t an idiot. They were going to make her into a slave and do things to her. That’s what Corsairs did. She had seen enough slaves in Hoquiam to know the truth. She had seen the whip marks and the empty eyes of the women who had hurried by, trying their best not to be noticed. She had seen the bruises and broken noses. She had seen them tremble in fear at the passing of the smallest man.

That would be Emily. They would take her and hurt her and break her. She would be like poor Kay Gallagher back on Bainbridge, who had been so badly abused that she had the mind of a toddler and had to be told to tie her shoes and brush her hair. That would be Emily…unless she told them who she was.

Emily Grey was valuable in a sad way. She was more than just a pawn in the terrible game being played out. In a manner of speaking, she was the cornerstone, the foundation, the one thing keeping Bainbridge out of the hands of the Corsairs. If she was caught, they’d use her to get at her mom, who was more than just the governor of the island. Deanna Grey was the island’s spirit—its fighting spirit. Without her, the defenses would crumble overnight. People would run or hide or simply give up. The walls would be abandoned and everyone Emily knew would be turned into slaves.

But what could Emily do? She was a kid. Although she used to tell people that she was very nearly twelve, and that her birthday was practically only moments away, she was still a child. She liked playing tag and having sleepovers. She had ridiculous daydreams of finding a stallion and riding over the mountains. When she had nightmares, she still climbed into her mother’s bed, and just then she felt terribly small and afraid.

Child or not, she knew she was stuck. If she said nothing, the four men would do unspeakable horrors to her, and she’d spend the rest of her life as a slave. But if she mentioned who her mom was…No, I’d never do that, she thought to herself, feeling a tiny spark of anger.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Billy whispered, reaching out a filthy hand to grab the edge of the boat. “Don’t be stupid. It’s not like you’re gonna get away. And if you could, where would you go? Don’t you hear all them zombies?” He was right. She couldn’t run and she couldn’t hide. Then again, she wasn’t going to take being called stupid and sweetheart by these vile creatures, and that meant fighting them.

The thought made her tremble. There were four of them. They were bigger, stronger, and better armed. Yet, she wasn’t exactly defenseless. Between her feet was an old battered Glock with a full magazine; earlier that night, she had killed at least two men with it. She took a secretive peek at it. It didn’t look like much, especially compared to the big black guns that the Corsairs carried. Nevertheless, it was a lethal weapon and if she had it, she wouldn’t need to be so scared. Jillybean had taught her that. She called guns “a girl’s best friend” and “an equalizer of the sexes.”

On its own, her right hand stretched out for the gun, but as it did, it ran into an invisible wall. Fear stopped her hand. Deep down, Emily was afraid that one small gun didn’t make her equal to a grown man.

“Okay, that’s enough,” the captain groused. “Rodrigo, get the boathook. And you can forget about dibs, Gavin. She’s mine and I don’t want to hear any damn whining. You three are lucky I didn’t put you on shore with the rest.”

The captain was bigger than the others and his smile never really touched his angry black eyes. He snatched the long wooden boathook from Rodrigo and used it to snag the canoe. Frantically, uselessly, Emily dug her paddle backwards. She was no match for the captain’s strength, and the others snickered at her feeble display. In a last act of childish defiance, she swung the paddle and smacked the rail of the Dead Fish, hoping to knock aside the pole. The captain was not just strong, he was fast as well, and he grabbed the end of the paddle.

“Look what you did to my boat, you stupid bitch!” he thundered. “You just earned your first beating.”

First?

How many more would come? An infinite number. They would beat her until the day she died. The realization shook her, and she dropped her head. Once more her eyes fell on the Glock, which was sitting in the water that had collected at the bottom of the boat. Seeing it right at that moment turned the spark of anger into a flame and, as though it was nothing more important than a dropped quarter, she reached down and picked it up.

The grip of the gun felt perfectly natural in her hand. She was a kid, true enough, but she was also big for her age, stronger than she appeared, and had a natural well of courage that she had only just begun to tap. Emily was also very angry—in the last week, she had been kidnapped and threatened with death, torture and rape. She’d been shot at and chased across half of Washington. Her Uncle Neil had been turned into a zombie, and her Aunt Jillybean was being held captive. And, probably not eighty yards away, the one friend she had in all this mess was more than likely dead, floating face down in the black water.

She had every right to be pissed off!

Turning toward the captain, she meant to only threaten him with the Glock. She pointed it at his face—and he started to sneer. This undid her anger somewhat; after all, who sneered when a gun was pointed at them? She decided to up the ante, to show him that she really wasn’t as scared as she was, and she was very, very scared. Her heart was racing, and her breath was going in and out of her, ragged and fast.

“I-I-I’ll do it,” she whispered and then slowly pulled the trigger, thinking to draw it back only so far, to show him that she wasn’t playing around. As she did, his black eyes went wide.

The two were connected by the paddle, each with a grip on one end, and when he dropped his side, it fell with a hollow thump on the front of the canoe. The night had become eerily silent, making that thump much greater sounding that it otherwise would be, and it caught Emily by surprise. She screamed and jerked just enough to pull the trigger the rest of the way.

With a huge noise, the gun went off.

What happened next didn’t correspond to the explosive sound. Blood didn’t go shooting out of the captain in a sickening fountain, and he didn’t go flying back. He didn’t cry out in pain or scream in fright. In fact, he didn’t even moan. There was such a lack of response that Emily thought that either she had missed him or the bullet had been a dud.

His face took on a puckered look, as if he were about to scream at her. She was on the verge of apologizing when the other three Corsairs turned their rifles on her. They did so more or less from instinct. They certainly weren’t afraid of the girl. In the dark, none of the three saw the compact black gun.

“What the hell, Cap’n?” Billy grumbled, thinking that he had fired the shot. “You coulda let us have our fun before you goin’ and shootin’ her. Cap’n? Cap’n?” The captain’s face continued to pucker until he looked like he was on the verge of erupting in curses or spit, or something, all over Emily.

Before he could erupt, Billy shook his shoulder, and the captain started to fall face first into the water. Billy grabbed his arm and Rodrigo grabbed a leg. Standing tall behind them and peering beneath his heavy Cro-Magnon brow at Emily was Gavin Walker. He was gradually, perhaps even glacially, coming to the conclusion that it had been Emily who had done the shooting.

When two was added to two and came out to four, it finally hit him. He blinked in surprise and pointed a finger at her. In turn, she pointed the Glock.

“Look out!” he cried and brought up his M4 one-handed. They both fired at the same time, setting off a mad scramble, that was lit by the strobe of blasting guns. Because his shipmates were in the way, Gavin’s shots went wide, zipping harmlessly into the black water. Her third shot struck him in the stomach before plowing through his guts and lodging in his spine. In a blink, his left leg went perfectly numb and he collapsed.

Confusion and high, frightened curses contended with the echoes bouncing off the cliff walls as Billy and Rodrigo trampled Gavin, fighting to get away from the girl. Billy even snatched Gavin’s M4 from his hand and fired over the bow, just missing the top of Emily’s head. She had been about to push away, only the bullets singeing a few hairs from her scalp told her that this would be a big mistake. Instead, she pulled herself close to the front of the boat and huddled there under the angry gaze of the captain, who still hadn’t moved.

“You watch the left,” Billy hissed to Rodrigo, “I’ll watch the right.”

Emily was now trapped. There was no direction she could move that was safe—and staying put would only keep her alive for maybe a minute longer. Eventually, the two Corsairs would realize her predicament and come for her. An idea struck her: she could slip out of the boat and take a stab at swimming for shore. Except the inlet did not have a real shore exactly. The closest land to her was a forty-foot sheer cliff face. And it was eighty yards away; she couldn’t hold her breath that long. But she could hold her breath long enough to get to the back of the boat, and once there…well, she didn’t know. She just knew that it had to be better than where she was. The Glock went into a zippered pocket and, using the boat hook to steady the canoe, she slid out of it and into the water.

“Give up girl,” Rodrigo whispered, edging closer. “Don’t make things even worse for…”

This was the last sound she heard. She took a deep breath and dove into the darkness, which seemed to go on forever. Above her the boat was black, below her the inlet could have been a thousand feet deep for all she knew. In seconds, she had lost the concept of up and down; she only knew forward, and had to hope she wasn’t swimming towards the bottom. Just then, her hand hit something. It was the keel! Relief swept her and drowned the panic that had hit her faster than she thought possible.

Feeling almost giddy, she pushed off the keel, took three mighty strokes and smacked the rudder with the top of her head. She barely noticed the pain. Above her, the darkness took on a deep blue tint and she swam for it, breaking the surface as quietly as she could. In front of her, the inlet opened out onto Puget Sound, and somewhere in that immense maze was the only home she had ever known.

She had to turn her back on her home, at least for now.

In the last ten seconds, the Corsairs had only advanced two feet toward the front of the boat. They were whispering back and forth over the top of their wounded friend, who had curled into a ball and was just beginning to feel seriously afraid. The reason for his fear: he couldn’t feel any pain. “Is it bad?” Gavin asked, just as Emily slipped up the ladder at the back of the boat. He was ignored by everyone.

Billy edged forward a little more, stood high on his tiptoes, raised the M4 over his head and fired across the bow. A second later, Rodrigo leaned way out from the side of the boat and shot the canoe. Ting! Ting! Ting!

During all of this, Emily, looking like a bedraggled cat, calmly extracted the Glock and took aim at Billy, just as Jillybean had taught her. She stood with her legs staggered, a slight forward lean so that her nose was over her toes, her right bicep pressed to her chin.

She let out a long, pent-up breath, and fired three times, knocking Billy off the boat, where he seemed to paw lazily at the water as if he didn’t care that he was sinking beneath the surface. Emily didn’t see if he went all the way under. She had turned the gun on Rodrigo, who was so much faster than she expected. In a blur, he spun and fired at the same time that she did.

A frightened jerk caused her bullet to blaze over his head, while his shots bracketed her, one just missing her left side and the next her right. Two more of his shots were way off and, by the time he had corrected his aim, she was leaping down into the galley below deck where it was as dark as the water. She tried to slip to her right, but ended up hitting something with a heavy thud. Almost immediately, Rodrigo fired through the deck at her. He missed, the bullets blasting through the galley deck and out through the hull.

Her first thought: We’re going to sink! went ignored as he fired three more times. Although he missed by a good five feet, she cringed and pointed her pistol up towards the little holes he had made. She didn’t fire, however. She couldn’t tell exactly where he was and was afraid that if she missed, he would zero in on her. She guessed that he hadn’t moved. The sound of his steps would have sifted down to her.

Just as she was thinking this, she heard a thump practically over her head. Up came the Glock, and she was just about to shoot, when Gavin whispered again, “It’s not that bad, Rod. Right? Rod?”

“Shut up!” Rodrigo hissed from near the front of the boat. He wasn’t over head as she thought—he must have thrown something to distract her! Or to get me shooting. Well, two can play that game. In her pocket was the jackknife, the one she had vowed to use against any man who tried to rape her. She dug it from her sopping wet blue jeans and tossed it in front of her. It hit something with a muffled clunk. It was just enough of a sound for Rodrigo to orient on. He fired twice, putting more holes in the hull.

Now she had a bead on him and fired three times through the fiberglass ceiling. She was hardly what anyone would call an expert shot, but still, he was all of fifteen feet away and was a good-sized target. It would’ve been difficult for her to miss, although she managed to with one of her shots. The other two sank home and he toppled backward over the railing.

“Rod?” Gavin whispered.

“He’s dead,” Emily told him. She had advanced up the stairs so that her head was just above the level of the deck.

Gavin had managed to drag himself to the edge of the boat and was sitting with his back to the railing, both hands clutching his stomach. His fingers glistened with dark red blood. “You gonna kill me?”

She didn’t want to. The two bodies floating next to the boat were bad enough and she was going to have to give the captain a shove in as well. He still hadn’t moved, and she didn’t think he would.

“I should kill you,” she told him. “You Corsairs are bad and can’t be trusted. Even when you’re hurt. You might even be waiting to get me once I come up.”

Gavin shrugged and pried one hand away from his stomach; it dripped red as he gestured around. “I don’t have a gun, and if I did…” He shrugged again, grimacing this time. “I don’t want to hurt you. Okay? This was all a mistake. Okay?” He had started to slouch and tried to force himself back up. Another grimace, and now he looked as though he was crying. “I could help you. I could help you with the boat and you could help me. My stomach…it’s, it’s bleeding. Just tell me it’s okay. Please?”

He certainly did look pathetic, and she did indeed need help with the boat. Her last attempt at working a sailboat had ended with her damaging one boat, sinking another, and getting caught by the Corsairs. She didn’t see how this was going to be any better. “Maybe,” she answered, nervously, afraid to trust a Corsair, even one who looked like he was on the edge of dying. “I can do my best for you, but I can’t make any promises. And first, before I do anything to help, you have to show me how to get close to that cliff.” She pointed nearly due west. It was the last place she had seen Gunner. Chances were that he was just another body floating in the water, but she had to see for herself.

Chapter 2

Puget Sound, Washington

It turned out that Emily Grey didn’t have time to be afraid of the Corsair. The puffing wind had progressed to a confused and sporadic gusting, which was slowly driving the Dead Fish southward toward a jumble of rocks that looked innocent enough, barely humping up out of the water. Barely or not, there was no true innocence there, and even Emily knew better than to let the boat get anywhere near them. Sailboats were delicate machines, and hers—she had quietly claimed it by virtue of conquest—already had six or seven bullet holes in it. She wasn’t about to let it run aground as well.

With Gavin mumbling out instructions, she danced around the deck, running the mainsail up, heeling the boom around, tying knots and working the wheel. She also grabbed the guns that had been flung about and stowed them near the wheel, where she could get to them quickly. Lastly, she dumped the captain’s body overboard without ever checking to see if he was actually dead.

He sure seemed dead. He was already stiff and he smelled like a dank, moldy armpit. She tried to shove him under the lower part of the railing with her foot, but he got stuck. His belly was three inches too round, forcing her to stomp him under. She did it with her eyes closed and her face turned away. It took five squeamish thuds before he went over with a splash. Although she felt her stomach flip, she didn’t feel an ounce of guilt. In her mind, he had been the prototypical Corsair and thus, deserved a far worse death than the one he’d received.

Once she had the deck clear and the sails properly set, she noted with some satisfaction that they were no longer aimed at the rocks. Neither were they going back to where Gunner had fallen in. They were headed northwest on a course that would take them out into the main part of the Sound. “We need to turn,” she declared, heading back to the wheel, and pointing at the remains of the staircase floating in the water two-hundred yards away. “That’s where we need to go.”

“Hold on. Don’t turn yet,” Gavin told her. She gazed fixedly on him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “It’s not like driving a car,” he explained. This was something that didn’t mean all that much to her since she had never driven a car. He took a deep, tired breath and tried again, “When we turn, the wind will push us hard to leeward. That means it’ll send us past where you wanna go, and we’ll end up having to go in a circle. Wait until we’re maybe a hundred yards past your spot and then make the turn.”

She didn’t like the idea of wasting any more time than she had. Gunner had been in the water seven or eight minutes already; plenty of time to drown. Or maybe he was dead already? The wounds he had suffered would have killed a normal man. Then again, Gunner wasn’t close to being normal. He was tough as old shoe leather, and had fought even when he’d been hurt. He had fought to save her, when he hadn’t needed to. She was glad that he had, of course, and was properly grateful…and was flooded with guilt. There was no denying that she had treated him shabbily, thinking that he was some sort of malformed pervert—and maybe he was, she didn’t know. Still, even if he were, he had never mistreated her, and if he’d been a bit rough around the edges with her, the fact that he had done everything he could to save her more than made up for it.

Gavin interrupted her thoughts, “Will you look at me, just to check? Please?” His head was slumped and his heavy jaw lay on his chest. The one sentence appeared to have drained his energy. “It’ll be a few minutes before you need to turn.”

Reluctantly, she agreed to look at him. Although Emily had clapped a few bandages on Gunner, she figured he hadn’t died under her care simply because he was tough as nails, not because of her “skills.” Gavin was something of a gorilla of a man with a round paunch and long heavy arms; he might have been big, but he wasn’t tough. He seemed soft beneath a sneering exterior, as if he was getting by on his reputation. That softness had Emily afraid she might accidentally kill him.

Or what if I look in at his guts and faint? Or puke? Or cry? Worse, what if he cries? All were possibilities, which were offset by her need to keep him alive. The inlet was narrow, and she was pretty sure she would crash the boat without help.

“I just need a little light,” she told him, buying a few seconds to steady her nerves. She had set the red lantern to the side as she had been cleaning up; now she pointed it at Gavin’s midsection, where it beamed a dull red glow onto a glistening mess.

Pressing her lips firmly together, she squatted down and peered in at his wound, saying, “Hmmm,” just as Jillybean would have. Emily had no idea whatsoever what she was looking at beyond a small hole that pulsed red fluids. She knew that his stomach was right there behind the hole and his spleen was tucked away nearby, but that was about it in the vicinity, except for maybe a few loops of intestine. “Does it hurt bad?”

Something deep inside of him had begun to throb. He told her this, adding in something of a whine, “Other than that, I can’t feel anything. Not even my legs. That’s bad, right?”

It sounded both terrible and perplexing. How could he not feel anything? She gave his belly a little poke, which made the hole belch out a gush of green fluid. He didn’t seem to notice. She, on the other hand, made a noise: “Hrrgh,” and began to heave. She looked away, breathing lightly, trying to keep from hurling up a rush of gastric juices out onto the deck.

“What is it?” Gavin demanded in a frightened voice. “Is it bad? Oh, Christ, it’s bad isn’t it?”

“No. I just…hrrgh…I just…it’s a…hrrgh…a small hole. Maybe it’s not…” A deep breath…“Not so bad.” She forced herself to look again, glad that her Aunt Jillybean wasn’t around to see how pale she was. As part of Emily’s “real” schooling, Jillybean had arranged for Emily to dissect two dead zombie bodies so she could learn the reality of human anatomy. They had been a hell of a lot different than the unblemished, sterile cartoon-like drawings found in Emily’s textbooks. It was shocking and gross, and yet Emily hadn’t been sick, even when Jillybean had her root around in the gunky parts.

But those had been zombies. This was a person. Bad or not, his pain and fear were very real. It infected her and made her unsure of herself. Still, he needed her to at least pretend to be competent. Swallowing heavily as her stomach continued to roll, she took a long look in at his wound. The small hole had not changed. “It probably nicked a nerve. Maybe I should look at your back.”

She was just reaching for the lantern when the boat shuddered and their momentum was checked. Emily’s first thought was that they had hit a sandbar.

Gavin corrected her. “It’s a zombie. Prolly a big one.”

“What do we do?” she asked, even as a huge slimy hand stretched up and took hold of the edge of the boat near the bow. The Dead Fish yawed to port, nearly sending Emily right off the boat and making Gavin gasp in pain.

“Use the boathook,” he suggested. “Just try not to let him go right straight under. If he gets caught up on the keel…man, you don’t want that.”

Emily’s nerves were already thrumming, and with the cryptic nature of the response, the thrumming advanced into her hands. “Why? Why don’t I want that? Will it chew its way into the boat?”

“It could, but that’s not the problem. The problem is you can’t steer the boat with one of them slung up underneath. And the only way to get it off…”

He left that hanging and she filled in the end, “Is to go under there?” Her clothes were still dripping wet from having just been beneath the keel, and she didn’t think she’d have the guts to go down there with one of them lurking in the dark. Taking up the boathook, she advanced to the front until she could see the beast.

Gavin had been right, it was a big one, at least eight feet tall and closing in on eight-hundred pounds. It was rotted, black and green, with mold and algae competing for space across its immense fleshy back and up its neck. When it pulled its head out of the water and growled at her, she saw that its teeth and gums were green as well, and that there was a long string of seaweed running from its chin down into its gullet.

Uncertain how to get it off the boat without allowing it to go straight under, she smacked its knuckles with the hook. This was very much like smacking the roots of a tree and expecting it to give up its hold on the earth. It didn’t even seem to notice. Next, she jabbed the hook into its upturned face. That got its attention. It raised its other hand, which was missing its thumb and pointer finger. Without them, it could only bat uselessly at the hook.

Letting out a howl of frustration, it let go of the boat to make a grab for the hook and immediately began to slide under. She gave it a quick shove with the hook. It had been a feeble shove against a great deal of weight and didn’t seem to move the monster more than an inch from the center line. She held her breath and listened as the beast tumbled and thumped against the hull, and it did indeed strike the keel, slewing the boat slightly into the wind, slowing them as if someone had applied a brake.

Then it came free and washed out behind them, rolling in their wake like a log.

Emily turned them back on course, only to see that it looked as though she could begin turning toward shore again. “Hey, Mister,” she whispered. “Do I have to mess with the sails?”

“Naw. Just turn.” He sounded cranky. “What about my stomach? You said you’d check me out.”

“And I will in a few minutes, I promise.”

“You have to hurry. There’s too much blood. There’s not supposed to be this much blood coming out of a guy. Hey! Don’t get too close to that cliff. Turn to port.” Having spent three days with Mike Gunter, she knew that port was to the left. It was too soon to turn, but she did want to slow down. She asked Gavin how to do that and he showed her how to “Heave to.”

Either he wasn’t the best teacher or she did something wrong. The boat went up into the wind and then began to spin slowly as it drifted parallel to the cliff. As long as they didn’t crash, she didn’t really care. She was too invested in finding Gunner to worry about the “perfect” approach or to listen as Gavin groaned and whined, doing everything he could to get her to abandon whatever fruitless cause she was on and help him. He guessed correctly that she was searching for the person who had been shooting at the Dead Fish, and with all his black heart, Gavin wished that he was dead.

Gunner was not dead, although he was close. After the stairs had fallen in with a great crash, the dark water had almost taken him. Had it not been for a bit of floating debris that his right hand had found just as his head was going under, he would have been resting on the muddy bottom of the Sound long before. His death seemed only to have been postponed, however.

The water was like ice, and within minutes, he felt his body temperature plummeting. He didn’t know why he was fighting to live. He knew that in his present state he could do nothing for his daughter and assumed that she had been taken by the Corsairs. This should have made him furious and sad in equal measures, but the cold had turned his iron muscles to mush and set his mind awash in a drowsing despair.

Even when the black boat, looking immense from his low point of view, came sliding up, he couldn’t seem to find the spirit of revenge that should have been burning in him. Instead, he made the firm decision to let himself drown rather than be taken captive.

Emily snagged him with the hook and hissed, “Gunner! Gunner! Are you alive?” Gunner was sure he was dreaming when he saw a blurry, dripping version of his daughter leaning over the rail. “Gunner?”

“Yeah?”

“Catch hold of this.” She held the boathook next to his hand and tapped it gently on the length of old wood so he wouldn’t have to do anything but grab it. He couldn’t seem to focus on it, and when he made a listless, anemic attempt to grasp it, he slid off the board and started right for the bottom, disappearing into the black water in a split second.

With a cry, Emily swished the boathook beneath the surface, caught something and hauled back. She had snagged him by the neck and as she pulled him to the side of the boat, she was simultaneously killing him and saving his life. She had no other choice, which was little conciliation to her as he passed out before she was able to drag him to the side of the boat.

“Oh no! Wake up, Gunner. Gunner! Wake…”

A harsh cry from above stopped her words and sent her heart into her throat. “What boat is that?” She knew the voice; it was Mark Leney, the Corsair who had hounded her and Gunner for days on end. He was a fiend of a man, and it was fitting that he appeared as a demonic shadow, standing high above them on the top of the cliff. He was not alone, either; there were other shadows with him.

Emily swung around just as Gavin was about to answer. “Don’t,” she whispered, digging in her pocket for the old Glock.

He looked caught between conflicting desires, and he hesitated, not knowing which way to go. The seconds drew out and as they did, Gunner’s face went blue. Leney asked the question a second time. “I gotta say something,” Gavin whispered. Louder, in something of a strident, strangled cry, he called out, “Dead Fish.”

“This is Captain Leney. You guys see a girl or a hunchback down there?”

There was no mistaking the violent side to side motion of her head or the gun that she finally managed to rip from her pocket. “Uh, no.” He didn’t sound all that believable. She waved the gun at him and then pointed seaward. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. “W-we were just coming to check though.”

“Just coming to check?” Leney’s hackles were up. Something wasn’t right. “How would you know to check?”

Gavin shrugged, looking towards Emily; she gestured with the gun in a way she hoped he would understand as: Make something up. He began to hem and haw. Emily didn’t know what to say to help him, but she knew she had to do something besides sit there under the guns of the Corsairs. She shoved the Glock back into her pocket and reached for a coil of rope. Quickly, she pulled Gunner right up to the edge of the boat, tossed the pole away, and…

“The radio,” Gavin said, finally able to spit something out. “And, and, and we heard shooting, and there was that big splash. So, uh, that’s why we came.”

She could only hope they would believe him despite the whiny, rattling way he spoke. He sounded like someone had a gun pointed at him. Regardless, she kept working, holding Gunner with one hand, while trying her best to wrap the rope up under his arms. It wasn’t just awkward, it was impossible. For one, he was so extremely heavy that she almost fell in on top of him. It took everything she had just to keep his head above the surface. Perhaps worse than his weight was that his hump was too big, his huge, muscular barrel chest was too wide, and her arms were too short. She was sorely tempted to wrap the rope around his neck, temporarily, of course; just long enough to get the boat turned away from the looming cliff. Beneath her, she could already feel a crunching, vibrating grind as the keel scraped across mud and slime-covered rocks.

“Alright,” Leney said, his suspicions only slightly diminished. “I’m going to need to take command of your ship. Take her south a quarter of a mile. There’s some remains of a dock. See if you can get her in close.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gavin answered and then said nothing else.

It didn’t seem like enough of a response to either Emily or Leney. “What the hell are you waiting for?” Leney snapped. “Get moving, damn it!”

“Yes, sir,” Emily called out in the deepest voice she could manage, putting herself in a terrible position. How was supposed to steer the ship while keeping Gunner from drowning.

If she tied the rope around Gunner’s neck, it would finish the job of killing him. Of this she had no doubt, but she had no choice. They were practically stuck on the rocks, and if they didn’t get moving fast, Leney would send men to find out why.

“Sorry,” she whispered, tying the rope just below Gunner’s chin, hoping that by avoiding his Adam’s apple he wouldn’t die quite so fast. She then heaved back, drawing him higher out of the water, like he was a tuna that was too large to land. Once she had tied him off, his face going swiftly purple, she leapt to the wheel and spun it left…and nothing happened. Looking up, she saw that the sails were limp; they were too close to the cliff to catch the wind.

“What do I do?” she begged Gavin.

He had been watching her with his chin sagged down to his chest. With a great effort, he looked blearily around. “Push us out into the channel. It’s the only thing you can do.”

That meant getting back into the water, which was so cold she was surprised it wasn’t iced over. In reality, it was forty-five degrees; not cold enough to form ice, but more than cold enough to kill someone by hypothermia. She didn’t hesitate.

She raced to the bow, jumped over, and found herself in up to her nose. Taking a deep breath, she went under, gathered her legs beneath her and heaved the boat away from the cliff. She was surprised how light it was and nearly pushed it beyond her reach, especially as the current took it. A line trailed in the water and she was able to pull herself to the side of the boat, which was too high to grab, forcing her to swim down the long hull.

A whine broke from her chattering lips. Everything was going wrong, and her mistakes were beginning to pile up as she made bad decision after bad decision, each one costing her precious seconds. They were seconds that Gunner didn’t have.

By the time she had worked her way to the stern and climbed back on board, he looked dead. “No,” she hissed at him as she yanked the rope off his neck. “Please, please, please wake up.” He didn’t. Grasping the boat hook again, she caught him under an arm his time and hauled him to the back of the boat where there wasn’t just a ladder, but a little diving platform that reminded her of a drawbridge. Two toggles held it up, and when she released them, it slid easily down to almost water level.

All she had to do was pull the monster of a man up by about three inches. It was impossible. She wasn’t strong enough and she lacked the keen insight that would have allowed her to use the physical properties of the boat itself to help. She would never have been able to get him up without help, which came in the form of a gentle swell.

The water, with caressing tenderness, simply lifted him up and slid him right onto the platform.

“Thank God! Thank God! Okay, now what?” She knew, but in her frazzled state it took her a few seconds to remember what Jillybean had taught her. “Airway, breathing, circulation.” They were the ABCs of first aid, and even though she stated them correctly, she blew right past actually checking to see if he had a clear airway, or if he was breathing, or if his heart was beating. She went right into CPR.

Taking a huge breath, one that could go a long way toward inflating a car tire, she blasted air into his lungs. Another tremendous breath in—she felt tiny compared to him and was sure that his lungs were correspondingly gigantic in size—was followed by such a huge exhalation that she forced air deep into the lowest part of his lungs. The two breaths were supposed to be followed by chest compressions, and had Gavin not said, “Hey…little girl,” she would have overdone those as well, jumping up and down on Gunner’s broad, muscled chest if she had to.

“We’re going to crash.” Gavin said this as if it was of such little concern to him that he might have been pointing out an oddly shaped cloud instead of wickedly sharp rocks jutting up out of the water. She had left the boat to sail itself. It appeared to have an infernal death wish and, accompanied by a quickening breeze, it was now charging across the water.

“How do I stop us? Does this thing have brakes or something?” Gavin didn’t answer. He had slumped over, unconscious. “Gavin? Oh, God!” Panic seized her, but she fought it down. “I’ll turn us. A quick turn and we’ll miss those…” She had stood to leap to the over-sized wheel when her eyes caught a glimmer of something off to her left, further out onto the Sound. It was a light, and it reminded her of a smaller version of one of the big spotlights that sat atop the wall surrounding Bainbridge Island.

The light was moving, which meant it was on a boat of some sort, and when the light swung away momentarily, she saw that it was a black boat, a big one. Emily’s legs buckled and she slunk down, crouching next to Gunner’s body. Another black boat could only mean there were more Corsairs on the Sound. And the spotlight sweeping back and forth could only mean they were searching for something in particular. They were searching for her, and when they found her, they would take her back to their lair and…terrible images filled her mind.

They were so horrific that the idea of crashing into the spires didn’t seem so bad at all.

Chapter 3

Puget Sound, Washington

The slick, black spires loomed up out of the water like the teeth of a giant. For Emily Grey, this was no mere simile. With the tide going out and the swell beginning to grow, it looked to her as if the sharp rocks were moving up and down like real teeth. The optical illusion was fed by the dark and the panic that had her by the throat with a steel grip.

So far, the almost twelve-year old had overcome the obstacles in her path with courage beyond her years. It helped that those obstacles had come at her one at a time, and that there had been an adult who stepped in periodically to help her past the harder spots in her adventure. Now, she had to be the adult and everything bad was happening at once. The Dead Fish was pointed straight at the rocks, she was responsible for two men who were within seconds of dying, there were dozens of armed Corsairs on the cliff above her, and who knew how many Corsair ships were crisscrossing the Sound, hunting her.

And there were zombies in the water.

She didn’t need to see them to know they were there. Their baleful moans had increased in volume as the Corsair searchlight got closer.

It was all too much, and she froze, her eyes jittering around seeing all the things she should have been doing instead of crouching down next to what she thought was a corpse. Gunner was as cold and as stiff as one, which made it all the more surprising when he grabbed her wrist. She jerked with such violence that she nearly tumbled off the back of the boat.

“You’re…so…beautiful,” he said in slurred whisper.

This was so unexpected that two seconds went by as she stared blankly at him. Her mind could not fit those three words into her current predicament. They made no sense and had no context. They had also been uttered by a man who was the exact opposite of beautiful. He had lost his mask and his revolting face was exposed in full. She could see the sickening burn scars that had eaten up half his face. She could see the ragged little hole in the side of his head where his ear had been. She could see where he was missing flesh around his jawline, and there were his ruined teeth and black gums.

It suddenly dawned on her that she had put her mouth on that! Twice! The shock of this got her moving. “Hold…hold on,” she told him and then scrambled over him to get at the wheel, which she spun to the left with all her might as if she were on a game show. It clunked to a stop faster than she expected and then began to tick quickly back the other way.

She grabbed it and fought it to the left, watching as the boat turned sharply. It heeled hard to the left, but it didn’t go left. The boat was still heading right toward the rocks, only now it was slipping side on to them. “What the…? Gavin? Gavin?” He had slumped over at some point. “Oh, God!” Her eyes flicked to the wheel, to the rocks, to the sails, to Gavin, and then back to the sails. She had never dropped them and now they were ballooning out, catching all the wind they could.

They had to be turned, but in what direction?

All her life, she assumed that sailboats simply went in the direction of the wind, sort of like a hot air balloon, and that their capability to steer was limited. Her voyage south to Hoquiam had changed her perception of that, without increasing her understanding of the factors involved. Besides, the Calypso had been a tiny boat. Its main sail was half the size of the Dead Fish’s little triangle of a second jib, and that had to mean the bigger ship was easier to maneuver…didn’t it? She had no idea.

She tied off the wheel so that it remained all the way over—she was sure that was right, at least—and ran to the boom, and was untying the preventer line when Mark Leney bawled from high overhead, “What the ever-loving hell are you doing?” He had been watching the boat in frank amazement; the amazement was quickly turning to anger. “Get that main over, damn it!”

“Which way?”

“Which way? What do you mean which way? Who is that?”

“I-I-I’m a slave.” She wanted to come up with a slave name only she didn’t know any slaves and didn’t know whether slaves had normal names or sexy names. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did, because she didn’t know any sexy names, except for maybe “Roxy” or “Taloola,” which might not be a name at all. Giving up on the idea of a sexy name she babbled, “There was a, uh, uh, there was a fight and two of the guys got shot.”

The black boat floated in a sea of darkness, which made it impossible for Leney to tell what was going on and which of the odd shadows on deck were corpses, and which were people, and which were bundles of rope. Still, the “slave” sounded very young to his ears and very familiar. “Haul that sail to starboard, Emily.”

Emily’s flesh flared with electric goosebumps. She was almost too shocked at hearing her own name to save the ship. The first of the rocks was less than fifty yards away when she pulled the sail around. It was the opposite direction that she would have chosen. She went with it anyway, guessing that Leney wouldn’t want to risk either the ship or her.

The wind caught the edge of the sail, turned the bow of the boat slightly away from the rocks, while at the same time imparting something of a forward motion. She pulled the sail back to a forty-five degree angle and grinned as the boat picked up speed. It still had a leeward lurch to it as each swell carried it south, closer to the rocks.

It was going to be close. She stood to judge the angle and breathed a sigh of relief as she saw they were going to miss the closest rocks by a good fifteen feet. One problem down, one million more to go, she thought.

“My name’s not Emily,” she called up to the cliff, imparting as much maturity and force into her voice that she could. “It’s Michelle and I am a slave. I, uh, I’ve been one for years.”

“Is that so?” Leney retorted. “I might believe that if you could tell me who the captain of the Dead Fish was?”

This was even more difficult than trying to come up with a sexy slave name. Would he believe Cutthroat Carl? Before she could utter this nonsense, the Dead Fish ran aground with enough force to send her flying. They had missed the rocks jutting up out of the water, but not the ones lurking beneath.

She slammed onto the deck and started rolling as the boat pitched far over on its side. It was already so far over that the water was coming up over the starboard rail. A new panic—that of the boat rolling all the way over and then being battered to pieces on the rocks, with her and Gunner drowning—swept her and seemed to switch off her mind’s “thought mode.”

As thoughts and actions went hand in hand, she did nothing except stare around her uselessly. Slowly, one thought bubbled up: Boats are stupid! With this less-than-Newtonian concept came anger and the realization that she hated sailboats. They didn’t have brakes, they never went in a straight line, they were flimsy and weak, and whoever had invented them was probably just as stupid.

The sound of Gunner splashing feebly broke her out of her internal rant and jarred her back to reality.

In a flash, she was scurrying like a monkey across the canted deck, racing to the stern. Gunner had slid off the little swimming platform and was four feet from the boat, and was being pulled further away with each swell. He could barely keep himself afloat. Foolishly, she jumped in and tried to hold him up. With one accidental swipe of his deformed left arm, she went right to the bottom. Luckily, it was only seven feet from the surface. Holding her breath, she grabbed one of his legs and hauled him the short way to the side of the boat.

Up she popped just as Leney roared, “Drop the sail, you idiot!”

If she had the breath to spare, she would’ve flung some particularly nasty and unladylike invectives his way. Even though she wasn’t allowed to use them, she knew quite a few bad words, and if ever there was a time to use them, this situation seemed tailor made. But she was struggling to drag Gunner to the low point of the ship. He was fading again and only had the one hand to hold on with.

Then her right foot made contact with the rising floor of the Sound, and she was able to pull him more easily. He was half-floating, half-standing now, as she came around to the low rail. “Slide under. Go!” Halfway under, he passed out again. It was enough. Emily slid under the rail, grabbed a rope, and cinched it down on his good hand, tying the other end around the mast.

Now she went to work on dropping the mainsail. Although she had raised the sail earlier, that had been with Gavin’s help, and she hadn’t memorized which rope was which, and there were a ridiculous number of them twisting all over the place. It was like a maze puzzle, and once more her anger started to flare. She followed this rope and that, trying to see which ones went to the top of the mast. Finally, she found the right one and yanked at the knot. The sail came down in a jumble which was wrong and not just because it was untidy. That was another thing about boats she didn’t like: if something wasn’t perfectly right, it meant it was completely terrible and that disaster would soon follow.

She knew she’d pay for the loose sail soon enough, but in the meantime, things were going her way for once. Without the wind pushing the boat over, it righted itself, and even floated back a few feet before stopping with a crunching sound.

“Stay right there, Emily,” Leney called down. “I have some men who’ll be there in a few seconds. They’ll get you off.”

“Yeah right,” she muttered under her breath. “I’ll just stay and wait for you to slap a collar on me.” If anything, she hated Corsairs more than she hated their boats. Once more she slid into the frigid water. Just like earlier, she put her shoulder under the boat and strained and grunted and heaved with all her might. Nothing happened. The Dead Fish was stuck fast.

“Stop that, damn it!” Leney shouted. “You’re going to carve a huge hole in the boat, and even if you do get it off the rocks, it’ll sink right out from under you.”

She hesitated as she pictured the boat sinking out in the middle of the Sound. It would be a long swim back to shore…if she wasn’t eaten by one of the zombies first or picked up by another Corsair boat.

“Don’t listen to him,” Gunner rasped. He was half-turned toward her. Lying on his side like that made his hump look as though a harbor seal had snuck up under his shirt. “Try rocking the boat up and down at the same time as pushing.” With nothing to lose, she heaved the bow up and then down, before throwing her shoulder into it. Right away the boat edged forward with a frightening scraping sound, as if she were indeed tearing a gaping hole through the center of the hull.

Leney threatened to shoot her.

She ignored him. Getting shot would be considered as getting off light with the Corsairs. Another rocking push, and just like magic, the boat slipped away from the rocks and floated properly…almost like she had managed to tame it.

“Are you going to be good now?” she asked the Dead Fish as she climbed back aboard. The boat responded by drifting away from the rock. And just in time. Men were running through the shallows towards her. Her hand went to the Glock that was still nestled in her pocket; she didn’t pull it out, deciding to let it remain there. Luck had been on her side during her first gunfight with real Corsairs. Expecting to get lucky twice wasn’t smart.

Smart or not, her luck held as the first Corsair in a line of six stepped on a slick rock beneath the surface and broke his ankle. His scream was high and filled with every combination of swear words that Emily had ever heard and some she hadn’t. Her ears went pink as she tried to haul the mainsail back up. She had been right about the sail. The wind had dragged it over the wrong end of the boom, and some rope or another had become tangled in it. She tried raising it by winding up the winch, and her skinny arms went round and round. It rose higher and higher, and then, of course, it got stuck halfway up.

She let fly one of the new curses that she’d just learned, which felt wrong in her mouth. Cursing hadn’t helped anyway.

“And this isn’t terrible.” The sail made it look as though the Dead Fish had something of a potbelly, but it propelled them away from the spires and the cursing sailors, and that was a win in her mind. A small win. She still had to get home, and in vain, she tried to aim the boat out of the inlet so that it hugged the north part of the shore. The wheel was already as far left as it would go, however, the boom was tangled in the lines of the mainsail and wouldn’t move in any direction at all. When she tried to realign the jib, something that required her to reel in one rope while releasing a second, she discovered an entirely new level of frustration.

Apparently, moving the “stupid, useless piece of cloth!” was a skill that took practice and maybe some training. It took five tries, and all the while the Dead Fish plowed steadily on, angling back south in the exact opposite direction she wanted to go. When she got the jib up, she sat back thinking that she had it all figured out. The black jib filled with wind and as it did, the boat turned to the east and then to the northeast, which was all very well and good. What wasn’t well or good was that with every passing second, the boat took on an alarming list.

The wind was pushing the boat so far over that Gavin rolled down the sloping deck and nearly went right into the Sound. Next, the lantern tumbled into the hold where the flame thankfully blinked out. And still the boat kept leaning further and further, until Emily found herself looking almost straight down at the water. Her mind screamed the obvious: We’re going to tip over!

Not knowing what else to do, she had no choice but to release the jib. She plucked at every knot in reach and soon the jib was fluttering like a giant flag. She thought the boat would come crashing down, instead it settled gently back into the water and swung south again. “South is better than flipping over,” she said, trying to reassure herself. For someone who could barely steer and who couldn’t tack at all, it really wasn’t very reassuring at all. South took her further from home and deeper into the maze of islands and canals.

What little reassurance she had managed to scrape together was promptly extinguished when she saw the light on the water again. It was the other Corsair boat, and this time it was straight in front of her and heading north! The sight of it bearing down on her set off a new panic and with shaking hands, she hauled in the flapping jib and tied it to a thick rope that ran from the front of the boat to the top of mast. Then she ran to the wheel before remembering the dang thing was already as far to the left as it would go. She needed to go even further left and had no clue how.

Her panic crested higher than ever and, involuntarily, she slunk down behind the wheel, hiding like the child she was.

Just then, the Corsair ship began to take on its own lean. Its port edge was so high in the air that she could see half its hull. A little further and it would be in danger of tipping over, and yet, there was no panic on board. Men climbed out on the high side to help balance the boat as it tacked in closer to shore.

Emily held her breath and prayed for it to go away and leave her alone.

This time her prayers were answered. The men on the high edge of the boat had their backs to the Dead Fish, and the boat’s spotlight was trained away, splaying back and forth up into the hills and forests. The beam of light centered on any movement and it picked out dozens of zombies, which came charging out into the water where they wallowed uselessly.

In a dead silence, the two ships slipped past each other with eight yards of empty water between them. There were no shouts or hails. No one yelled to “Come about!” The night was silent, save for the ever present and growing moans of the dead. Emily hid behind the wheel, sitting motionless, except for her head, which cranked further and further around until the Corsair boat was past her.

Only when it was a hundred yards away and getting further away with every second did she finally sit back. A shiver wracked her, which at first she chalked up to the close call until it dawned on her that she was freezing. She almost scurried down into the hold for a blanket or a towel before she realized that Gunner had to be twice as cold. If he was even still alive.

He was; his eyes cracked as she knelt down next to him. He tried to talk, but his whisper was so light that the words lost their form before they left his mouth.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “Don’t say anything. I’ll get you fixed up and warm.” She had no idea how she was going to manage either, although she knew enough to get him out of the night air, which was becoming chill and damp. Untying his hand, she asked him to push with his leg as she dragged him to the stairs leading down into the galley. He weighed a ton and his attempts at helping were constrained to little more than a few ineffectual kicks. Then she got to the stairs. There were only seven steps. They would be seven head-banging steps that might kill him.

“I’ll get a pillow,” she told him. Do Corsairs even use pillows? she wondered, heading down into the darkness, where she pegged the irony meter by tripping over the lantern. Righting both herself and it, she lit it and found herself pleasantly surprised at the state of the ship. The only other Corsair boat she’d been in had been a trashed-out mess and she had assumed they’d all be like that. Corsairs were villains, after all.

The Dead Fish was as clean as her room back home on Bainbridge and far more orderly. A cabin was just behind the stairs, and there she discovered that Corsairs did indeed use pillows. She came up on deck, stuck the pillow beneath Gunner’s head and began pulling. With gravity assisting her, she got him down the stairs in a flash, and because the teak flooring was clean and uncluttered, she slid him right to the first cabin.

There was no getting him on the bed. She’d need a winch to get his bulk off the ground.

He had begun to shiver as well. “That’s normal,” she told him. “It means your body is doing the right thing. The, uh, normal thing. We’ll just get you dried off and warm.” Had he been anyone else, she would have cut away his clothing, toweled him off and wrapped him in blankets until he resembled a human burrito. As he was something of a horror with his clothes on, Gunner was the last person she wanted to see naked.

Even though he looked about as unconscious as a person could get and still be alive, she told him, “I won’t look, I promise. It wouldn’t be ladylike.” With that excuse firmly set, she ran to the galley for scissors and then to the tiny bathroom for towels. Laying the towels over him, she cut away everything but his underwear—she had to draw the line somewhere. Next, she toweled him off and wrapped him. Still he shivered.

What she needed was a fire, and in the galley she found something that looked like a witch’s cauldron. Within the wide, black metal basin she found the evidence of past fires. Nearby was a spilled box of kindling. She had a small fire going in a minute and watched, complacent and warm, as the smoke went up through an odd funnel drilled into the ceiling.

The heat was wonderful and she luxuriated in it for a while before a moan reminded her of her duties. The first of which was to haul Gunner back out into the galley so he could be closer to the fire. Once that was done, she went up on deck to check their position. Before she could, she saw Gavin.

“Dang it! Gavin, I’m sorry.”

“You said you’d help me,” he accused in a whisper.

“And I’m going…” He interrupted her by vomiting up a quart of blood that was so black it could’ve been tar. In defeat, she sighed, tiredly. “Okay, let’s get you downstairs.” Because he was awake, wincing and whining, it took twice as long to get him down into the galley. She slid him to the far side of the cauldron from Gunner and then went about repeating the same set of nursing actions: strip, dry, bundle.

“Now fix me,” he ordered in his croaking voice. “You were the one who shot me, in case you forgot.”

“In self-defense, in case you forgot. That puts you at the bottom of the list. And anyways, I have to get out of these wet clothes.” Everyone was dry, except for her. Once more, she was pleasantly surprised with what she found in the way of clean clothes. The captain had been a stickler in this regard as well, and there were plenty of clean options open to her. Nothing fit her, of course. That was a given in a man’s boat, and since it was a Corsair boat, her color choices ran the diverse gamut from black to darker black.

Still, she was dry and getting warm. She turned her attention to her two patients and poured into them all the medical experience she had managed to soak up during her classes with Jillybean. This did not amount to much in regard to either man: she checked their vital signs, put them in shock position with their feet elevated, kept them warm, and that was about it.

Both of them needed surgery. She didn’t have real tools for it, sterile bandages or even a single piece of IV equipment to get fluids into them properly. And even if she had an entire operating room at her disposal, any form of surgery that required anything more than stitching up the simplest cut was beyond her.

Feeling like a fraud, she told them, “You need to rest now. And I have to make sure we’re not going to run into anything.” She had no idea how long she had been below deck, though it had to have been a considerable length of time. When she came up on deck, the darkness had given way to a hazy gray light that filtered through a dense fog.

Gray was the only color visible. From where she stood at the top of the companionway, she couldn’t even see the mast, let alone the bow which, for all she knew, was heading right for more rocks, a gang of zombies, or a fleet of Corsairs. Or all three.

Like a blind girl, she edged clumsily forward with her hands out until she found the mast. There, she worked at the tangle of knots with desperate hands until she had the sail free once again. It billowed and swept back the fog for all of a moment, then the gray came creeping in again. In those few seconds, the boat had doubled its speed. Quickly, she hauled the sail down and tied it off. This should have stopped the boat, but when she looked over the rail, she saw that the Dead Fish was still drifting.

Even she knew that drifting blindly was a bad thing. But how could she stop a boat that didn’t have brakes?

“The anchor!” she cried in triumph. Feeling her way to the bow, she released the anchor without realizing that during the gunfight earlier, Billy had accidentally shot the anchor rope. The anchor splashed into the water and sank, going straight down for two hundred feet until it buried itself in the ooze at the bottom of the Sound. “Oh jeeze,” Emily whispered, as the boat swept on at the mercy of wind and tide.

Chapter 4

Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

Commotion. A thousand faces. A body splayed out in a sea of blood. Cruel, searing pain, and intense lingering cold. Stripped bare and shaved bald. Then darkness so vast and endless that Jillybean didn’t think she would ever find her way out again.

She didn’t find her way out so much as she was hawked up and spat out onto the concrete slab that made up the prison floor.

Not so rough! Ipes was suddenly there, sitting in the dust with his three-inch legs jutting out from his navy-blue shorts. He squinted over the top of his bulbous nose at Jillybean. Hey, you okay? How are you holding up? Can you see me?

She’s fine, Eve snapped. Unlike Jillybean, Eve still had gobs of hair—chestnut brown and poking out in every direction. She was also clothes: dressed in black from her knee-high leather boots to a deep velour half-cape that hung from her squared shoulders. In fact, she’s better than fine. Aren’t you, Jillybean? I think you might finally be angry enough to do some real damage.

“Damage? Wh-what kind of damage?” The images were beginning to come together to form a hazy memory. She knew where she was: Hoquiam, the lair of the Corsairs.

Ipes waved his flappy hooves. Don’t listen to her. We’re in no position to do anything of the sort. Eve cocked an imperious eyebrow, making Ipes fidget. There is something you could do, however, the zebra said. We’re sort of in a pickle and I think it would be beneficial for all of us if you could extricate us from our current predicament.

Jillybean gazed at him glass-eyed. “You want me to escape…again? It seems that’s all I ever do, and where does it get me? No where.”

That’s not all true. This from Sadie, who suddenly appeared from a shadow. Like Eve, she was dressed in black, however, her outfit was styled in teen-goth: black jeans with holes in the knees, a black t-shirt with writing obscured by a battered leather jacket, and high-top Converse All-stars, the toes of which had once been white but were now doodled over and dirty grey. The last time you escaped, you ended up saving Emily. And I can’t remember how many times you escaped to save me.

“You can’t remember because you’re dead. And you were never alive, Ipes. And I’m pretty sure I killed you, Eve. Well, Neil did when he threw you into that fire. And where’s Ernie?” She finally glanced around and saw that she was still in the same cage she’d been in earlier that night. Just outside of the cage on the concrete floor, almost within reach, was a brown stain. She stared at it, feeling a sharp pain spread through her chest.

The brown stain called to her, and she went to touch it, only to be brought up short by her golden collar. She looked back, the movement making her new chains rattle. The chains flashed silver—Only the best for a Queen, she heard echo in her head. It had been the Black Captain’s voice, replete with cold, biting laughter.

Each of the three chains were looped around fat, grey dumbbells that were stamped with the number 45. The chains were thick and marvelously shiny except where they looped tightly around the middle of the weights; the silver there marred by dark iron welds. She fingered the loops of silver chain beneath her chin and felt the same sort of welds.

Ernie has been kicked out of the group, Eve said. He was…

Jillybean could feel her inside her head, rooting around, trying to find the right word. “Superfluous?” Jillybean suggested.

Exactly. Why have him around, bringing up bad memories, when we have me? I’ve always been the dominant, strong one. Sadie is the useless compassionate one. Jillybean, you supply the brains. And Ipes, she curled a lip at the toy zebra. Ipes, you’re just a pussy, and when I figure out how to get rid of you…

“Oh stop,” Jillybean said without any force. She didn’t want to hear any more of Eve’s yapping.

That’s too bad, because you’re going to get an earful. I’m in charge now. You folded up and went bye-bye, and now I run things, so unless you want to go back into the dark, you better figure out a way to get us out of this damn cage.

“How?” Everything had been taken from the cell, including the pillow, mattress and blanket. The cage was molded steel that had been bolted straight into the slab of cement. “Do you see anything I can use to pick a lock?”

We thought you’d be able to use, I don’t know, physics or science or something like that.

“It’s physics that’s keeping me in this cell, or perhaps, more accurately, it’s metallurgy.” She knocked one of the bars and sighed. She was about to go on, explaining about the properties of steel, only her eyes fell on the brown stain again, and she pictured Stu Currans lying right there, his hand held out to her. He had come back for her and he had died for her.

“I’m not worth it,” she said under her breath.

Yes, you are! Sadie hurried over and knelt in front of her. I died for you because I loved you. Without you, where would the people of Bainbridge be? And all those people in Estes? And the slaves of the River King? And the people of Sacramento…

“Are either dead or about to be enslaved. They can’t stand up to the Corsairs. The same is true of the Islanders, the Hill People and the Santas. And what about the Guardians? I destroyed their home. I destroyed it for nothing. No, no, I’m not worth dying for. You made a mistake, Sadie. Luckily, I can fix it.”

The chains and weights would make hanging herself from the ceiling bars difficult, but there was an easier way. The cell door had a thick lock plate, three feet off the ground. If she wound one of the chains around it and then around her neck, then wrapped the other two weights around her midsection, she would only have to sit to have her larynx crushed and her circulation cut off. She’d be dead in…

NO! Eve flew across the cell, her feet skimming the cold cement without touching. Jillybean felt a jolt of horrible cold the moment Eve entered her body and took over her mind. Along with the cold came a sinister darkness that was very much like the black, icy water of Puget Sound. It was deeper than most people realized. A body could sink for some time before settling softly among the spires and tendrils of seaweed, deep down in the green muck.

In Jillybean’s mind, the darkness went on forever, and she sank and sank, losing sight of the world above. She had no thoughts while she was beneath the surface. There were no memories. There were no ideas. There weren’t even emotions. Sometimes there’d be a flash of a picture: a handsy guard, a bucket that stank of urine and excrement, a hose turned on her, leering, jeering crowds filled with so many faces that none of them possessed real features. They were blurred outlines bordered by hair.

These seemed to come at great intervals as if weeks or months passed between each, all except the faces. These were still with her when she found herself on her bare knees, staring down at cracked asphalt. A faint white line to her left told her she was on a street. To her right was a frantic stuffed zebra.

Get up! Sadie, please hurry.

“I’m not…Sadie.” She was out of breath and there was fresh pain across her back. She had no idea where she was or how she got out of her cell, but knew the searing, familiar pain. She was being whipped.

Jillybean! You can do this. Take a deep breath and get up, but hurry. Hurry!

She was not fast enough, and before she could get one shaking leg under her, the whip fell with an amazingly loud crack! The fierce pain spread across her back like a terrible echo. It made her suck in her breath, but she refused to cry out.

Jillybean, Ipes warbled, the fear making his voice go high. She knew the whip was being drawn back a second time. Beneath the laughter and the cheers of the crowd, she could hear the whip slither away like a leather snake. Before it could be drawn all the way back, she thrust upward, thinking that she would stand tall and glare defiance. Instead, she was brought up short by the golden collar. The chains attached to the weights were six inches too short and she could only stand in something of a cringing stoop.

Good! Ipes cried. He rushed around to stand in front of her, beckoning her forward with one of his hooves. Just start walking. Concentrate on me. Don’t think about any of them.

Them? Jillybean gazed blearily around and saw that she was somewhere in the middle of a town that was glutted with trash and human excrement. The morning air smelled like the soggy brown pit beneath an outhouse. It was Hoquiam, and as bad as it was, the people that lived there were worse. Their insides were more terrible and disgusting than their filthy hides.

With a deep breath, Jillybean leaned forward, nearly choking herself until she stuck both hands beneath her collar. Ipes urged her on and she began to take slow plodding steps, the three barbells scraping along behind her. Collectively, they were heavier than she was, and soon her legs were shaking and her breath was ragged and harsh. A city block was all she could manage before she felt as though she was going to collapse again.

One more block, Ipes urged. You can do this. You’re almost there.

“Almost…where?” she gasped.

Ipes was slow to answer, and when he did, he wouldn’t look her in the eye. It’s a surprise. That’s what the guard said. They both knew it would be a terrible surprise.

Jillybean turned around so that she was facing the man with the whip. He was properly ugly: nose too big, mouth too small, a chin that dribbled toward his neck, making him look weak despite his height. He sneered at her, showing gnarly, unbrushed teeth. In every way he so perfectly conformed to her visual paradigm of evil that she was struck by the notion that perhaps he wasn’t real.

“Like Ipes,” she said to herself. She knew he wasn’t real. For starters, stuffed animals couldn’t walk or talk, and even if they could, she had buried Ipes by a river a thousand miles away. And if he was an imaginary phantom created by her broken mind, how could she not question the reality of the Corsair? Or the ugly crowd? They were shouting lewd comments and cracking jokes. Some were drinking and some were drunk. All were filthy and hideous. They were all calling on the whip-man to, “Get her again!”

There was a good chance that none of them were real either. “Because who acts like this?” she muttered.

You know. It was Sadie speaking from the crowd. There was sweat in her hair, blood running down her arms and her Goth-clothes were hanging off her in tatters. She had taken the brunt of the whipping. People are like this. They’ve always been like this. You know history better than anyone.

Sadly, Jillybean did know history. She had studied it and thus knew the evil inside mankind had a long tradition. From the terrifying depredations of the Mongols, to the sixty-million Hindus slaughtered by Muslim invaders, to the massacre of the Jews by the Nazis, humans have proven over and over again that, as a species, they were rarely more than one generation away from regressing back into an uncivilized, cruel barbarism.

The whip-man began to draw back his weapon again. Jillybean sighed, wrapped her right hand around the chains, took up a grip with both hands and began heaving backwards. She went quickly now that she was using fresh muscles. The chains bit into the bare flesh of her arm, and strangely, that was okay. It was worth it to see the crowd’s disappointment. They were hoping she’d be whipped to shreds.

Most of them, that is. Scattered here and there among them were slaves, both male and female. They watched with drawn lips and sad eyes. They knew the terror and the pain. Some cheered along with the rest, but for the most part it was an act.

Jillybean spotted one she knew. The girl was young with dark, haunted eyes. She had belonged to the Cadaver. Jillybean nodded to the girl and kept going. There were other slaves she recognized as well. She saw at least eight of the Black Captain’s sex slaves, and his two Hispanic kitchen slaves. Further on, she saw the blacksmith, Harper Kountz and his gangly slave, who had only been referred to as “Jeff.” The two pushed forward and gawked, but mostly at the golden collar. They could be heard exclaiming over it.

The slaves were mostly an interest to Jillybean simply as a way of taking her mind off the pain radiating throughout her body. Her whip-tortured flesh zinged and burned as if she were on fire, but what hurt more than anything were her bare feet. Her soles had been beaten with a rod and her toes hammered; they ached terribly, especially when she stepped on the rocks and glass that littered the road.

A glance back showed her that her ordeal was almost over…and that a new one was about to begin.

Don’t look! Ipes ordered, as the crowd began to hiss and point. The little zebra was riding on one of the barbells as if it were a horse. Just keep your eyes on me at all times and we’ll get through this. The temptation to look was very great, and it was made all the more unbearable as Sadie openly stared, her face draining of blood.

After a few more feet, Jillybean was grabbed by rough hands and hauled around. She had dragged her weights to a Lutheran church. At one time it had been a fine, large, white structure, with a steeple and tall clear windows. Now it was a burned-out husk, splashed with graffiti and what was probably more of the human excrement that decorated so much of the town. Several shapes hung from the windows and steeple. To Jillybean they looked…

Listen to Ipes, Sadie said, suddenly appearing among the guards. Don’t look. Keep your eyes on Ipes.

The tiny zebra was plopped on the ground square in front of her. Obediently, she stared straight at him.

“The Queen has arrived at last!” the Black Captain said in a thundering voice that could be heard over the crowd. “All hail!” He wore clothes that were so deeply black that Jillybean couldn’t guess their material. His skin was chocolate velvet and his smile pure snow. He was at the height of his power now. His enemies were crushed and scattered and his hold on the world growing stronger after his initial stumbles.

More jeers and catcalls from the crowd only made his smile go wider. The Black Captain let it go on for a full minute before raising his hands for silence. “Tell us, your Highness, what do you think of your castle?”

When she refused to look up, brawny men with unkind hands yanked her head back. Ipes was screaming for her not to look and Sadie was trying her best to sink Jillybean into the darkness, but it was too late. Jillybean had seen the dead bodies of her captains: Steinmeyer and McCartt. There was also Gerry the Greek, and next to him was a small body that she feared was that of Emily Grey, then she saw that it was missing an arm. It was Aaron Altman hanging by his neck, his fish-belly white skin sagging as though it were about to slide off of him.

In the exact middle of the building, hanging squarely over the double doors was Stu Currans. Unlike the others, he wasn’t hanging by the neck, he had been nailed to the siding like a modern-day Jesus. Except for his face, his flesh had been peeled away and now blood formed a tacky pool directly in front of the doors. If she was going to be forced inside, she would have to trail her bare feet right through it.

Jillybean’s legs went right out from beneath her, and her bruised knees cracked on the asphalt. She didn’t feel the pain or hear the howls of laughter. Her mind was slipping into darkness, a darkness that was impossible to define. It had no borders; no true beginning and most certainly no end. The beginning was only an unnatural dimness, and she wanted to scurry within its black bosom, only there was a face within it, a sneering face much like her own.

Not yet, it whispered and shoved her back out into the light. You aren’t broken enough, yet.

“I am,” Jillybean begged. But she wasn’t, not yet.

The Black Captain gazed fondly down at her. She was a wreck: wild hair gone, fancy black clothes ripped from her back; her flesh scorched, bruised, slashed; her smug, know-it-all attitude replaced by blubbering insanity. One moment she was spitting incoherent curses, the next she was sitting blank-eyed, mumbling to herself. In his eyes, she was perfect. She demonstrated to the world the extent of his power.

“I am?” he asked. “What are you? Hmm?” She wouldn’t look at him. She only stared fixedly on a spot on the ground, her head bobbing as if the bones in her neck had been replaced by a spring. “I tell you what you are, you’re a queen. You’re the Queen of the Slaves.” He clapped his hands. “Let’s have the crown!”

Harper Kountz took a box from Jeff’s hands and pushed through to the Black Captain who reached inside and took out an abomination. The crown was a thick gold circle studded with human teeth and from which fourteen bleached rib bones jutted up. She wanted to scream and back away, but the heavy hands were on her again, holding her down.

“And now the robe,” the Captain said. He smiled easily at her as a pale Joslyn Reynolds hurried forward with another box, held out at arm’s length, keeping it as far from her face as she could. “Let her see it, Jos. Come on, don’t be squeamish.” Whereas the crown had a sickly art to it, the bones being sanded smooth and the gold polished to a high shine, the robe was ghastly. It was a dusky grey-white with crude stitches holding the uneven patches together; no one had bothered to shave the hair from it. The robe was made of human flesh. Stu’s flesh.

Jillybean vomited on the ground.

Chapter 5

Bainbridge Island, Washington

As her daughter was wracked by surges of panic, Deanna Grey had her own issue to overcome: paranoia.

Deanna had known since the day her daughter had been kidnapped that there was at least one more Corsair spy on the island. When she first imagined the person, she had pictured an evil, skulking coward, someone afraid to risk their own skin. Now she knew that the picture was way off. Far from being a coward, the spy was fantastically brazen.

She, and Deanna now knew for certain it was a she, had come into Deanna’s home! Not only that, she had waltzed into the prison and killed Gina Sanders! Then she had slaughtered Norris Barnes, and Norris had been a big man with huge fists, each the size of Deanna’s head. Anyone who could do these things was no skulking coward. She was exceedingly dangerous, and what made her doubly so was that the spy could be anyone.

The fog that laid over Bainbridge was not as dense as it was across the southern part of the Sound. The heavy mist was like something out of a horror movie, which didn’t help Deanna’s paranoia one bit. She gripped the hunting knife in her pocket with a little more force, ready to pull it out and shank the first person to jump out at her.

Of course, no one did and no one was likely to. The spy could have been killed the night before without a problem, so why would she decide to come back and kill her right there on the street where she could be caught? This was a reasonable question which didn’t matter a bit. Everyone knew that paranoia and reason were polar opposites, and so Deanna held onto the knife as if her life depended on it.

Her purposefully quiet steps took her past the New Peking Panda, where the council was nervously waiting for her, each of them afraid that maybe she had been killed as well. Every morning seemed to bring a fresh horror, and yet they said nothing, not even to each other. They acted almost as if addressing the issue would make it worse.

Deanna couldn’t stand their weakness and had no problem letting them stew longer as she made her way to the pretty, little home where her friend Veronica Hennesy lived.

The big blonde was feeling her own strain of paranoia and kept the chain on her door as she peeked out. “Oh, it’s you,” she gushed in relief when she saw Deanna. Veronica was dressed in slacks and a white blouse, which was odd enough for a Saturday morning. What made it even more so was that her great mane of platinum blonde hair was curled. She laughed uneasily and fumbled with the chain, a chain she hadn’t once used in the last ten years. “What are you doing here? Is there anything wrong?”

The two women exchanged quick, rigid smiles before their eyes stole past each other to nervously take in the background. Veronica looked alarmed at the mists, thinking it could hide an entire company of assassins.

If anything, Deanna was even more frightened. A shadow had moved in Veronica’s living room. “Who’s in there with you?”

Veronica stiffened and her nervous eyes confessed her embarrassment. “In here? With me? I-I-I…it’s no one really.”

The shadow loomed, growing larger. Deanna’s grip on her knife turned slick with sweat and she had just started to slide it out when Paul Daniels stuck his unkempt head out from behind the wall separating the foyer from the living room. “Don’t be like that V,” he chided.

“Paul!” Deanna said, surprised. “Um, good morning.” Paul had been hot after Veronica for years. His prospects had dimmed with each passing winter as his gut slowly increased in size and his lower cheeks elongated, gradually forming jowls. Despite this, he was not an ugly man. Ten years before he had been big and strapping, fearless and tough. He had been a man’s man, loud and quick to laugh, especially at his own jokes, very few of which were ever funny. He gave crushing handshakes, hearty thumps on the back, and loved to mash the heads of the undead whenever they struggled up on shore of the island. His favorite weapon: a heavy sledgehammer with a taped handle that he called “Mincy.”

During the heyday of the apocalypse, he was a man you wanted on your side. Once the wall was built, not so much. His manly-man behavior became boorish, while at the same time, his jokes increased in both volume and vulgarity. Deanna found his company to be tedious, since he seemed to live to tell stories from the early days of apocalypse.

As far as she knew, the only reason Veronica had kept stringing him along was that he could still hunt better than any man on the island. Sure, sometimes he brought back an occasional harbor seal with big sad eyes, but he always gave a cut to Veronica.

“Well, if it ain’t Governor Dee.” He stepped into the foyer and was, thankfully, dressed. Despite his growing belly, he was inordinately proud of his naked flesh. “Or is it Governor Double-D? Ha-ha! Hey, I’m just kidding, you know that. You looked surprised to see me is all. Yeah, well I might be taking my grade-A loins off the market. And yes, I sell them by the pound. Ha-ha!” His booming laughter was the opposite of infectious. Veronica had her back to him and so he didn’t see her cringe.

There was an awkward silence and Paul rarely passed an opportunity to heighten the awkwardness to the next level. “So, what brings you out, Governor? Scraping for votes? Looking for a baby to kiss, or are you out pressing the flesh? If so, I could be your man. I may only have one vote, but it’s a big one.” He gave his hips a quick gyration.

Both the ugly movement and the awkward moment felt surreal to Deanna. “We’re on the verge of war, my daughter has been kidnapped, people are being murdered left and right—and you’re shaking your hips at me?”

The wide smile fell from his face. “Hey, it was just a joke.”

Ever the politician, Deanna forced the glare into a neutral look, adding the smallest of smiles; the best she could manage. “I’m sorry, but I’m just not in the mood this morning. There’s too much going on and I need to talk to Veronica, alone if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, sure. No sweat. In fact, I got things to do myself, you know. And you got me outta cuddling. Ha-ha! What self-respecting man has time for cuddling? Am I right?” Deanna clung to the fake smile, which he took for full agreement. He went to Veronica and bent over her, his lips outstretched a good inch. She gave him her cheek. “Now you’re shy? Ha-ha!”

Her grin was as fake as Deanna’s as she pushed him out the door and locked it behind him. She put her back to it. “This is not what you think. Nothing happened. He slept in the guest bedroom, I swear. It’s just, you know, with everything going on, I didn’t want to be in this house all alone. He may be sort of a jerk, but he’s also reassuring in a way.”

“Like having a big slobbery dog?”

“One that doesn’t mind ripping off farts right in front of you.” Veronica sighed. “I couldn’t go through with anything after that. Which is good, I guess. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Was? The outfit and the curled hair suggested to Deanna that the thought was still there. “You could have stayed with me. I have a ton of rooms.” Veronica’s fake smile came back, telling Deanna all she needed to know. Veronica would rather shack up with a moron like Paul than risk getting her throat slit by hanging out at the Governor’s mansion—and she didn’t even know about Deanna’s midnight visitor.

Deanna glossed over the refused invitation. “I need your help.” At this, Veronica shrunk into the door; not a good sign. “I really need you to take over Norris’ spot on the council. It’s important. No, it’s critical.”

She shook her head. “Critical? How so? Wasn’t he the Chief of Housing and Infrastructure? I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.”

“You would learn on the job. It’s not that hard. It’s the job I had, remember? And I’m no genius.” But she’d had access to a genius. Jillybean had made short work of any problem that had arisen and Deanna had taken all the credit. This was, after all the mark of a truly gifted politician. “Besides, I’m going to authorize security details for each of the council members. You’ll be perfectly safe, and it’ll keep you out of the fighting if we have to go to war.”

The blonde had started to shake her head; the word “war” stopped her. “You think that’ll really happen? War, I mean?”

The way Deanna saw it, she didn’t have any choice but to go to war. Their chance of actually winning was a long shot, she knew this perfectly well. However, a fight to a draw, or maybe even a threat of a fight, could get her daughter back and save the island at the same time. “I do. It’s almost a certainty. And we’re going to need every man, woman and child doing their part. So, your choices are to fight, or this. Also, the pay is much better than at the plant. So, what do you say?”

Veronica wanted to say that no job was worth the possibility of getting stabbed to death. Then again, she didn’t want to be a part of any sort of battle. She had fought in enough battles in the early days and now she wanted to be done with all that.

“Please, Veronica. For me.”

“Oh, you pain in the ass. I guess so. How tough could the job be if Norris could do it?”

Deanna hid her relief behind a new confident smile. “Good. The first thing you need to do is get Kay on board as well. I want her for Joslyn’s position as Councilman at Large.” It was a catch-all position that required supervision and auditing skills, neither of which Kay Gallagher possessed to any degree. Kay had once been a sex slave, long before the Black Captain had come to Hoquiam. She had a crooked smile, when she smiled at all, and was slow on the uptake, from the many beatings she’d been subject to.

“Kay? Are you kidding me?”

“No, I wish I was. Kay may not be the smartest, but she’s reliable, and when the time comes, I’m going to need to have guaranteed votes.” Veronica’s blue eyes narrowed. Deanna patted her hand. “It’s not the same with you. I trust your judgment. Most of the others on the council put personal ambition ahead of anything else. I have to be able to counter that if it comes up. Besides, the positions will be temporary until the November elections.”

Veronica looked unhappy with the entire affair. “I don’t like this one bit,” she said. “Kay is a lamb and I don’t want anything to happen to her. It wouldn’t be right. She’s already gone through so much.”

Deanna’s politician training kept her from lashing out—didn’t Veronica remember that her old friend Deanna had gone through her own problems? She had been raped countless times, and she had been beaten and abused, and her husband, the one truly good man left in the world, had been killed by bandits. Her first child had been poisoned in her womb, and now her second had been kidnapped.

Deanna’s smile was hard as rock as she asked, “Haven’t we all been through so much?”

Veronica felt the rebuke and agreed to hunt down Kay and to make sure she was presentable; sometimes she missed her lips when putting on lipstick.

Back in the mists, Deanna hurried to the New Peking Panda where the members of the council were glad-handing it with the forty or so people hanging around, waiting for the session to start. Three of them had actual business with the council. Another eleven were almost permanent fixtures at the meetings; it was a form of entertainment for them, Deanna supposed. The remainder were split into two groups: they were either there to put themselves forward as a prospect for one of the two council seats that needed to be filled, or they were supporters of the former.

Deanna was accosted the moment she stepped inside. “Governor, my friend Matthew McElderry would be perfect for the At Large position. You know Matthew. A great guy and last year he came in second in the pie-eating contest at the fall festival!”

“Of course, I know Matthew,” she said. “He might not have won the medal, but he was the people’s champion. I’ll give it some thought.” Or not. Pie-eating, though grand in its own way, was not a qualification for public office.

Another hand was thrust at her. Deanna tried not to flinch. “Linda Witaker, ma’am. I’m so sorry about what happened to Emma. As a mother, I know the pain you’re going through. I just wanted to put my name out there for the Chief of Housing and Infrastructure position. I was in apartment leasing before.”

To keep from glaring, Deanna gave her an overly large smile. Her eyes crinkled to slits. “Lisa, was it? I’ll keep you in mind.”

“No, it’s Linda.”

And my daughter’s name is Emily! she wanted to scream into her face. “Okay, sure thing. Hi Raul. Hello Wendil. Mr. Perkins, it’s great to see you made it. Have you ever missed one of these? No. Ha-ha.” And so on. Normally, Deanna was in her element during these meetings. She had a natural way of putting people at their ease, while at the same time making them feel important. That morning she would have rather spent the following two hours chewing on tinfoil.

She had to appear as if in serene contemplation as each would-be councilman stood, fidgeted at the podium, made a brief, stilted speech, was seconded and then sat again, usually in a lather of sweat. An hour into the ordeal, Veronica and Kay slid into the back of the room. Veronica looked somewhat alarmed at the idea of having to make a speech. Kay was abjectly terrified.

Deanna wasn’t about to ruin her chances by having either of them give impromptu speeches. That would be disastrous. Instead, she waited until the last person had finished rambling to thank them all and to let them know that the council’s decision would be announced as soon as possible. This precipitated a great deal of milling about, during which the council retreated to the back room to hash things out.

It was there that Deanna made her recommendations. Normally, she played politics with her choices, doing her best to curry favor from one group or another, or trying to balance the council itself. Since the Governor had a greater say in these things, and could only be overridden by a unanimous vote, her choices had always been passed without issue.

This time, it would be different.

“Kay Gallagher?” Rosanna Landeros looked shocked, something that Deanna didn’t think possible in someone so stern. Her one extended eyebrow sat halfway up her forehead. “Isn’t she…a little slow?”

“Shy, is how I would put it,” Deanna replied. “Shy or not, she’s a hard worker and takes direction well.”

Soft, meek Jonathan Dunnam, who really was shy, began to stutter, “But, but, but, Kay? I suppose I could back Veronica, maybe, but, but, but, Kay? I really think she may not be cut out for the job.”

Andrea Clary, who was not cut out for her own position as Chief of Logistics, stood and planted both fists on the table, striking an aggressive pose. “I know Kay very well,” she declared. “She’s a sweet, sweet girl, and you can call her shy all you want, which doesn’t change the fact that she is terribly slow. We all know it.” She raised a hand and stared around at the other four council members. “I say she’s a firm no. All in favor of…”

“You’re out of line,” Wayne French said, cutting right across her without raising his voice. “Have I had my say? And what about Karen?” Properly chastised, Andrea sat down. Wayne and Karen had the same mind as Jonathan; a yes for Veronica and a no for Kay. A vote was taken and Kay was a firm No across the board, while Veronica received four of five positive votes.

Although Deanna got Veronica on the council, losing Kay was its own rebuke. She had thought that since they were in something of an emergency situation, she’d have more of a free hand. “So much for including them in on Operation Otter Pop,” she muttered, as she made her way to the restaurant’s main room. “In fact, it’s probably better this way.” It had been a long shot to think that she could count on five politicians to risk everything on a pick like Kay.

Kay was overjoyed not to have to sit on the council. Veronica, on the other hand, followed Deanna back into the room as if she were walking into a morgue to identify a body. “For now, just agree with everything I say,” Deanna told her.

As much as Veronica loved Deanna, she hated the idea of being someone’s puppet, and initially she resented being put in the position of “toady” as she saw it. Andrea’s sneer, Rosanna’s cold reception, and Wayne’s darting glance at her bosom certainly helped to relieve any hard feelings, however. It was Karen Hentz who cemented the fact in Veronica’s mind that she had just sat down at a table of snakes.

Up until that moment, Karen had been the councilman with the least experience and now she wanted to lord it over Veronica that she was the newbie. “I say we let our newest member suggest a qualified person to fill the last seat at the table.”

Veronica had no idea who was qualified for anything and she spat out the first name that came to mind, “Matthew McElderry.” He had been out in the main dining room, kicked back in a chair, letting his friend go on and on about what a great guy he was.

“The pie guy?” Karen laughed, earning her a smile from Andrea. “No, we’re looking for a serious candidate.” Just like that, Veronica and her choice were dismissed. She simmered while Deanna looked as if nothing unusual had happened.

Deanna sat placidly listening to Karen until she brought up Colin Mills, the man she wanted to nominate. The governor drummed her fingernails on the table and said, “Colin is an interesting choice. Wasn’t he one of Eddie Sanders best friends?”

“Best friends? I don’t know about…”

“Yes, he was. I remember they were almost inseparable. I distinctly remember that. Hmmm, best friends with a Corsair spy? And say, weren’t you and Gina close?”

Karen turned pale and began shaking her head. “No. I-I-I wouldn’t say we were especially close. I saw her sometimes around…”

“No, you two were close, which is why I think it’s strange you would nominate Colin. Won’t it just remind everyone just how close you were with Gina?” The threat was clear. Deanna was not going to let anyone bully Veronica.

Poor Jonathan was so put out by the display of political intimidation that he simply passed on his chance to nominate someone. Andrea and Rosanna suggested two different people who had given speeches in the outer room, while Wayne surprised everyone by suggesting Deberha Perkins.

“The sheriff?” Andrea asked. “She hasn’t exactly done a stellar job lately.” Andrea snuck a glance at Deanna, who had been thinking Deberha had done a terrible job. Perhaps as a dig at her, Andrea went on, “But I suppose she is hard-working and does connect with the people well enough.”

“She does,” Wayne agreed. “And after these last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about moving her on. Let’s face it, as an investigator, she’s in way over her head, but she would be perfect for an At Large position.” And he would be getting rid of a liability. He was Chief of Island Security, and as such, the sheriff answered directly to him. When she looked bad, he looked bad.

Deanna weighed the different prospects of each candidate, including the two dozen in the other room. What she needed more than anything was someone she could count on to have her back when war was declared. She hoped she could count on Wayne, especially since he was the closest thing to a military leader among them. He had been a naval officer at the outbreak of the Apocalypse, and although his job had been in high-tech communications, he was still a cut above the few soldiers among them that had managed to survive.

“I think Wayne might be right about Deberha Perkins,” Deanna said. “She’s steady.” It was about the only compliment Deanna could come up with that wouldn’t twist the truth into a knot. The real reason Deanna wanted her was because Deberha had been almost the only person to completely side with her during the past week, and she figured that loyalty which was rewarded would only increase in measure.

The vote was unanimous in Deberha’s favor.

Deanna wrapped up the meeting quickly afterwards. She had work to do. She had to figure out how Jillybean planned to blow up the walls surrounding Bainbridge. Operation Otter Pop was only a theoretical concept, a quirky idea that was never ever supposed to see the light of day and had it been anyone else putting it forward, the concept would have remained strictly in the realm of conjecture.

“Except this is Jillybean we’re talking about,” she said to herself as she entered the fog and headed north. Jillybean had clearly foreseen the danger posed by the Corsairs and she had never been one to wait around for a dangerous situation to unfold. “No, she’s taken steps, I’m sure of it. Unlike me, she did something.”

But was it a good thing? Picturing the walls stuffed with dynamite sent a cold shiver down her back. Can I deliberately take down our only defense? It was a realistic question with only one answer, “I don’t know.” Deep down she knew it was the only way to make her people into warriors again. They had already suffered every affront a civilized people could possibly take, and where was the clamor for war? There wasn’t even a clamor for an apology.

The people of Bainbridge had sat back in silence after being exposed to murder, kidnapping, and political assassination. They had become weak, spineless sheep, and yet, Deanna knew they would come after her if they found out what she was planning. They would probably do more than banish her, they would turn her over to the Corsairs. It would be the ultimate betrayal and they would do it because it was the most gutless thing they could do.

Chapter 6

Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

Jillybean woke in increments, her huge, luminous blue eyes only slowly coming into focus. The air was cold and ugly-smelling, the cement beneath her colder still, and for all of a second she thought she was waking up in her cell. Then she saw the pool of blood inches from her hand. Confusion swept her until she gradually came to realize that she was still in front of the doorway of the Lutheran church.

“But I fell.” The memory of dropping away into the great dark void inside of her was crystal clear. “Shouldn’t I be somewhere else? Shouldn’t I be gone?” The only thing she could think was that she had been kicked out of her own personal purgatory and now she was back. “I’m back too quickly,” she whispered, tasting bitter resentment on her tongue. “What’s the use of being crazy if I still have to deal with this? I should be back in the darkness. That’s where I’m supposed to be!” She had once feared the darkness; now she craved it so badly that she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to will her mind away from this world.

A sudden crack of a whip was followed by a harsh, slashing pain across her back. She gasped and then groveled before the blood stain, “I want to go back, please. Please! Eve? Where are you? You win. I don’t want this!” All around her the crowd hooted and laughed at her misery. Only one in those hundreds did not.

Eve sneered out from between two drunken bandits. She had her arms slung around their shoulders. Don’t be such a whiner! You wanted this, remember? You wanted someone to love you, remember? Back on Bainbridge, you thought you were so lonely. You thought you’d been “overlooked” by the boys, and what did you pray for?

“I wanted a real man.”

And that’s what you got. Eve pointed toward the church, but Jillybean didn’t dare look up, knowing that Stu’s mistreated body hung above her. Seeing him would be more pain than she could bear. It would be worse than any torture she’d yet received. She would die without dying.

“What did she say?” someone screamed over the crowd.

A gruff voice right behind her replied, “That she wanted a ‘real’ man!” This brought on a slew of unfunny jokes, and dozens of men volunteered to show her what a “real” man was. Jillybean shut them out. She shut out everything, or at least she tried to, but the blood called to her. She reached out and touched the tacky red puddle. It was Stu’s blood. He had come back for her and he had died for her.

Just like always, this was what love got her: blood splattered on concrete, a body being devoured by flies, her soul crumbling away.

“But now it’s over,” she tried to tell herself. “There’s no one left who will die for me.” It was something of a relief. Not a great relief, of course, since there were still plenty of people who were going to die because of her.

Don’t think like that! Sadie cried. She too was in the crowd. Like the ghost she was, she slid through an impossibly narrow space between a pair of Asian slave girls who had been given atrocious bowl haircuts. Yes, people will die, but it’s not because of you. It’s because of the Black Captain. He’s to blame. What you’ve done is give your people a fighting chance. You’ve shown everyone that the Black Captain can be beaten. Now, Jenn will be able to…

“Shut up!” Jillybean cried. The crowd thought she was yelling at them and only laughed louder. “I don’t need a feel-good speech from you, Sadie. I messed up, okay? This isn’t what winning looks like.”

This was the opposite of winning. And yet, victory had been so close. She knew where she had miscalculated, she had vastly underestimated the Guardians’ dedication to pacifism. All of her rather amazing insight into the human mind had failed in the face of religion.

“Jenn won’t be able to do anything. There will be no alliance and the Captain will swoop in and pick them apart.” But it didn’t have to be that way! The San Francisco Bay area could be easily defended. She pictured it: the key would be holding the bridge. With it, no invader could safely enter the bay without looking over their shoulder, wondering when their one escape route would be slammed closed behind them. Then there was Alcatraz. With a little forethought, it could be unassailable, even with very few defen…

Ipes was suddenly right in her face, poking his bulbous nose into her pert one, jarring her back to her reality. We have to move, Jillybean. Listen. Within the cruel laughter of the crowd, there were cries of: She’s just sittin’ there! Whatcha waitin’ for? Get her again with the whip!

Get up, please. Ipes threw himself at her, trying desperately to lift her arm. Come on, Jillybean! It’s just a few more feet. His hooves were soft and weak, and utterly useless; his frightened, desperate insistence was much more substantive. She didn’t want the whip again. It was a hateful thing.

Despite the pain that lanced through her body—her back was on fire from the whip, her feet ached from her beatings, her throat was choked by the golden collar and the weights chained to it—she pushed herself back to her feet, stifling a cry as she did. The crowd seemed disappointed that she was able to stand. And that was good. She had nothing left, no hope, no love, no friends and no family, and really no reason to live except to hurt the people who had done this to her. That desire for vengeance was thoroughly laced throughout her black soul. A fiery hatred had taken root, its tendrils going deep. It was Eve’s doing and for once Jillybean was perfectly fine with her cheap thrills. She was just surprised at how quickly the utter loathing had filled her.

“What time is it?” she asked Ipes. “How long was I out?” It felt as though a great deal of time had passed since the Captain had set the hellish crown on her head, and yet the clouds above were as still as they had been, heavy and close, pressing down on the world.

Only a few minutes, he paused and pressed his hooves into his round belly, noting dejectedly how easily the fur squished inward. I think we’re going to miss lunch just like we missed breakfast.

“I don’t think I could eat anything, anyway.” She was directly in front of the doors now, with the body of the man she loved nailed right above her. “What do you think is going to happen in there?”

Nothing good, Ipes whispered. Look behind you.

She chanced a look back and saw thirty or forty unhappy men shackled and chained. They were lined up in ranks of three and, like her, they had been recently shaved and not by a barber with a razor and a delicate hand, either. It looked like someone had used an old dull, serrated bread knife to do the job. They were naked and stood in a stoop, covering their genitals and shivering as the crowd jeered.

“Go,” a grizzled bear of a man said to her. Although he was a different guard than she remembered, the bloody whip was the same. He pointed with it at the doors, and as he did, she saw a straggle of her flesh drop to the ground.

Her hatred bloomed, giving her a small burst of strength. “What’s your name?” she asked. His eyes narrowed, and she explained, “I like to know the name of the people I kill. It’s only polite.”

He laughed at this, his face going scarlet and his eyes disappearing in a crinkle of flesh, tears forming at the corners. He turned and told the next Corsair, who exploded in gales of laughter. The story and the laughter spread, and while it did, the man with the whip sighed between chuckles.

Jillybean risked the whip, asking, “What’s so funny? I’m being serious.”

This induced a new burst of laughter. “Oh, you was bein’ serious.” More laughter. “Why didn’t ya say so? Ha-ha! Here be the truth, honey-britches. The truth is, you’re a joke. Ya just don’t seem to realize it yet.”

“We’ll see,” she said, and then pushed her way into the church. As bad as the outside looked, the inside was markedly worse. Rats scuttled beneath the overturned pews and dropped their filth on a floor carpeted with thousands of scattered Bible pages. An evil smell hung on the air, one which every survivor of the apocalypse knew. It was the smell of a rotting body.

A dozen or so sputtering candles lit the church, which was a simple rectangle divided by a center aisle with ranks of toppled, befouled and broken pews to either side. Near the front, some of the pews had been set back up and a huge throne-like chair had been pushed in front of an altar that had been thoroughly and disgustingly desecrated. The immense chair had stained red velvet cushions and directly in the center of the seat was the crown that had been fashioned for her. Hanging from the back of it was the robe—it dripped a brown substance.

Upon seeing it, she wavered both physically and mentally. Her legs shook and her mind filled with blessed darkness. She was on the verge of fainting when the whip brought her around. Fire raced down her back. It left her gasping, and she lurched forward to escape the next blow. Soft laughter from above floated down at her, making her wince as much as she had from the whip.

It was the Captain. He stood in the center of the balcony, dominating it like a dark god. As always, he wore his signature black attire; the only color showing about his person was a touch of silver from the twin .44 caliber Colt Anaconda revolvers he wore strapped to his lean hips. Behind him, his entourage filled the poorly lit balcony. There had to be thirty people with him, but to Jillybean, they were only a single amorphous blob of leering shadows.

Two faces stood out in the crowd, and both were faces Jillybean that hated with a hot passion. The first was Joslyn Reynolds, her beautiful dark auburn hair flowing over the shoulder of an electric blue dress. The dress was completely out of place. She looked as though she was attending an opera, that is if her face hadn’t been twisted into a grimace by the stench and filth around her. The other person who stood out was Eve. She wore ever-shifting layers of black, so that sometimes it seemed she was in a pantsuit, or a gown, or biker’s leathers. She grinned, her eyes dark with excitement.

In sudden fury Jillybean looked around for something to throw at her. Before she could find anything suitable, the Captain’s rich voice boomed out, “Take your assigned place, your Highness. We have a lot of work to do. Being Queen of the Slaves isn’t just about tiaras and throwing fancy balls. You have obligations to attend to. You have decisions to make about your fellow slaves. Important decisions.”

Jillybean was shoved in the back to get her moving again. Oddly, the shove was just about the nicest thing anyone in Hoquiam had done for her so far. She glanced back at the bearish Corsair. “You could have whipped me, yet you didn’t. Maybe I won’t kill you,”

He scoffed quietly and then darted a look up to the balcony, afraid he had made a mistake by not whipping her. The Black Captain hadn’t noticed one way or the other. He was waiting while one of his slaves arranged a blanket for him to sit on. “Just go,” the guard hissed.

She leaned forward and the chains grew tight as she dragged the heavy barbells down the center aisle until she reached the dais, where she heaved them up the steps, one at a time, before addressing the crown and the robe. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said to Ipes.

Maybe just close your eyes and do it. Imagine that you’re a real queen again. Jillybean tried, but even with Ipes and Sadie whispering encouragement, the only image that came to her was the moment when Stu Currans knelt before her on a cold, wet dock in San Francisco. He had been the first to acknowledge her, and she could even hear his words echo in her mind, I pledge my life and sacred honor to you, my Queen.

“I can’t,” she whispered. Not even a whip could get her to put the crown on her head. She waited for the whip to come, slashing her flesh like lightning.

The whip did not fall, and it was the Captain who inadvertently came to her rescue. “That’s right, let your attendant help you,” he called out.

Her attendant was a collared slave with black hair. She was grubby in her ill-fitting and ragged clothes. They had been made for a man far larger than she and were pegged at the ankle and rolled at the wrist. She kept her face pointed down toward the floor, even when she mounted the steps.

“Don’t forget to curtsey,” the Captain warned, much to the amusement of the people filling the church.

The woman curtsied and then reached for the crown, showing Jillybean soft hands and only recently bruised wrists. On impulse, Jillybean breathed in deeply, searching with her faculties beyond the stench of the dead body and the feces. There were familiar scents about the woman that weren’t normal with the other slaves she’d come in contact with: coconut lotion, guava extract shampoo, perfume that Jillybean couldn’t name but could imagine came in a fancy gold-etched bottle.

She knew the woman from the scent alone. “Do you now wish that I had killed you, Colleen?”

Colleen White jerked before slowly lifting her chin. Her face bore a spectacular bruise beneath one puffed-up eye. She glared hatred at Jillybean, who only smiled, suddenly flush with strength. An unexpected hungry desire for vengeance gave her a thrilling tingle.

“Well?” Jillybean asked when Colleen refused to answer. Jillybean laughed, “I could kill you here and now. Beg me, and I’ll do it. Get down on your knees and beg me to kill you.”

The guard with the whip waved his leather lash so that it caught the Black Captain’s attention. “Sir? This one is threatenin’ to kill that one there.”

“That seems rather unbecoming in a queen,” the Captain mused. This was greeted with a perfect howl of laughter from the growing audience. He put up his hands to quiet them. “You may be the Queen of the Slaves, but you do not own them. And keep in mind, your positions may switch at any time.” The crowd let out a collective: oooh!

Eve was right there with them, looking excited at the idea of some sort of infernal competition between slaves, as if she wasn’t one of them. Which I’m not, Eve said, speaking through the buzz of the crowd. In case you forgot, I was queen first, and not some stupid slave queen, either. I was a real queen. You’re the one who pushed me away. You’re the one who thought you could do it all alone. Well, now you get your chance. This is going to be all on you until you can figure a way out of here. I’m not going to take another beating for you and neither will Sadie.

A chain appeared in Eve’s hand. She gave it a yank and suddenly Sadie appeared beside her, wearing a golden collar that was a perfect match to Jillybean’s. Sadie opened her mouth to say something, only to choke as Eve gave the chain a yank.

“Someone slap her,” the Captain said. “She’s zoned out again. Not you, Colleen. Oh, she’s back. Your Highness, if you don’t mind behaving like a proper slave that would be great. You are supposed to be setting an example. Yes? Okay, let’s get the crown on first and then I think it’s high time you got to work.” His dark eyes glittered as Colleen hefted the hideous crown.

“You deserve this,” Colleen hissed, as she placed the crown on Jillybean’s head. It was uncomfortably heavy and, as it wasn’t padded or properly shaped, it threatened to fall off at any second. To keep it on, she had to sit with her neck perfectly straight. The robe came next, and if anything, it was even worse. There was a ghastly familiar smell to it that had Jillybean crying.

It smelled like Stu, except it also possessed a corrupted dead smell that she couldn’t equate with the handsome, sturdy Hillman. The flush of energy she’d felt earlier drained away as quickly as it had come, and now all she had were tears. They came steadily and prompted shouts of laughter from the crowd and a cold sneer from Colleen, one that was an exact match to Eve’s.

During this hilarity, the Black Captain sauntered down from the balcony. He walked up the center aisle, one hand on a pistol. The new slaves flinched away, none daring to look him in the eye. The poor creatures had a sad, gray sameness to them. Tall, short, thin, slouched, it didn’t matter. In Jillybean’s eyes they looked like the rejects from the potter’s wheel, like castoffs, like garbage.

The Captain treated them as such, fearlessly walking through their midst. He came right up to the throne, smirked at Jillybean’s tears and then moved to stand right behind her. She could feel his presence over her shoulder; it was as if he exuded evil.

“I say we get this show on the road,” he said. “Let’s have the first two prisoners.”

A man with a broken nose and shattered teeth was pushed forward. He stared at the floor, his head bobbing and jittering on his long neck. The man next to him was scrawny to the point of being emaciated; he held his genitals cupped in his hands as if he expected to have his parts lopped off at a word. He too refused to look up, and yet, Jillybean recognized him.

As though he were reading her mind, the Black Captain asked, “Do you recognize these traitors?”

“I don’t know him,” she said of the first man, “but that’s Rat-faced Ronnie.” For some reason Ronnie, whose nickname was perfectly apt, drew in a staggering breath and stepped back, looking like he was about to try and make a break for the doors.

“Yes,” the Captain said, “and ol’ Rat-face has been a bad boy. He’s been disloyal and is accused of being a traitor. The same is true of this other thing.” He sneered at the other prisoner. “This is Mordecai Monroe. Do you know him? Did he work with you?” His tone with Mordecai was different; it was searching.

The Queen shook her head, nearly losing the crown. “I don’t believe I ever talked to him.”

“Interesting.” The single cryptic word was all he put forth in regard to Mordecai. He seemed to dismiss the two prisoners altogether as he came around to Jillybean’s side. “Your job is quite simple. All you have to do is choose one of the two to die for their sins.” Jillybean’s spine, which had been as rigid as steel, turned to rubber and she slumped. Once more, lives were in her hands. Once more blood would be as well.

“What if they didn’t do anything wrong? What if they just happened to be a part of a crew that was giving up altogether? Or on a sinking boat?”

He leaned back away from her, feigning shock and disgust. “Your Highness! I would never kill a man for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I understand the desire to live better than anyone. These people aren’t being sentenced to death for a moment of weakness. No, no, no. They’re going to die because they had every chance to kill you, but they didn’t. No one even tried except for Leney’s sad attempt at poisoning you. They had guns. They had opportunity. They even had motive! But no one did a damn thing.”

Shaking his head, he looked down on the prisoners, his disdain for them written plainly on his features. “You are all stinking cowards!” His voice was so powerful that the flames from the candles seemed to bow to him. “Look at her! Go on! Look at what you were all so afraid of. Look at your Queen. She’s nothing but skin and bones. She’s barely even a woman.” The two men couldn’t raise their heads. The crowd stared with judgment and contempt. Forgetting for a moment the origin of the robe, Jillybean pulled it closer around her bare shoulders as her eyes drifted down and away.

The Captain scoffed, “No, she’s not even close to being a full woman! She’s just a girl, and none of you had the balls to kill her. One bullet. That’s all it would have taken. One bullet and you would’ve been a hero. Instead…”

More head-shaking, this time accompanied by a sigh. “Instead you’re on trial for your lives. But don’t look so glum. I’ve decided to make this fun. Since you bowed to her and groveled at her feet and gave up everything for her, I think it’s only fitting that your Queen decides your fate.” He turned to her. “By the way, I decided to make this into a game. You’ll get one minute to question each prisoner, and then all you have to do is pick one of the two for execution. If it seems too simple, you’d be right.” He grinned, letting the moment hang in the air so that the entire congregation leaned forward, eager to hear what deliciously cruel twist he had in mind.

“I will also make a choice.” The crowd oohed again. “If our picks match, then that man will be killed, and the other will become a slave. But if they don’t match, well, I’m afraid they’ll both have to die.”

The crowd loved the idea and cheered like mad. During the pandemonium, Jillybean glanced once at the two men in front of her. They were both sadly weak creatures. She was sure they had committed evil acts in their time—just as she had. A month ago, she might have been able to let them die in whatever horrid manner the Captain had in mind without batting an eye. It was different now. They had been her men, perhaps not totally, still they had fought for her and maybe, had things been different, they might have done enough good in time to atone for their crimes.

“What if I don’t make a choice?” she asked. The real question on her mind: What if I can’t make a choice?

“Then I’ll hang them together at once, and I’ll tie you to their bucking bodies so you can look into their eyes as they die. Maybe you’ll be close enough to hear their black souls drip on out of them.” He chuckled at the visual. “Trust me, with these two there’ll be no ascension and no Pearly Gates. So, are you ready to go? Good. Let’s have some paper and something to write with.”

Pen and paper were fetched, and the Captain set a timer on his watch. “One minute on the clock, aaaand go!”

If the Captain thought that Jillybean was too crushed in spirit to step up to the challenge in front of her, she quickly proved him wrong. In fact, he inadvertently assisted her by turning the whole process into a game. Her agile mind approached the questioning of the prisoners in a way that wasn’t designed to discover guilt or innocence. That would have been a waste of her minutes, since it was obvious that the Captain thought they were both guilty. Her questions were asked with the Captain in mind.

What was he looking for? What made him choose one over the other? Could questions be directed at one man and not the next to sway his mind? Could she paint one as particularly treasonous and the other as simply unaware or dragged down by a situation out of his control? Her one aim was to keep from having both men killed and in this, she failed three straight times. Four men joined Mordecai Monroe and Rat-faced Ronnie in the corner before she was able to guess correctly.

She didn’t recognize Dustin Heilman, the one-time captain of the Tempest, until she heard his voice. Even with fear making it warble, she knew the gruff captain. He had knelt before her, and for that insult he had to die. This was the Captain’s tell. He was a textbook narcissist and any affront, perceived or actual, to his character was grounds for death. Dustin had been gifted the position of captain, which to a Corsair was almost a royal position; a captain was supposed to have undying loyalty.

From then on, Jillybean had the upper hand and saved ten more men in thirteen tries. The new slaves stood away from the condemned men and although they had been saved, they looked almost as miserable as the ones slated to die. They knew better than to hope. Hope in Hoquiam was always a mirage, and sure enough they watched as the Captain’s toothy grin gradually dimmed with each minor victory by the Queen.

His growing ire was not lost on her. She could read it in his eyes. As smart as he was, he wasn’t good at hiding his emotions or his thoughts. The wheels turned in his head and she saw them working round and round as if his skull was glass, and she was well aware the moment he realized his major mistake: he had allowed her to engage her mind.

Then let him win, Ipes suggested. These are Corsairs, you know. They’re more his men than yours.

“Maybe. Maybe I should,” she told the zebra. But she wasn’t going to. The game allowed her to cling to a shred of sanity and with it some of her old strength returned. She knew it wouldn’t last. She knew that his goal was to have the enormous weight of guilt stack up on her, to crush her, to leave her broken and witless, a drooling nothing that he could parade around for a few months before hacking her head off and sticking it on his wall. And yet, like a drowning man, she clung to this illusion of sanity for just a bit longer.

The final pair of men were brought forward and questioned. Thirty seconds in, Jillybean knew which man the Captain would want killed: Wet Jack, the first mate on board the Red Pill. But she also knew that he knew, she knew which he would choose, so obviously she couldn’t choose Wet Jack. Unless…

It made for a convoluted mental puzzle, which she unraveled. When he showed his answer, a sneer entwined his full lips for a split second before he readjusted them back into his confident smile. He strode in front of the Queen, eclipsing her, turning her back into a nothing in everyone’s eyes. He asked the room, “Now, how should we go about killing them?”

“The games!” someone shouted, leading to an eruption of cheers that carried on and on. A sigh escaped Jillybean. Ever since the River King had initiated fights to the death in his arena, every little tinpot dictator had their gladiator-style games. She hated the spectacle—not the intense combat which seemed to her perfectly natural—no, what she hated was the display of inhumanity on the part of the spectators. They were absolutely bloodthirsty.

Beneath the noise of the excited crowd, the Captain cast her a side-long look. Now would come his petty revenge, she thought. “I know what you are doing,” he told her. “But it won’t work.”

“And what am I doing?”

“You’re trying to get me to kill you. Wasn’t this exactly what your demonstration of ‘superior’ intelligence was about? You wanted to get me so angry I’d fly off the handle. At the same time, you were demonstrating that you could still call on your mental powers any time you wanted. You want me to think that you’re still dangerous, and that just maybe I should kill you quickly before you do something.”

Deep inside a part of her flooded with disappointment. Because of Eve, it hadn’t been an active thought, but the idea had been there. She was surprised that he had perceived her hidden desire for death and now, as her face fell, he sat on the armrest of her throne at his ease.

“It’s a common desire around here. Does that surprise you? That you are more common than you like to think? That you really aren’t special in any way?” She shook her head, again nearly losing the crown. It shifted on her bald head and would’ve fallen if the Captain hadn’t held it there, grinding it down. “No, not special at all.”

He stood and held up his palms until the room quieted. “The games are a great idea and it was exactly what I was thinking, however we just don’t have the time. Bainbridge has declared war on us and…” There was a great roar of hypocritical outrage from the crowd. The Captain’s hands went up again. “I know, I know. How dare they, right? It’s a veritable stab in the back.”

Using the most vulgar terms imaginable, the crowd agreed that it was indeed uncivil.

“Yes, it’s terrible and we should be shaking in our shoes.” Braying laughter burst out at this. “And we still have our friends on Alcatraz to deal with. So, time is pressing. I think the best way to deal with them is to boil them alive.” The crowd oohed, while at the same time the prisoners moaned. Some became so weak that they collapsed and had to be beaten to their feet.

“Did you say something, your Highness?”

Jillybean had moaned along with the crowd. If done correctly, being boiled alive was a slow, agonizing death; she knew she’d be forced to watch each and every one. She shook her head.

“I swear I heard something.” He nodded to Dean Bridge, a small, whey-faced man who was the Captain’s head of security. Dean chose three others and left at a run to prepare for the executions. When he was gone and as the room ran with excited conversations, the Captain glanced at Jillybean. “Are you ready to play another game?” He paused for an answer without expecting one. “It’s a simple question and answer game. If you answer correctly, I’ll move one of those guys,” he pointed at the group of condemned men, “over to the other group. But if you don’t answer correctly, I’ll add more to the executioner’s tab.”

She knew this wasn’t an optional game and she nodded without looking up.

“Very good. The first question is simplicity itself. What is Operation Otter Pop?”

This came from so far out of the blue that Jillybean jumped in her chair—there was no sense denying that she knew what the Captain was talking about. But how did he know? Only three people knew that code name, none of whom would let it slip by accident. Knowing who had talked and why would go a long way to determining how she would answer. She tried the direct approach. “How did you hear about that?”

A cryptic smile played on his full, dark lips. “I have my sources. Too bad you answered my question with a question.” He called out to have “Mondo” moved to the “Soup line.” This was greeted by laughter and a large, beefy man was bustled over even as a huge metal vat, the size of a jacuzzi, was brought in. It was blackened along the sides and bottom, while the interior was dull gray save for a sickening ring comprised of caked-on vomit, matted hair and parboiled flesh.

The sight of it hurt Jillybean’s heart.

“I’ll ask you again, your Highness. What is Operation Otter Pop?”

Chapter 7

McCleary, Washington

Neil Martin walked in something of a fog, one that was both literal and figurative. Both were exceedingly dangerous. They were twenty miles east of Hoquiam in the hills overlooking the town of McCleary, Washington. Well, they would be overlooking the town if it wasn’t for the fog, which was so thick that the rising sun was helpless against it.

In places the fog was a solid grey wall, and he and Zophie Williams had to hold onto Troy’s spear to keep from being separated. In other places it was a solid grey ceiling, hanging just above their heads.

Neil hardly noticed the fog, one way or the other. His mind kept disengaging from reality. Not that he was going about as though he were tripping on acid. No, it was more like he was sleepwalking. He saw the fog and waded through icy streams and was pulled down behind a tree because they had almost run into a gang of zombies, but none of that really registered. Nor did it stick in his long-term memory. To him, it seemed as though their escape from the Corsairs’ lair and their long arduous trek had taken somewhere between four years and forty minutes.

“We gotta stop, please,” Zophie Williams begged. She didn’t wait for an answer or for permission. She reeled to her left and plopped down on a fallen tree and groaned. “My feet are friggin’ killing me.” Neil gazed blandly at the top of her dirty blonde head as she untied one of her Nikes and pulled it off. “Oooh yeah,” she said, with such obvious pleasure that it made Troy Holt distinctly uncomfortable.

The eighteen-year-old Guardian turned his handsome, chiseled face slightly away, saying, “We just had a break, Miss Williams. Could you please put your shoe back on?”

Instead, she took the second one off, moaning, “Oh God, yes.” This seemed to wake Neil from his fugue. He cocked an eyebrow and smirked at Troy in a knowing manner.

In truth, with his scarred flesh, his gray face, the spray of old black blood freckles across his nose and the pin going through his forehead, the smirk, knowing or not, was lost on Troy.

Even if Neil had retained his boyish good looks, the smirk would not have been appreciated. Troy was not just a Guardian, he was a Knights Sergeant and held himself above sexual humor, seeing it as both crude and debasing. What was worse than that was the breaking of the Second Commandment: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. She’d been doing it all night, despite his admonishments or his patient explanations.

His patience was wearing dangerously thin. “We’ll get another break when we get to the Sound, but that’s only if we hurry. This fog won’t last forever.” He liked to think that the fog had been heaven sent and, as with all miracles, it was not to be taken for granted. The Lord God not only worked in mysterious ways, He could be fickle and capricious, especially at the first sign of someone being disgruntled.

If they were lucky as well as good, keeping the blasphemy to a minimum, Troy knew in his heart that the fog would stay with them until they made it to Bainbridge.

“The fog sucks,” Zophie remarked, holding up one of her shoes and curling a lip at it. The athletic shoe, which had started the night as white, was currently mud-colored and squished out yellowed water when she bent it. “I almost poked my God-damn…” Troy stiffened and she sighed. “Sorry. Sorry. I almost poked my eye out just now.”

Impatiently, he stamped the butt of his spear into the damp ground and explained, “The fog does not ‘suck.’ It’s a gift that we shouldn’t squander. It hides us from our enemies. If they can’t see us, then they can’t get us. Do you understand?”

“I guess so,” she said, and then demonstrated her complete lack of understanding by peeling away one of her socks.

“You guess so?” Troy turned to Neil and was about appeal to him to see if he could talk some sense into her, but he was staring at the woman’s small foot with what Troy took to be a look of hunger. Sudden anger flared in Troy and he raised the spear to really slam it down—Maybe they don’t realize the danger they are in. This thought dispelled the tantrum he had been about to throw.

The Corsairs were closing in. Troy had first heard them near three in the morning, calling to each other or crashing through the woods, getting closer and closer. It had all seemed very clear to him, but had it been clear to the others? By then Neil had been as mindless as a zombie, plodding ever forward without tiring. Zophie was just the opposite. She had been stumbling and complaining. At the beginning of the march she’d had a pack, which she had let fall somewhere without telling anyone. She’d also had an M4. She had demanded the gun and then not an hour later wanted to toss it aside. Exhaustion had turned her into almost as much of a zombie as Neil.

“The Corsairs are very close,” he explained, dropping to one knee and taking the sock from her hand. He gave it a quick snap against his thigh and put it back on her foot. “It’s hard to say how close they are, now that we left the road, but we can’t take any chances. You know what’ll happen if they catch you, right?”

Zophie gave him a frightened nod, while Neil looked calmly on, without any fear at all. Troy envied that. He was doing everything he could, and had been for days now, not to let his fear show through. He trusted completely in the Lord, but his body was still mortal and it betrayed him from time to time. His hands shook and his insides trembled at the thought of getting caught. The Black Captain would make a special case out of him; he would try to break him just like he had tried to break the Queen.

“I don’t think they can track us in this fog,” Neil said, patting Zophie’s knee as if he wasn’t a hideous monster and as if she wasn’t looking at him in disgust. “It should be okay.”

“See?” Zophie said to Troy, snatching off her sock again and wiggling her toes. “They’ll never find us in this pea soup. We should take advantage of it and chill for a few minutes while we can.”

Troy looked up into the fog and saw only gray. Even though the fog was a blessing, it also made him feel isolated, separated from his God, alone with what were, in essence a prostitute and a demon. He wasn’t used to this sort of company and it made him feel both superior and cranky that they wouldn’t automatically acquiesce to his higher authority.

“They may not be tracking us now, but our destination is fairly obvious, don’t you think? They have to know that we’re trying to get to Puget Sound, and if they get there before us, and there’s no fog to hide us,” he paused to shrug. With his armored vest, the movement was slight. “We’ll have to find the boat in broad daylight.”

“It won’t be that bad,” Neil said. “There’s trees and buildings and stuff like that. It’s not like we’ll be right out in the open.”

Troy closed his eyes briefly. “And when we get out onto the water? What about then? You said yourself that we’ll be on the water for a few hours before we get to Bainbridge. We’ll be sitting ducks.”

“I guess you’re right,” Neil allowed, still completely unruffled. “Maybe we should get moving.”

Zophie stared at him down the length of her crooked nose. “Maybe?” she hissed, forcing the sock onto her foot. “Maybe nothing. Jesus H. Christ! How are we going to be out on the water for hours? You said that Seattle was like two miles away. I could swim that faster than a few hours.”

“Seattle is that close to a portion of the Sound,” Neil explained, “but the boat’s in Olympia and that’s not close at all. It’s like forty miles.”

“Forty miles!” Zophie cried. She had been with the Corsairs for so long she had forgotten the basic rules of surviving in the wild, the first of which was to be quiet. A zombie heard her and let out a long moan and started trudging in their direction. Tree branches snapped and the ground seemed to tremble; to Zophie, it sounded like an elephant was coming. With or without shoes, she wanted to take off running.

Troy placed a hand on her shoulder and held her down. With his other hand, he hefted his spear. “Wait,” he told her. “It might not even see us.” The three crouched down with the fog a few feet above their heads. The fog was maybe six feet off the ground, but as the beast came closer, a stray wind briefly lifted the veil and they saw that it was not one zombie, but three.

Now Zophie froze in terror. She couldn’t run and she desperately wanted to. She tried, but all she could manage was a series of spasms that did nothing but rattle a branch and draw the zombies’ attention right at them. The same breeze swept an even denser fog across the hilltop just as the three beasts charged. Running in a straight line wasn’t easy for a zombie, even when it could see the target of its hate and hunger. In the fog, direction became a hypothetical concept. The middle zombie was missing its right foot and tended to list quickly in the direction of its stump. It banged squarely into the fellow on its right and the two barged off, barreling past the little group by ten feet, and then kept going to wander uselessly in the fog.

The third zombie took the wrong course as well, canting off at an angle only to run face-first into a tree and rebound directly for the trio. It thundered along, a hideous beast, nine feet in height and many hundreds of pounds in weight, its mind consumed with hatred and its head in a literal fog. Neil stood and was ready to fight, except he had forgotten that he had propped his M4 against the downed stump. He squinted around, saw the gun and went to grab it just as Troy lifted his spear to take the charge of the zombie in the throat.

Neil accidentally knocked the spear aside just as the beast came storming up. With its head in the lowest edge of the swirling fog, it didn’t see Troy until it plowed right over the man. Troy’s chest would have been dented in a good seven inches if it hadn’t been for his armor. Even with it, he was sent flying back, his breath knocked right out of him, too stunned to right himself before the zombie got to its feet.

It charged the prostrate Guardian, and Troy knew his armor wasn’t going to save him this time. The zombie, naked, huge, scabbed and covered with running sores, stood glaring down for a second too long. Before it could reach down, rip open his armor and pull out Troy’s intestines, very much like it was eating from a can of SpaghettiOs, Neil was on it, fighting like mad, looking tiny against the giant. He had a hunting knife in one hand, which he used to stab the creature over and over again, aiming for its neck, its heart, its liver.

The zombie didn’t feel the dagger, but it knew something was on it. With a hand that was half Neil’s size, it grabbed Neil and tossed him away. Neil hit a tree, his back bending like a U. He was up again after barely a pause and once more he attacked with single-minded aggression, like a wolverine going against a grizzly bear.

The beast was slow-witted and took huge heavy-handed swipes that Neil saw coming a mile off. He ducked beneath the first and then dashed in to stab both of the thing’s kidneys. He then danced around to his left in a tight circle, avoiding a swishing backhand as the zombie turned.

Troy wanted to tell him to go for the back of the knees, only his lungs were still paralyzed from the shock of the impact and he was unable to draw a breath. Neil might have been beyond the point of understanding English, anyway. His actions were in no way consistent with his character or common sense. Having already discovered a winning strategy, he threw it away by leaping on the monster’s broad back. Now he plunged the dagger deep into the zombie’s throat and began sawing back and forth.

Sawing the head off a zombie while it was still standing is the single greatest blunder a person could make. Neil was flung again, this time he disappeared into the mists with the zombie went charging after.

In seconds, there were great crashes, screams and fierce growls. Troy staggered to his feet, managed a wheezing, asthmatic breath, caught up his spear and lurched after. He followed a trail of black blood and broken trees that curved away down the hill. There he found Neil calmly pissing onto the back of the dead zombie. The creature had been struck in so many vital spots that it had bled out, something that was a rarity in the annals of zombie fighting. Neil didn’t look any better than his dead opponent. It appeared as if he had just stepped out of a blender.

“What?” Neil asked as he buttoned up the shredded remains of his pants. “I had to go.”

It wasn’t the urination that had Troy staring. Neil’s scalp had come unpinned again and a great bloody flap hung over one ear.

“Your hair is…” Troy waved a hand next to his own head in imitation.

Neil gave his head a jerk and the flap slapped back into place. After he zipped up, he checked the flap. “Awe man! The safety pin’s gone.” His face took on even more of a curdled look than usual, which Troy assumed meant that Neil was “feeling” something, an emotion, maybe. It was hard to tell.

“We’ll find a new pin,” Troy assured him. “Or some thread and a needle. Come on. I don’t want to leave Zophie alone for too long.” They trudged back up the hill and Troy found Zophie’s sneakers, but not Zophie.

It took Neil half a minute of staring at the log and the sneakers before he blurted out, “Hey, where’s the girl? She was right here.” He took a long breath, and Troy was sure he was going to yell her name.

“Don’t!” Troy hissed. “There were two other zombies, remember? And look.” He pointed at the ground where small prints could be seen tracking through the dew-covered grass. “She should be easy to find.” Neil grinned at him, something Troy wished he wouldn’t do. He turned away and saw other tracks that were even more obvious.

The first set belonged to the zombies. The second set of three were their own and even as it occurred to Troy how easily they could be followed, he heard a whispered voice come from out of the fog: “Tell Lamar to bring his men up. I think we might be getting close.”

Chapter 8

Washington, East of Puget Sound

For a long moment, foolish courage on the part of Knights Sergeant Troy Holt, and an unnatural lack of anything resembling either fear or self-preservation on Neil Martin’s kept the two men standing amidst their tracks in the dew. They had known that there were Corsairs following them, but neither had any clue they were this close.

They were also clueless as to how many of them there were.

The fog hid their numbers, but not the noise they made: low curses, a snuffling nose, a foot catching on a log, the light click of an M16 stock knocking on the top of a canteen. Troy guessed there were possibly as many as a dozen, which was too many to fight. Next to him, Neil had no guess as to how many there were. He wasn’t so good at numbers anymore and had he been asked to count to ten, he was sure he would have lost interest in the process somewhere between five and the number that came after eight, whatever that was.

He was suddenly more interested in a new and growing hunger than in fighting or counting. Eating humans was something that had been on his mind a lot lately. The thoughts and desires properly disgusted him, and it helped that the Corsairs were hairy, unkempt, beastly creatures. The idea of picking lice out of his teeth was repulsive, even to someone who was more than half zombie.

Just then; however, the Corsairs were hidden in the fog and as such, they existed in something of the abstract. Neil’s mind filled in the blanks left by the mists and he pictured them as soft, clean, hairless and smelling of oregano. Like a Corsair lasagna, there’d be layers, each delicious if taken alone, but so much better when one got it all in a single bite. Saliva suddenly filled his mouth and his stomach let out an embarrassingly loud growl.

Troy shot him a look.

“Sorry. It’s just…”

“Shush, please.” Troy needed time to think, time to figure out what to do. Running seemed like the best option; however he was responsible for shoeless Zophie Williams, who had foolishly taken off on her own. Her tracks through the dew were glaringly obvious, and he had no doubt that he could follow them right to her. So could the Corsairs, which would put them in exactly the same position. What he needed was to be in two places at once; someone had to find Zophie and someone had to slow down the Corsairs. Unfortunately, he couldn’t trust Neil with either task. His straight-forward fighting style would get him killed by the Corsairs in seconds, and if he was sent to find Zophie there was a good chance that he would either forget what his mission was after a minute and wander away into the fog, or that when he did find her he would eat her.

“We’ll just have to work together,” Troy decided. He pulled Neil behind the downed tree Zophie had been sitting on. “We have to slow them down, okay? Neil, listen. Are you listening? We’ll give them a few shots and then move. Neil, look at me; focus. Stick and move. This is not the time for a prolonged battle. Got it?”

Neil stared at him for a long moment as the words sank in. When they finally penetrated, and he was able to recall the definition of the word prolonged, he grinned wolfishly. “Just kill a few of them, right?”

Troy didn’t understand the grin and he definitely wouldn’t have understood the warped thoughts going through Neil’s head: A dead person was no longer really a person, and if someone wasn’t really a person then certainly no one would mind if I took a bite or two, while the flesh was still warm, that is.

“Yes,” Troy conceded. “We’ll take a few well-placed shots and then move.” Neil licked his scarred and bruised lips, curing Troy of the last of his own hunger pains.

By then the Corsairs were very close. Their sounds multiplied and magnified, and their presence loomed. While Neil pictured them soft and yummy, Troy’s mind inflated their numbers until he figured they were facing a battalion of men. In reality, there were twenty-two of them and not one smelled of oregano, although a few smelled of garlic-infused sweat.

The first man appeared like some sort of apparition. He was ghostly and grey, and disappointingly scruffy. Neil frowned and shot at him, missing by a good foot and a half to the right. It wasn’t a wasted shot, since the platoon of Corsairs were foolishly walking clumped together. The bullet sizzled through the wet air, found a neck, and a gurgling scream erupted in the mists.

Troy fired as well, knocking down the man Neil had missed. The Guardian then walked his next four shots in a line to the left, holding his rifle at waist height, and spacing his shots about two feet apart. It was effective precision shooting, killing one man and wounding two others. Neil, on the other hand, sprayed bullets all over kingdom come. The echoes from his own gun confused him, and he shot trees and fog and a lot of dirt.

“Enough,” Troy hissed, seconds later, hauling Neil to the ground as the Corsairs returned fire. The two slithered away with hundreds of rounds whizzing overhead, stirring up the fog.

The Corsairs displayed a very high degree of inexcusable inaccuracy. More than half of them weren’t even pointing their guns in the right direction, and the ones who were, had the angle all wrong. Not far in front of them, the slight hill they’d been tramping up flattened out, but because of the fog they couldn’t tell.

Their bullets were flying harmlessly over head, hitting tree trunks and scaring squirrels. To Neil, who was no longer a good judge of distance, it seemed that the bullets were missing by half a mile and he was the first to stand, brushing off his ragged, stained clothes. “I think we got one.” The gurgling cries could still be heard beneath the thunder of the one-sided battle.

“Hopefully more than that,” Troy answered getting to his feet as well. His personal code would not allow him to cower while another man stood. “Come on. They won’t…” He paused as there was a bit of a lull in the shooting. “…be distracted forever.” He wasted a few bullets, firing without aiming. The return fire was a sustained barrage that allowed the two to jog off, following Zophie’s tracks.

She hadn’t gone far. The scurrying tracks showed a short, quick stride, then they crossed over a dry stream bed, which consisted solely of rocks and brambles. After that there was a stuttering quality to the prints which suggested she had stepped on something undesirable. They found her twenty yards further on, attempting to hide behind a tree trunk.

Zophie threatened them with a tree branch until she saw Troy’s clean-shaven jawline, at which point she launched herself into his arms as if they were lovers who’d been apart for days, instead of virtual strangers who had been separated by five minutes and two hundred yards. This was unheard of conduct among the Guardians, and he quickly disentangled himself from the woman.

“There’s no time for…” The blundering wanderings of a zombie stopped him and the three crouched—Neil doing so in imitation of the others; Troy, while hand-fighting Zophie, who still wanted to cling.

The beast went by unseen, stomping toward the Corsairs, who were still firing, although now sporadically as they began to wonder if they were actually shooting at anything at all. The zombie and the next two that followed after it changed that. Each came charging up one at a time, only to be riddled by enough bullets to turn their pumpkin-sized heads to pulp. This gave the three fugitives time to run up the dewy tracks made by the first zombie. Troy cautioned Neil and Zophie to try to step in the huge prints left by the beast. It proved to be too much for both Neil’s diminished eyesight and his total lack of dexterity. He strayed, fell frequently, and generally made a mess out of the tracks, but it didn’t really matter. Their own tracks had “disappeared” far too close to the zombie tracks to fool the Corsairs. Still, it gave them a few minutes head start, long enough for Zophie to get her shoes on.

Her being shoed helped, and they were able to stay out of reach of the Corsairs long enough to find a running stream of some fifteen feet in width. It went bubbling off to the east and Troy had no doubt that it would eventually empty out into the Sound, which meant it was the direction the Corsairs would expect him to take. The other direction meandered in a general northward direction.

“This way,” he said, splashing into the stream and heading against the freezing current.

Neil went in without blinking, while Zophie practically screamed, “It’s fricking freezing!”

Troy felt “fricking” was too close to an actual curse word and sniffed, “It’s ice melt, what do you expect?”

“Aren’t you the snooty one?” she said through pursed lips. “You know, I’m starting to like the zombie-guy better’n you.”

Neil was slow to realize that she was talking about him. When he did, he gave her a smile that could have curdled milk. “That’s right, baby, I still got it.”

“Yeah, you’re quite the catch,” she said and pushed past him, stepping squarely on one of his Crocs. The rubber shoe popped up out of the water like a powder-blue cork.

He grabbed it and hobbled after her, saying, “That’s nice of you to say, but I don’t think it would work out so well between us. I don’t know if it’s noticeable, but I have a slight skin problem. I might be infected with the zombie virus.”

“Might be?” she choked out in an astonished laugh.

“Maybe. And it may not be permanent. And this head thing I’ll get fixed as soon as we can find a staple gun or something. Or once we get Jillybean back, she’ll take a look at it…”

Her eyes rolled far back in her head as she said, “Just stop. We had this entire conversation yesterday. You said you were some bigwig on Bainbridge and that the Captain tried to assassinate you. Blah, blah, blah. It wasn’t believable then and it’s even less so, now.”

“Believable? I don’t understand, what’s there not to believe? I am an advisor to the Governor of Bainbridge and once, a long time ago, I was the Governor in Estes Park. That was when the…”

“When you helped to defeat the Azael?” she spat over her shoulder. “You told that one, too. Look, Neil, I bet you were a great guy, but I was just joking before. There is no possible future between us, so why don’t you give it a rest? No one in their right mind would believe your wild stories, especially me. You’re just embarrassing yourself.”

Neil trudged through the water wondering if what she had said was true. His memory had been slipping ever since he’d been cut by the poisoned razor blade, and the idea that he really had broken into the River King’s prison did sound far-fetched. “What about the attack on New Eden?” he muttered under his breath. Had that been real? And what about Yuri and the zombie vaccine? Had that happened? He remembered Victor Ramirez being turned into a zombie and he remembered being chained to a ferry boat that Jillybean had set on fire.

Considering these things put him into one of his tunnel vision moments where he simply plodded along. Time swept over him and he was slow to realize that Troy had left the stream and that he had as well. He was walking along, his brain mostly turned off when he knocked into a tree branch and fell. When he got up, he found Zophie staring at him in horror.

“What?”

She pointed to her own head. “Your hair is all flopped over again.”

He slapped it back down. “We really could do with finding a house.” He glanced down at his outfit. From the Crocs on up, he was wearing what had once been women’s apparel and because of that he wasn’t exactly upset with the blood stains, the mud and the general rattiness of the outfit. “I could use a change of clothes.”

“I already asked twice, but his holy highness said no.” She pouted, a look that did not sit well on her drawn and sadly man-handled features. Her bruises from the day before were breaking out in ugly green and yellow splotches.

“We’ve seen two houses?” He looked back, thinking he’d see the stream or maybe one of the houses. There was no stream, only forest. The fog had lifted enough for him to see maybe thirty yards. “When was that?”

She gave him a queer look. “A while ago. Where have you been, zombie-boy? Off in la-la land, daydreaming?”

He didn’t like being called a zombie, but adding “boy” to it sort of offset the insult. It made him feel young. As he was considering a comeback, something that might have taken an hour or more, Troy came back.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Are we good? Okay then, let’s tighten up. We’re almost there.”

“You’ve been saying that for two hours,” Zophie groused.

He had been, and was as disappointed as she was. According to all the maps he had ever seen, they should have been at the Sound by then. Even the air had that familiar sea smell to it. “Trust me,” he told her. Her look told him that she didn’t. A few minutes later they climbed an old sagging chain link fence and dropped into a bit of a dell.

For some unknown meteorological reason, the fog did not sink with the land. It formed a perfect blanket ten feet above their heads, and for the first time since they had escaped from Hoquiam, they had an actual “view.” It wasn’t exactly scenic, however. Before them were the remains of a four-lane highway. The surface ran with long weed-choked cracks that snaked from one muddy pothole to the next. There was a car canted off the shoulder. It had once been red, but now it was a sun-bleached pink. Its doors were thrown open and its hood was up, showing a mass of rusting metal and slowly disintegrating rubber belts and hoses.

Just in front of it was a faded road sign declaring that Little Skookum Inlet was one mile ahead. “Finally,” Troy said. He turned to Neil, who had missed the sign and was gazing absently at a squirrel sitting in a nearby tree. The squirrel was staring at him with a murderous look to his tiny black eyes. “Neil?” Troy tapped him with his spear. “Where’s Little Skookum Inlet? Is that close to Olympia?”

“Little Snookum’s what?”

“Little Skookum Inlet.”

Neil scratched his flap, making it wiggle. “Uh, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it, but they have all sorts of inlets and bays around here. Hey, you know what we need? A map!” He made it sound as if maps were a new invention. “There’s got to be more houses around here. We should look in one of them.”

“A map?” Zophie snorted. “What a brilliant idea. We shoulda thought of that a long time ago.”

Neil missed the sarcasm. He was back to squinting at the squirrel, very certain that it was on the verge of attacking. He answered without taking his eyes off of it, “Maps are smart. Does that squirrel look rabid to you guys? Troy? Zophie?” Only just then he noticed that the other two were forty yards away, marching diagonally across the highway in the direction of the inlet. “Oh, jeeze!” He hurried to catch up, tripping as he came up the shoulder of the road. When he looked up, they had disappeared into the high marsh grass that ran straight and true down the middle of the highway.

He could hear them wading through what sounded like a bog, their feet making squishing noises that had him concerned for the safety of his Crocs. He was quite attached to them. Certainly more so than anything else he carried. His and Zophie’s rifles were strung across his shoulders and were all but forgotten. And he was oblivious to the pack he had been toting since Hoquiam. It had been torn nearly in half by the zombie he had fought and looked like just another of the rags that covered him.

To preserve the Crocs he sat on the edge of the marsh, and was about to pull them off when someone started shooting a gun. “Do you guys hear that?” he asked, getting to his feet. Troy and Zophie had been thirty yards away on the other side of the marsh and slightly to the south. Now he had no idea where they were. Turning, he saw the shooter firing from the edge of the pink car.

“Hey! There’s a Corsair!” He pointed at the man, just as the air started hissing and whispering around him.

“Get down, Neil!” Troy cried.

That certainly seemed like a good idea. He looked for a dry spot and crouched down, perfectly amazed as the velvety brown heads were being shot from the duckweed. They were strangely fluffy inside. The fluff was coming down like a light snow. “I wonder if I’m allergic to…”

“Cover fire!” Troy cried.

“Oh right! Sorry. I just have to get this gun off my…oh, crap. It’s tangled. The strap is caught. Here we go. Are you ready?” Troy called out in a carrying whisper that he was. “Okay, Go!” Neil yelled, as he stood and fired his M4. Of course, it was still on Safe and nothing happened. Once more the air hissed and crackled, and something hard smacked into the stock of the rifle, flinging black plastic into the air. “Ah, here we go,” he said, and fired. He missed everything, including the car.

“Sorry, I forgot to aim.” When he looked down the length of his rifle, everything blurred into a mix of brown and grey with just a touch of pink close to the center. He fired at the pink and was happy to hear bullets skipping off the cement and then smacking into metal, which was probably the car.

When the gun was empty, he crouched again. Although his head rang, his ears were just fine and he was able to appreciate the few seconds of silence in that fog-less zone.

It didn’t last.

“This is Nick!” the Corsair practically screamed. At first, Neil thought he was talking to him, and only slowly did it dawn on him that the man was shouting into a radio. “I found them! They’re right here on the 101, and the girl is with them.” There was a pause before the Corsair said, “Did I shoot? Uhhhh, no.”

Neil wanted to shout: You’re a liar! Only just then he heard a weeping sound from across the marsh. Even as slow as he was, he knew it wasn’t Troy. “Zophie? You okay?” Forgetting his Crocs, he plunged through waist-deep brackish water and found her not far away. She had been shot in the midsection and was leaking blood.

“He-he-he left me alone. He-he left me, N-Neil.”

Troy was nowhere in sight. “I’m sure he’s off fighting that guy. Here, let me take a look.”

She cringed back. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed, her face going from a cringe of pain to desperate fear. It eased slightly once he sat back. “Sorry. I-I just don’t want your germs anywhere near me.”

“I understand. I’d feel the same way. Wait. I think that might have been Troy.” A single gunshot had sounded. It had a finality to it that made Neil a little sad and hungry at the same time. He sucked in a deep breath, his nostrils flaring wide, discovering that blood held so much more than a coppery scent. There was also a rain smell that the copper rode upon. And a scent like old bone, and…

“Neil?” Zophie was looking at him in alarm.

“Hmm?” He had been leaning over her. “Oh, um, I was just…here comes Troy. Good.”

The Guardian came jogging up, hefting an extra rifle, his pockets stuffed with magazines, food, a map and a radio. He pulled the magazine from the extra rifle and tossed the M16 into the ditch. “How is she?” She whined fearfully in answer, and then whined worse when he checked for an exit wound. There wasn’t one, and he didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He looked over the top of her head at Neil, who could only shrug.

Troy looked into her face and came as close to lying as he could. “Bainbridge isn’t far. The Queen was from Bainbridge. She has all the tools and drugs for this sort of thing, right Neil?”

“Yes. She has an entire operating room.” He held back that she was the only one on the island who knew the first thing about surgery. She had begun teaching Emily, though that had been in the beginner stage of medicine. And yet, that wasn’t Zophie’s biggest problem. They had to get her there first.

A quick check of the map showed that they were much further north than Troy had anticipated. He worried that it would be a long, dangerous trip curving back around to Olympia. Then he turned on the radio and discovered things were even worse than he imagined. Corsairs and Mountain Bandits had flooded the area and had staked out every street, highway and dirt road from Little Skookum Inlet to Olympia itself. Going south was impossible.

Had Zophie not been shot, Troy would’ve suggested slipping back west and hiding out for a few days until the pursuit was lifted. She didn’t have that sort of time. If she didn’t bleed out, the stomach infection would get her. He had seen it happen twice, where relatively minor belly wounds went ripe and as nasty-smelling as old cheese and had killed men much tougher than her.

“We’ll go north. Neil, let me have your backpack. And I don’t think we need both guns. But keep the straps.” A confused rattle of gunfire from the south had them all staring until it bled away. “We have to hurry,” said Troy, only Zophie couldn’t be hurried. She couldn’t even stand. The only way to move her was to drag her using the straps of their rifles and the backpack. She moaned pitifully as she was dragged along. It became so bad that Troy asked her if she wanted to consider her other “options,” a gentle way of asking her if she wanted to be put out of her misery.

It took two minutes for her to finally shake her head. With the Corsairs pelting north, all of their options were diminishing quickly. More gunshots echoed behind them, closer now.

The three came up out of the dell and were hidden by the fog once again. Two miles later, Troy had to rest. His arms were burning and his legs were trembling. Along with everything else, he was carrying around thirty pounds of armor and a fifteen-pound spear. As well, he had been going for too long without food and couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to drink. All these were fine excuses and yet, he had never been out-marched or out-worked in his life, yet Neil was easily doing both. To cover his embarrassment, he took out the map.

“What do you think?” Neil asked. He had glanced at the map and only saw a mesmerizing glow of colors.

“We’re a mile south of Shelton, so we should start seeing some houses soon. We can’t hide in them, though. Hiding won’t do us any good whatsoever.” He sighed, not knowing what to do besides pressing on. This they did. Right to the outskirts of Shelton, where they found a grocery store and transferred Zophie to a cart with four squeaky wheels. Their ears were assaulted for two blocks until they came across a gas station.

Although it had been cleaned out, there was a big semi-truck parked right in front. Its oil pan was easily accessible and was so rusted that it was as fragile as an eggshell. Troy punctured it with his knife and rich black goo dribbled out. Like so many towns, there was trash strewn everywhere, and Troy found a cracked bowl which he filled with oil and in no time, they had the wheels greased and were plowing on. They left the north end of the town just as the first of the Corsairs came abreast of the supermarket, and gazed down at the bloody backpack that they had left behind.

The radio crackled, “We tracked them to Shelton. One of them is hurt. I think we got ‘em trapped.” A quick look at the map showed that the speaker was correct. To the west were the foothills of the Olympic mountain range, to the north their way was blocked by an arm of Puget Sound and to the east the land bottlenecked to a point less than half a mile wide.

“What do we do?” Neil asked.

Troy’s eyes shifted to Zophie before he could stop himself. As long as she was with them they would have to stick to paved roads. It meant that getting caught was only a matter of time. “We keep going.”

This sounded like a poor plan, even to Neil’s befuddled brain. But he understood. “How ‘bout this. What is the last thing they would expect us to do?”

Troy stared at the map again. “They’re trying to drive us against the Sound, so I guess they don’t think we’d attempt to swim it.”

Neil shrugged. He didn’t know if he could swim as a zombie so he should have been afraid, only he wasn’t at all. “Then that’s what we do. We’ll find something that Zophie can float on and we’ll cross where the waterway is the most narrow.” He made a half-mile swim in forty-degree water while hauling a raft, sound like it would be nothing. Without other options, Troy agreed.

Together they began pushing the cart once more. Zophie sat in it, her knees drawn up, holding her stomach, whispering to herself that they were all going to die. “Maybe you should pray,” Troy suggested. She cast a harsh look at him and was about to ridicule him and his beliefs when they hit a crack in the street. The cart thudded heavily over it, and her look turned to pain. “Try the Our Father. It’ll make you feel better.”

He walked her through it until she was able to repeat it without fault. Fifty-two repetitions of it got them to a branching, tree-lined road. With the fog coming on thick again, all they could see was an endless line of tree trunks on either side of them. They were spaced so perfectly apart that they felt like the bars of an immense cell. Zophie started praying again, quicker now, but also quieter. They could hear the dead moving on either side of the road.

So far, they’d been lucky. The zombies were stirred up by the sound of the guns and were on the move, yet the three of them had been missed, on the other hand, the much more numerous, and much louder Corsairs couldn’t go a mile without having to blast away at them.

Their good luck held as they finally made it to Puget Sound. The water was grey and calm, barely lapping against the shore. Troy dipped a finger in the water; it was frigid and he knew it would quickly suck the life out of all of them if they went in. Maybe Neil can make it, Troy thought. He would be the only one and that was if he didn’t get turned around in the fog.

Of course he’ll get turned around in the fog. Troy stifled a groan. “Okay…let’s find a raft or something,” he said, trying to sound confident.

“Jillybean used a bounce house once to cross the Mississippi,” Neil remarked. It was just a faded memory to him and it came blurting out. It had a strange effect on the other two. Both looked away into the fog, both thinking about the bounce houses they’d been in. The very concept struck the hardness from Zophie’s face and it brought out the little boy in eighteen-year-old Troy.

“I was in a bounce house once,” he said. “It was so long ago.” His memory was even more vague than Neil’s, and yet it brought with it a surge of hidden joy.

Zophie had been fifteen at the time of the Apocalypse and had a much clearer memory: kids bouncing like rubber balls off the inflated walls, whacking into each other, giggling and laughing like mad. Someone always got hurt, but they’d be back three minutes later, smiling through the tracks of their dried tears.

The two wore the same look, one that Neil didn’t think he could even fake now. He was losing his humanity by degrees and it was sad that he didn’t feel all that worried over it.

They pressed on, the two reminiscing about their childhood, and Neil doing most of the pushing. It was fine with him since he wasn’t tired, although there was an emptiness inside of him, especially in the area of his stomach. He was hungry, but what he was hungry for couldn’t be spoken of. He didn’t even want to think about it and yet, the idea of sucking on Zophie’s bandage wouldn’t leave his head.

His stomach had just let out an enormous growl when Troy abruptly stopped the cart. Zophie jerked with a groan and was about to lash out.

“Shhhhh,” Troy whispered, and pointed his chin out at the fog. Something was drifting in from the Sound. At first it was hard to tell exactly what it was, as incongruent parts solidified one at a time. What looked like a giant spear broke through first, then a dangling rope, and then the wide edge of something long and black.

“It’s a boat,” Neil said, but only when a stray breeze revealed the entire thing at once. More specifically, it was a fifty-foot Corsair boat drifting lifelessly with the current. Its black deck was completely empty. “Let’s get it!”

Troy was way ahead of him and was already laying down his spear and pulling his rifle from his back. All Neil cared about were his beloved Crocs and he set them neatly aside before wading in.

Chapter 9

Puget Sound, Washington

True to its name, the Dead Fish floated lifelessly in the gray murk. The big boat was helpless, pushed and pulled by the tides, its head spinning slowly around the compass as stray gusts kept Emily confused as to which direction up was.

The fog seemed to have no end and was so thick that it defied the sun. Gunner’s heavy black watch told her that it was past noon, yet there wasn’t a hint of warmth or radiance when she stared up into the sky. There was only cold, wet, grey air. Even though she had lived most of her life on the Sound, she had never seen anything like it.

At one point, she actually had to wonder if she was dead and if the boat was actually floating between worlds. Then Gavin died without so much as a groan. Emily figured one couldn’t die if they were already in the afterlife. This hardly cheered her up. The truth was, Gavin didn’t simply die; she had shot him—no, she had killed him. She had killed other people before, always in self-defense, of course; the difference was that they hadn’t lingered long enough for her to see them as real people, with real pain and real fear.

Gavin had seemed like a normal guy. “After I shot him,” she had to remind herself. “Before that, he was as bad as the rest.” During the last several hours, she had taken to talking to herself to ward off loneliness as well as her growing fear. Before Gavin died, he would mumble in her direction, and sometimes Gunner would crack an eye, but that was all she had to reassure herself that she wasn’t really alone.

Now she didn’t even have that. Gunner had faded into such a deep sleep that she was afraid he wouldn’t wake up.

She was staring down at Gavin’s corpse when a zombie sent up a mournful howl. A shiver went up the entire length of her spine. “Maybe I’m in a ghost world,” she whispered. When Emily had been small, her mom had told her that there was no such thing as ghosts. She had been very firm on the subject. Her Uncle Neil had been less so. When she had asked him, he had agreed with her mom, but he had done so with an odd look on his face, as if he were only saying it because he didn’t want to run afoul of Deanna. She had a strict “everyone on the same page” style of parenting.

Emily had pressed him closer and he had stuck with the company line, adding, “Maybe don’t bring up the question around your Aunt.” He meant Jillybean, and to a seven-year-old that was basically a gold-plated invitation to ask her.

“Ghosts?” Jillybean had snuck a look past her at a blank wall and then grinned. “Of course, I believe in them. I see them every single day. Then again, I’m crazy, so what do I know?”

That had thrown Emily for a loop and the question had never really been resolved in her immature mind. “And now is not the time to open that can of worms.” The one way to avoid it was to get rid of the body. That was another thing Jillybean had taught her: “Always get rid of the evidence.” Emily figured it would go worse for her if she ran up on more Corsairs and they found out that she had killed four of them and stolen their ship. It would also get rid of a potential ghost, if one was still hung up inside the body.

Getting Gavin up the stairs was a hundred times harder than it had been letting him bounce down. He was twice her weight, and it was literal dead weight. In death, he had become somewhat unbound, though that wasn’t the term she would have used. She regarded him as “floppy.” His arms and legs were apt to go in any direction, and his neck seemed grotesquely longer than it had been, and was now as supple and pliant as hot rubber.

This was all very disgusting, but what was worse was when his underwear got caught on the first step going up to the deck and tore right off of him. He was now completely exposed—she thought she was going to throw up.

Through a great dint of work she got him on deck and slid him over the side, leaning away from the splash even though her shirt and arms were slick with blood. She expected him to sink and when he didn’t, she thought he would float off and lose himself in the fog. Instead, Gavin came up and thumped his head against the side of the boat.

“Oh, jeeze,” she mumbled, feeling her stomach heave. She hurried to fetch the boat hook, which she used to shove him away. Instead of slipping out into the fog and becoming lost in the mists, he spun like a leaf just out of reach of the boat hook. And there he floated, keeping station with the Dead Fish, neither gaining nor falling off. After a few minutes of hoping he would sink or that a shark would eat him, she slunk back down into the galley to check on Gunner.

Nothing had changed. His lungs were still filled with blood, his pulse was still thready and weak, and he barely stirred when she bound his smaller wounds with strips of sheets. Next, she inspected and prodded the hole that ran into his strange hump. She felt she had to do something even if it turned out to be the wrong thing. The worst that could happen was that he would die a little faster.

“Or a lot faster,” she muttered. She tried sitting him up, but he only kept slumping over and if anything, he struggled even harder to draw a breath. Next, she laid him on his injured side because she was worried that the blood from his injured left lung was somehow spilling over into his right. Although her reasoning was off, shifting him as she had done was actually the right thing to do, and his breathing grew progressively easier.

But he still didn’t wake up.

She had a vague notion of what a coma was and guessed that he was in one, and decided that maybe it was a good thing. He seemed more at peace and if he was in pain, it didn’t show on his horrible features.

Having done all she could for him, she inspected the boat and found all sorts of necessary items: guns, bullets, food, fresh water, torpedoes.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in tea!” she whispered, gazing down at the odd devices. The controls were simple, the arming device obvious. “So easy a kid could use it,” she giggled, as she picked one up and hauled it bodily on deck, where she tied it to the outside of the railing with a couple of simple knots. It could be in the water in seconds. Going for balance, she brought up another and tied it on the other side of the boat. Seeing them there made her feel safe for the first time since being kidnapped.

Now she went for more guns and ammo, storing them in the cockpit, and for a moment, she felt more than just safe, she felt like a badass. The Dead Fish, a name she was certainly going to change the moment she got to safety, could now fight another boat with a real chance at winning.

The feeling couldn’t last. In minutes, it was swallowed up by exhaustion and her worry that Gunner was going to die. She went down and sat with him, alternating between feeding the fire and herself. To keep awake, she chatted with the comatose man, telling him stories of her life, which up until a few weeks before had been uneventful. Blessedly so, she now realized.

She was in the middle of telling Gunner about her last birthday—Jillybean had allowed her to help build a recoilless rifle and fire it right after the sun went down—when he shifted suddenly and his blanket fell from his back, exposing his scarred flesh. She had never seen anyone look half as tortured, or even a quarter so. In truth, she had never even heard a rumor of someone so abused and still alive. The scars were everywhere, crisscrossing his body.

They reminded her of something. Peering in closer, she saw that some of the scars were thinner than expected. Many of them were little more than etched white lines, almost as if the stitching had been done by a real surgeon, and there was only one real sur…

A soft thud against the hull made her jump and cry out.

“It’s that gal-durned Gavin again,” she told Gunner. “I’ll be right back.” This time she was going to give him a push in the center of his naked body and not on the leg as she had before. “And I don’t care if I do see his thing. But what if there’s like, something eating him?” She pictured his body covered in crabs; their snipping claws pinching off little bite-sized chunks.

The mental picture slowed her steps and she crept from the galley to peer over the side of the boat. It was Gavin alright, thankfully without the crabs. Using the boat hook like a shuffleboard master, she shoved the corpse away, giving her wrist a little flick at the end to counter any spin. Gavin drifted away, entering the edge of the fog and had almost wholly disappeared when he hit something, giving off a light hollow thump—it was the exact same sound as when he had knocked into the hull of the Dead Fish.

Emily froze as a boat materialized out of the gloom. It was big and black and terrifying. Gone was her feeling of safety. She shrunk back, wanting to dash down into the galley and probably would have given in to her childish fears, except she observed that the deck of the other boat was empty. No one had seen her yet!

Escape was still a possibility. She hurried to the wheel and gently turned the wheel of the Dead Fish to port. Sluggishly, the boat started to turn, and then stopped completely with a strange spongy sensation coming through the hull.

“We hit something.” But what? It wasn’t the bottom or there would’ve been a crash or a ripping sound. No, the feeling was sort of like being caught by something, like a giant rubber-band. “Or maybe a rope.” A rope made sense and it was a good guess that the Dead Fish had gotten fouled up in the anchor rope of the other boat—the Harbinger. They were so close she could read the gold lettering easily, and there, running from the bow and directly beneath the hull of the Dead Fish was its anchor rope, stretched so taut it looked like it was about to snap on its own.

There was only one thing to do and she didn’t shy away from the instant decision. Back into the icy water she went, climbing down the swim ladder. After taking a deep breath, she dove, found the rope in the darkness, and sawed at it frantically with Gunner’s long, black hunting knife until it snapped with a weird boint sound.

She broke the surface as quietly as possible, thinking: Had they heard the sound of the rope parting? Could they feel their boat moving? Would they come swarming on deck, mad as bees and see her? Judging by the complete lack of reaction on the Harbinger, the answer was a firm No to all three questions.

The Harbinger drifted away, the fog swallowing her up quickly. So quick in fact that it puzzled Emily. The new boat didn’t have any sails up and it certainly didn’t have a motor running, so why had the current sent it on so easily? The boats were roughly the same length, but the Harbinger did seem to be higher in the water by a good two or three feet. She glanced over the side and thought the dark surface was a little closer, which didn’t make any sense unless it was some sort of optical illusion.

“Maybe the fog is messing with me,” she said, uncertainly. There was only one way to really tell if they were lower and that was to get back into the water and see if she could grab the edge like she had before. It had taken a big kick and a long stretch. “But I’m not getting back in there for nothing.” She was already freezing and considered zipping down to get a new set of dry clothes when she looked back over the stern and saw the swimming platform was now three inches below the water.

“We are lower. Why would we be low…” Her eyes shot wide. “Oh jeeze, that’s right, we were shot!” With everything going on, she had forgotten that the Dead Fish had been holed. “How many times? Six? Seven?” She couldn’t remember how many times, but one was too many. Afraid that the boat was halfway to sinking and that Gunner was even then drowning, she raced down into the galley and found that nothing had changed. Everything was still perfectly dry. “Yeah right,” she said, speaking to the galley as if it was capable of sinister intentions. “You’re not fooling me. There’s got to be a sub floor or a basement or something.” Spinning around, her sopping wet hair swinging about, she looked left and right for a hatch or a trapdoor. She eventually found a storage locker set into the floor. Yanking it open, she gasped—it was almost filled with water.

Quickly, she slammed down the hatch again and locked it. “We really are going to sink,” she whispered.

That frightened kid feeling inside her wanted to come creeping back up again. It latched onto her throat like a clawed hand and squeezed. She swallowed loudly, took a quick, sharp breath and told herself that it was a slow leak. “Or a lot of slow leaks.” She turned in a circle, uncertain of what to do. Plugging the holes seemed like a good plan and yet, she was drifting out of control with another Corsair boat nearby. Shouldn’t those two problems come first?

In desperation and in need of a real adult, she went to Gunner and gave his shoulder a little shake. He moaned; she thought that was promising and tried again. “Gunner? Hey, Mister Gunner? Are you awake? Hey!” The moan was all she got out of him. “Okay, think, Emily. What do you do?”

She decided that the holes would have to come first, but only after a quick check to make sure the Corsair boat hadn’t come back. Back on deck, where visibility was maybe forty feet, all she saw was a gray, gray morning. And that was good. “Now, how do I plug a hole?” For a child of eleven, this was something of a stumper. “A cork? Or some gum or something. But how do I get…”

The soft splash of water quieted her. It was the sound of someone stumbling on a rock hidden beneath the surface of water. She had heard the sound a thousand times and had made it herself whenever she went to Skiff Point with her friends for a swim. It was a natural sound. The silence that followed wasn’t natural at all. The silence was pensive and filled with a breath-holding kind of fear.

The silence was made worse by the fog and Emily was sure that there was something just there, a few feet into the grey. She wasn’t wrong. Within seconds, the Harbinger began to slowly form, seeming to materialize from the fog itself.

Its bow had slid gently onto the slime-covered bed of the Sound as it rose up to meet the land and it was now within thirty feet of shore. Inside the Harbinger, two of the four remaining crew members cracked bleary eyes and instinctively knew something had changed. The boat wasn’t rocking as it should have been, and the soft lip of the water against the shore was loud to them; loud as well as unnerving. Had they lost their anchorage? How close were they to the shore and was it rocky? Had the wind picked up? And what was that other sound?

The “other” sound was Neil Martin struggling to remain upright. The ground beneath him was a perfect combination of ooze and ooze-covered rocks. Even Troy was having trouble; a rock turned under his boot and he pin-wheeled his one free hand to keep from falling.

They were both in odd positions when one of the Corsairs came peeping up from the companionway. In that one second, he had all of his questions answered, though now he had new ones. “Who the hell are you guys?” he demanded in his rough way. The two men weren’t Corsairs; he knew that for certain. No Corsair in their right mind would try to sneak up on another man’s boat. You’d get shot that way and the Corsair was a flinch away from unloading a magazine on the two.

“I’m Neil Martin,” Neil answered, forthrightly. It never occurred to him to lie. Lying took a certain amount of imagination and just then he was happy just to get his own name right. “And this is Troy…Troy something. I forget what exactly. And you are?”

“I’m the man that’s gonna kill you, if you don’t get them hands up higher.”

Neil looked perplexed for a moment, and then asked, “What do they call you for short?”

As the Corsair began to throw curses at Emily’s uncle, she went to the wheel of the Dead Fish, her small hands clamping down on two of the extended spokes. She had little steerage but with the weather conditions, she didn’t need much. A quick turn to the left and she would disappear into the fog; a quick turn to the right and she would disappear into a battle…probably forever.

Chapter 10

Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

Boiling men alive was a time-consuming process and during some of the more prolonged executions, the Black Captain wasn’t in the church at all, which was the only relief that Jillybean had during the ordeal. When he was gone, things took on a workman-like atmosphere. The guards fed the fire and added more and more water to the vat. They trussed up the prisoners, and prepared the ropes, and they did all this in a haze of sweat. The church was like a steam room.

The guards leaned on walls and Colleen sat on the second step of the dais with her head in her hands, possibly trying to drown out the screams. The audience relaxed as well, which actually made them even louder, something Jillybean didn’t think possible.

When the Captain disappeared for the third time, Jillybean’s gruff, bear-like guard told her, “Ya cain’t ‘spect him to hang around all day. He gots plans to unravel.” His name was Ben Jagar and he liked to let on that he had a vast knowledge of the comings and goings of the Captain. “As his personal guard, he trust me, ya know. Sometime he even axe me fer advice.”

“Is that so? L-Like w-what sort of advice?” she asked, desperately needing to take her mind from the screams. They had been drilling into her head for what seemed like hours now and were enough to drive a woman to madness—and she had already been mad to begin with.

“Ya know. This an’ that. I cain’t give specifics ona account that would be kin to spyin’ an’ all.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said as what seemed like the hundredth man was being slowly lowered into the hissing boiling water. Like all of them, he began the awful writhing and bucking, shrieking in a way that wasn’t human; she wished to God she could stab her fingers into her ears to stop the sound. This was not allowed and her hands were tied to the armrests so she could only writhe along in companion-like misery, begging Eve to take over. “Take me into the darkness, please!”

The Corsairs fell over themselves in laughter at this. They made faces at her and cried out, “No, take me!”

Furious, she screamed that she would kill them all, that she would set fire to their world. They only laughed harder. The laughter was nearly as bad as the screams, sending her mind spinning so that the next man who was hoisted above the boiling grey muck wore her father’s face, and when he screamed in high terror, he screamed in her father’s voice, “This is your fault! This is your fault!”

She begged his forgiveness in a wailing cry that she kept pitching louder and louder so she could be heard over the waves of laughter.

In the midst of this, the Black Captain was back, appearing in front of her like a dark apparition. “You could end this, you know. Tell me about the operation.” Her brilliant blue eyes had been as round and blank as pearls, but at this they focused into hard diamonds. He shrugged. “Have it your way. It’ll only get worse.” And it had. With each death, her mind warped and twisted. Reality and insanity mixed until she couldn’t tell what was true and what wasn’t.

Ipes deserted her sometime later when Sadie was dipped, inch by inch, into the roiling water. Don’t tell! Don’t tell! she screamed.

“I won’t,” Jillybean screamed back right before she fainted, losing her crown, which rolled down the three steps and into the fire. It was snatched out of the flames as cold water was dashed into her face.

“Just keep yer head still, fer goodness sakes,” Ben muttered, sticking the charred crown on her once again. Blearily, she apologized, and this simple act opened him up to her. He began talking to her under his breath; he seemed bored by the executions and had no problem talking about what sort of diabolical plans the Captain had for their enemies. She learned that until the Bay People were dealt with, Bainbridge was to be “sat on like a hen on her brood,” which didn’t sit well with Ben. He was tired of Hoquiam and wanted the Captain to do something more dramatic than simply “sit” on Bainbridge.

“What’s it really like there?” he asked, as he practiced with his whip, flicking it at the altar, trying to extinguish a candle without knocking it over. “Ever-one say you gots ‘lectricity, and water in the walls. Is it true?”

“Yeah,” she answered, somewhat breathlessly. The stench in the church was hellish and beyond description. The smell of boiled human flesh literally hung in the air in the form of a sticky mist that coated her skin and seeped into her pores. Jillybean could practically feel the stench emanating from her naked flesh and from her glistening bald head. “It’s just like the old world.”

With the crack of the whip snapping like stray firecrackers over the screams, she let her mind latch onto the memory of her home. The image of the island filled her: the high walls, the clean, well-lit streets, the bucolic people, slipping so easily back into the soft, peaceful ways of the time before the Apocalypse. She pictured the Fall Festival in its orange and gold glory, the Christmas pageant with its many lights, the Easter egg hunts, the picnics, the barbecues, the long summer evenings where the laughter of children could be heard from one end of the island to the other as they played kick the can or capture the flag until twilight gave way to real night.

As Jillybean sat on her throne above the vat with its screaming man, her mind built an entire world from her memory. But in that world, the wall went for miles into the air and was so thick that it could never be breached or destroyed. The children never aged, the trees were never without fruit, and the rain only fell at night and the soft, gentle patter would ease her into her dreams. She built a perfect world in her mind, and she wanted to stay in that world; she wanted to hide there forever if she could.

But Eve would not let her.

Eve filled her mental image of Bainbridge with rampaging zombies and raping, pillaging Corsairs. The streets became rivers that ran with blood, and the buildings…

“Stop it!”

No, you stop it. You can’t hide from our fate. Eve appeared in the crowd of Corsairs, a bottle of brown liquor in one hand; there was just a slosh left in the bottom. Remember what you said?

“I say a lot of things. Perhaps if you…”

A soft, childish voice cut her off. The wall won’t hold. It was her own voice spoken nearly nine years before as she surveyed her creation. It had been Jillybean who had drawn up the plans for the Great Wall of Bainbridge, and it was she who had managed every inch of its construction. It was a monumental work that had propelled Deanna into the Governor’s office, while at the same time had nearly broken Jillybean’s carefully pieced-together mind. She had lived and breathed the wall into existence at the expense of her mental health.

And when it was completed and the people slept safely for the first time in years, secure in the knowledge that no army could ever defeat it, little Jillybean, only ten at the time and already a towering intellect, had sighed and said, The wall won’t hold, not forever. She had known this even before she had started on the plans and it was why she had taken precautions. Impressive as it was, she knew that if she wanted to, she could easily destroy it, and didn’t that suggest that a future attacker, if they were smart or determined enough, could as well?

She knew they would start by taking out the searchlights on the walls. These would be shot out by distant black boats, and then, in the dark, divers in wet suits would come up out of the Sound to set explosive charges against the walls. Holes would be opened in a dozen different places, and into these breaches a flood of zombies would pour in, just enough to get the attention of the defenders. While they were dealing with the undead, a hundred black ships would land the next wave of attackers. And the next, and the next, and the next. They would fan out, overwhelming the last of the defense and kick off a week-long orgy of rape, blood sacrifices, horrific tortures, and screams like the ones blaring in her ears.

“No,” Jillybean whispered, grimacing, picturing it all once again.

“It’s true,” Ben said. “More’n half the fleet is gonna be goin’ south. I was there an’ I heard it with my own eyes, didn’t I?”

Jillybean blinked up at him in confusion, realizing that he’d been talking for a while and that she had missed most of it. She tried a smile; it was a brief, twitchy thing, more of a tic than an expression. “Well, if you heard it with your own eyes, then I suppose it must be true.”

“I ain’t lyin’,” he agreed. “An’ I ain’t lyin’ that I don’t wanna go. We ain’t never been lucky south of Eureka and that’s the truth. They says that even that other queen got witchy powers. That true?”

Witchy powers? Other Queen? What did I miss? It took a moment for her mind to reset itself and to remember where she was. The first thing she saw was a pale, rubbery thing that had once been a man, being slithered into a green garbage bag. His hair had been boiled off and his flesh hung like hot cheese from his bones.

Jillybean’s stomach rolled over and she turned quickly to Ben. “No, she doesn’t have any supernatural powers,” she answered honestly. “In fact, she doesn’t have any supra-natural powers, either. The one meaning to have talents relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe…” She paused to take a gulping breath. “Especially one attributable to God or a god, demi-god, spirit or demon.” She was being pedantic and didn’t care. She had to take her mind off the torture and she clung to her over-sized vocabulary like a drowning man might cling to a passing branch.

“Huh?” Ben said. His lips twisted, giving his beard a Muppet-like grimace of befuddlement.

“I-I wasn’t done.” Far from it. There were ten more weeping, praying men yet to die. “Supra-natural, in the strictest definition would suggest an increase in the higher end functions of a person’s natural abilities. Supra meaning above in most…”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about? I just asked if that kid queen had any witchy powers. Like ESP, or mental telepathy, or voodoo crap, stuff like that.”

The way the tide had turned so rapidly, Jillybean was afraid that Jenn Lockhart would in fact need some sort of supernatural powers to defeat the Corsairs, especially if she didn’t have the help of the Guardians. And even with their help, the young queen would be hard-pressed. As stout of fighters as the Guardians were, and none were braver in Jillybean’s opinion, they were not forward-thinking when it came to warfare. They saw battle as two-dimensional: us versus them, good versus evil. One army lines up here and the other army lines up there; the two sides clash, and whichever side has God on their side will win. It was a fifteenth century philosophy with little use in the real world.

Unfortunately, without a strong military leader among the Bay People, and Jenn had not yet demonstrated anything along those lines, the order of battle would be determined by Knights Commander Walker—and that was if Jenn had managed to weld the disparate groups together, a feat that few could accomplish even in the face of a common enemy.

Jillybean had been able to do it by harnessing fear, superstition and the power of her mind. She had also been lucky when it counted and she had used her unique genius to capitalize on that luck.

Jenn, on the other hand, was not particularly lucky, she wasn’t a genius, and no one feared her. Her greatest attribute was an endearing sweetness that had only increased during her darkest hours. If she had a superpower, it was kindness taken to the nth degree, a trait that was hardly the proper requirement to lead a shattered group of people in a time of war.

Still, Jillybean had chosen Jenn for a reason, even if the reason was utterly ineffable. There was something about her that could not be defined. “Neither she nor I have ‘witchy powers,’ or ESP,” she told Ben, “and we don’t need them. The Queen is smart and competent. She’s faced the Corsairs in battle before and held her own. I expect that she will ag…”

The doors to the church opened and through the hideous steam, she could see the Black Captain. He wasn’t alone. Holding his hand was a child, a girl of seven or eight who barely came to his hip and that was even with her mass of brown hair that had been teased into a shocking, chaotic mass.

“No,” Jillybean whispered, her huge eyes staring, unblinking.

“It look like the Captain is up to his tricks,” Ben said, tipping Jillybean a wink. “Might be he think yer sweet on girls. Is that it? Well, I say leave it to the Captain to find yer weakness.”

Jillybean closed her eyes and tried to steal herself against what was coming. “It’s not me. It’s not me.”

It wasn’t her. Jillybean latched onto the differences. The child had brown eyes instead of blue and her hair had been styled into the crazed mop atop her head while Jillybean’s wild mane occurred naturally. And the girl’s manner was one of shyness. Even at a young age, Jillybean had known she was different, smarter, better than most adults, which had given her confidence that she had to keep hidden. Adults always thought they were better and more capable than children even when the evidence pointed to the contrary.

Another difference: Jillybean’s collar was gold, while the girl’s was silver and so thin that it might have been a necklace.

“Your Highness.” The Captain’s smooth voice rolled over her. The screams and hyena laughter had faded; there was only the crackle of fire and the bubbling from the vat. “I’ve brought a friend.”

A hundred rejoinders came to mind; she only answered by saying, “Oh?” Reluctantly, Jillybean opened her eyes. She saw two girls; one was her scrawny six-year-old self and the other was this strange, frightened girl. The two tried to merge and Jillybean closed her eyes again, clamping them down so hard that she saw spots. Still with her eyes closed, she asked, “What’s your name?”

“Leah S-Stewart.” The name came out in a warbling stutter. “I-I am C-Captain Wilton’s.” A shudder wracked Jillybean at this. The girl was already a sex slave, at least she had been a sex slave. Now, she was an expendable pawn, a tool wielded by the Black Captain to break Jillybean. He would boil her alive if he had to, and he would do it with that same suave smile on his evil face, there was no doubt about that in Jillybean’s mind.

There was a long pause as the girl nervously eyed Jillybean, then, “Are you really a queen?”

That was the question. A real queen would accept the loss of innocents as nothing more than “collateral damage” on the battlefield; a sad by-product of warfare. A real queen would persevere with an iron will until the enemy was defeated. A real queen would not bend to this sort of threat, knowing that even more lives would be lost if she did. A real queen had ice running through her veins.

Jenn doesn’t. Sadie had come back. Jillybean cracked her eyes and saw the Goth-girl standing off to the side, partially hidden by Colleen White. Her dyed black hair was spiked and glistening from the steam. Jenn isn’t an Ice-Queen, and I think that’s the reason why you chose her. You want to be like her.

Jillybean bit back on a nasty, caustic reply. She might have wanted to be like Jenn, but she couldn’t afford to be. Jenn was as naive as she was sweet, and had she been in Jillybean’s place, tied to the throne and wearing Mike Gunter’s flesh for a robe, she would have given in ages ago. She would have crumbled the moment Rat-faced Ronnie had been strung up.

And she wasn’t even crazy.

At least Jillybean had that as an excuse. When she snuck a peek at the girl, she saw blue eyes instead of brown. She saw untamed and untamable hair. She saw towering mental strength built on a foundation of matchsticks, half of which were on fire. That fire was crackling and screaming, in her own head, engulfing her mind in the darkest smoke, and that was a good thing. No, it was a great thing. Jillybean craved the darkness. In the darkness, her pain and torment would end. The darkness would keep Jillybean from seeing Leah boiled alive. It would smother her screams. It would make everything alright.

But it wouldn’t come. It remained a shadow in her mind, just out of reach, and nothing was right, least of all the torture of a child.

Jillybean’s shoulders slumped with the final realization that she could not hide from reality. Does that mean I’m getting better? She laughed at the thought, her eyes blurring with tears. When she blinked them away, she saw only Leah. Her own tiny image was gone.

“Yes, I am a queen,” she said, at last. “I am the Queen of the Slaves. I am your Queen, in fact, and maybe I can grant you one wish.” The Captain’s eyes narrowed at this. Jillybean ignored him. “Come here, Leah.” The girl came right up to the throne. She shook in fear as she realized that her Queen was wearing human flesh and that her crown was adorned with teeth and bone.

In a whisper that was only heard by the guard, Ben Jagar, Colleen White, and the Captain, Jillybean asked Leah, “Would you like to be free of Captain Wilton?” The girl’s head bobbed by the tiniest fraction of an inch. “And would you like to be my Lady-in-Waiting? It’s a fancy way of saying you’d be with me and serve me in all things.”

The girl was frightened right down to her twittering heart. The flesh robe was sickening, as was the foul, ugly crown. Beneath it, the Queen was little better; she was bloody and bruised, and her eyes were sharp, as if she could cut someone to pieces with them. Leah hesitated, unsure which was worse, the scary Queen or Captain Wilton, who was evil and nasty and did bad things to her.

While Leah weighed what seemed like two awful choices, Jillybean looked over her head at the Black Captain, who nodded, but reservedly, suggesting that he was giving his consent, but only if Jillybean cooperated fully. She knew this already. Her good behavior would forever be held hostage by Leah.

“Do I gotta wear clothes like that?” the girl asked.

“No. This is for me only. I am special, Leah. I am Queen. You will wear a black dress from here on. It will mean that you are not to be touched. And you will wear a gold collar like mine. Would you like that?”

Leah suddenly grinned and nodded in excitement. She looked like a child at Christmas and that was so devastatingly sad that Jillybean had to take a deep breath before she said to her, “Take Colleen and Mister Ben outside so I can have a word with the Captain.” Leah hesitated; they all did. “Don’t be afraid, Leah. You are the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting. In this you speak for me…and the Captain, of course.”

When Jillybean was alone with the Captain, she stared into the flames beneath the vat and explained in a soft voice what Operation Otter Pop was. His reaction was one of complete skepticism. “You’d destroy your own wall? I really find that hard to believe. Do I need to bring that girl back? Maybe just dip her in up to her knees? Is that what you want?”

“It won’t change my response. What were Deanna’s words? Her exact words when she threatened you with Operation Otter Pop? Yes, I know who told you and I know it was a threat. She still thinks you have Emily, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” he answered slowly, gazing intently at her, trying to pierce her mind, and failing. “But how do you know the rest?”

Guilt spread over Jillybean’s face. “The only other people who know that code phrase would never tell, not under any torture. And I know Deanna threatened you because how else will she get Emily back?”

The Captain considered the question, his eyes gazing past the vat and the screaming man whose genitals had been just submerged with a sizzling hiss. “She said to tell me that I have one week to give up Emily or face her wrath. I just can’t believe…she’d really blow up her own walls?”

“Yes. As far as I can fathom, it’s the only way to get them on the warpath. I know you view my people as sheep, but I think a better analogy would be to a herd of cows. They’re peaceful creatures, but if you throw a scare into them, they can stampede and stomp you into the ground.” She was being perfectly honest for a dishonest reason: she needed the Captain to focus on Bainbridge and not the Bay Area. Jenn Lockhart needed all the time Jillybean could give her to prepare for war. Jenn’s people would not stampede. They would melt away, choosing to hide instead of fight, which would result in them being hunted down one by one.

Yes, Bainbridge had to be perceived as the larger, more immediate threat. Even without walls, Bainbridge would not be an easy nut to crack. They were well founded in ammunition, clean water and food. They had a large, unified population, and they held a naturally defensible island. The only question was over who would lead them? Wayne French? He had been a reserve Naval officer at the outbreak of the Apocalypse, but his specialty had been high-tech communications, and he had not impressed Jillybean during the yearly training exercises conducted on the island. He set them up unrealistically with the “Opfor” coming in brutishly dumb, attacking into the teeth of a thoroughly prepared defense.

Although this did happen in wartime—and it was a commander’s prime duty to trick his opponent into making just such a disastrous move—there was little to gain in training for such an event. It was far better to prepare for obstacles that were more likely to arise: ammo shortages, unexpected flank attacks, feigned retreats, ambushes, etc.

But did the Captain know the island’s weaknesses? Did he care? Did he think they would just sit there, walls or no walls?

The two enemies sat in silence, each visualizing different scenarios. He spoke first, “Otter Pop is an interesting idea. Too bad it won’t work. Look at what you did to the Guardians. You took down their wall and they haven’t budged; they’re still a bunch of pussies. It’ll be a cake walk taking them apart, especially now that I know how low on ammo they are. And that silly little queen you installed is in almost the same straits, all thanks to you.”

He added insult to injury by bowing deeply. “Without you, they would still have a massive fleet, all the ammo they would ever need and a couple hundred torpedoes. Now they have nothing and they’ll fall like dominoes.”

Jillybean knew it didn’t have to be that way; she could still defeat the Corsairs. Even with the disadvantages before her…Eve broke in on her thoughts, Prove it! she cried out, laughing. All you have to do is break free, then you can show us all that you aren’t a joke. It could be your great comeback. Just get us out of here!

Jillybean didn’t like to appear crazy in front of the Captain and so she only answered Eve by yanking on one of the chains that ran from her collar. Escape was impossible.

Not for you. I know it. You’re holding back and I want to know why. Is it because you’re afraid to face the people you screwed over? Are you…

“What, you don’t like your chains?” the Captain asked, with a chuckle. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to them eventually, and maybe, if you’re lucky, someday I might take off one of those weights. Or I might add one. It’ll depend on whether you cooperate or not.”

“I told you about the operation…”

“And that was good. That was smart. You saved that girl, at least for the moment. What about tomorrow? What will you do to save her tomorrow?” Jillybean started to shake her head. “It’s okay. I know what you can do. You can build me some bombs. And I’m not talking about smoke bombs either. Those we can make. What I want are rocket-propelled bombs; missiles to be precise. They’ll need a range of about five hundred meters and I’ll need them strong enough to topple a wall—if you know what I mean.”

“What about Operation Otter Pop?”

He stood and stretched. “I’ve decided to cancel that, one way or another.” He let the implications of that sink in—Deanna’s life was now in danger.

Eve cackled, Because of you, Jillybean. You and your big mouth. It’s all your fault. Ha-ha!

The Captain went on when Jillybean’s eyes dropped to the floor. “I happen to like the walls of Bainbridge. They’re one of the reasons why I decided to take the island in the first place. I’ll make some small holes, maybe bring down a section or two, just to show that I can. Chances are they’ll see exactly how fruitless their defense is and they’ll give up. What do you think?”

Jillybean’s jaws were clenched so tightly in anger and frustration that she couldn’t speak. She shook her bald head.

“Oh, you’ll build my bombs, one way or another. You could envision how many innocent lives you’ll be saving in the long run, or I could bring back the girl and give her a nice hot bath. And if she doesn’t get you to behave, there are always more. Hundreds and hundreds more. I’ll cart them up from San Fran. Do you remember Lindy Smith? What about Ida Battenburg or Ryanne Walker?”

“Please don’t,” Jillybean begged in a whisper, the air in her lungs seemed as thin as the wisps coming from the vat.

He laughed. “Oh, since you said please. Ha-ha! Let’s see if we can get you to beg me for the privilege of making my bombs. Someone bring me the girl! Leah, honey, time to get wet.”

Eve’s mad cackling filled Jillybean’s mind. The dark creature swelled in size until she stood a head taller than the Captain, and when she stuck her hands on her hips, her fine, three-quarter coat flared and rippled as if a wind had caught it. Inside the inner lining of velvety ebony were faces. Among them was Sadie’s, looking determined, fighting to get out, and there was Jillybean’s father, handsome and deeply sad, and Ipes was there, too.

The little zebra had been forgotten and with a quick nervous look around, he leapt out onto the ground. You can’t do this, Jillybean. It’ll be worse if you make those rockety things. You can’t let…Eve reached down with one huge hand, snatched up the toy, and bit its head off. It began to snow as soft fluff came down on Jillybean. Eve tore up the remains of the zebra and as she did she went on cackling, laughing up torrents of fluff, an entire blizzard of it, until the white, cottony bits were knee-deep and a mantle of it crusted everything and everyone.

And Eve went right on laughing. The tremendous, booming noise filled the church, swirling the fluff in a vortex, and Jillybean knew this was it. She was going truly and completely crazy—and what a relief it was. The insanity in her mind was so much more preferable to the madness of human reality. Jillybean even sighed before puffing up her cheeks and giving the fluff a little puff as though she were blowing the head off a dandelion.

NO! Eve yelled. Down came the huge hand. It struck Jillybean on the back of her neck and drove her to her knees so that she was eye-to-eye with the terrified little girl.

“I don’t want this,” she whispered. “Don’t make me.”

Then escape. Get us out of here.

Eve didn’t understand. There was no escaping hell. She had already tried three times, and each time something had pulled her back. And now a fourth attempt was impossible. Before she went into her cell, she was always stripped to nothing and searched inside and out. Completely searched; she could still feel the dirty fingers wriggling inside of her. She shuddered just as Leah began to whimper. Ben had grabbed Leah by the arm and now she looked at Jillybean with such stark fear that Jillybean felt her heart breaking into pieces. The shards of it were like razors, cutting her. It was a pain she couldn’t endure.

“Please, please don’t,” she begged.

The Captain’s laugh mixed with Eve’s, and it rolled on like thunder. “If one please didn’t work, you think two might? Ha-ha! Let’s get the little rat strung up. We’ll start with her little piggies. Awe, look how cute they are. Look Jillybean. Look how small they are. Too bad they’ll blister and swell like little sausages. Ha-ha! And, when she’s boiled, I want more of them. They’ll go in one by one. I want them lined up around the block. And…and, here’s an idea. I want them to come and kneel in front of you before they get dipped. And I want them to beg you to personally save them. How does that sound?”

It sounded like torture. Jillybean scrunched her eyes down tight, knowing she wouldn’t be able to take even the first. “No. I-I’ll do it. Just don’t hurt them, please,” she said, selling a little more of her soul.

Chapter 11

Puget Sound, Washington

Time was one of those strangely malleable concepts that seemed to expand or contract, depending on the space it filled. There, in the implacable, unmoving fog, Neil’s world had shrunk to a strip of beach, a small stretch of dark water and half of a black boat. The bow was altogether lost in the mists and the mast seemed to end not far over the head of the Corsair.

The man’s Corsair name was Back-hair Bob, and he was dressed casually in an old t-shirt and grey sweats, both of which were stained and wrinkled. Bob was just as stained and wrinkled. He was a gritty veteran and thought he knew trouble when he saw it, however the sight that greeted him: a gray, gargoyle of a man and a tall confident Guardian, seemed at such odds with each other that he didn’t know what to think.

Even when Neil had given their names, Bob seemed stuck between thoughts, which was entirely due to the fact that he was an alcoholic and that he’d left Hoquiam with four gallons of potato mash moonshine and that now, three days later, he only had a quart left. “Where are we?” The last thing he remembered was anchoring because of the fog.

“Puget Sound,” Neil replied helpfully, or so he thought.

Another head emerged from the galley and with it came another gun. “Who the hell is this jack-ass? And what’s his deal?” By “deal,” this new fellow was referring to Neil’s face. Although the fog blurred his features, it couldn’t completely hide the hideousness of it, and the Corsair squinted mightily in disgust.

“My deal? My deal is my own,” Neil said, haughtily as if he were talking to a cheeky fourth-grader. Despite the fact that he was clueless as to what the man was talking about, he felt the rejoinder was particularly clever, especially as it made the Corsair frown in confusion. “Like I told your friend, I’m Neil Martin and this is Troy. And you are Corsairs and this is a Corsair boat.” With his zombie brain going off half-cocked at times, he liked things to be as concrete as possible and now that he had a firm handle on the situation, he could address it properly. Turning to Troy, he asked, “Do we kill them or take them prisoner? What’s the proper way to go about this?”

The question should have been asked by one of the Corsairs; Neil still had his rifle on his back and wasn’t in the position to kill or capture anyone. Troy had a bead on Back-hair Bob, which left him vulnerable to the second man, and his position became even more untenable as two more Corsairs appeared on his right, coming up from a hatch in the foredeck. Before they could completely materialize out of the fog, he pivoted his aim at them.

Without much hope, Troy suggested, “Maybe we should all go our separate ways before someone gets hurt.”

“Or maybe you drop your gun,” Back-hair Bob said, grunting out a laugh. “We got you surrounded.”

“Ha!” Neil cried. “That’s what you think. We have an entire company of men with us. Right back there.” He jerked his thumb behind him, hitting his M4 with it, and only just then realizing he wasn’t carrying the gun at all, which seemed to be the height of silliness since a “gun” battle was in the offing. To be sure, he looked down at his empty hands—yep, no gun. It was all the more reason to bluff his way out of their current jam. Raising his voice, he called out, “Captain Williams, if you’ll send some men to flank these miserable Corsairs, I would appreciate it.”

Neil hoped that Zophie would skip a few rocks into the water or do anything to make some noise. Unfortunately, she was too frightened to move beyond trembling.

Back-hair Bob listened with an ear cocked. “I don’t hear nobody.”

“No duh! That’s because they’re Delta Force Seals,” Neil explained. “You hear that?” They all uselessly cocked an ear. Puget Sound was dead quiet. “That nothing you hear is the sound of them surrounding us right now. And you know what? They have M-80 high-octane thermalized vision scopes. Each of you is probably being targeted four times over right as we speak. I wouldn’t even think about sneezing if I were you.”

“Is that so?” Bob replied. Neil assured him that it was so, prompting Bob to ask, “Then what are they waiting for? Why don’t they shoot?”

“Why? Because they’re so highly trained, of course. They’re waiting on my command and I’d give it, but…”

He couldn’t think of an adequate “but” and the seconds drew out. “But why?” Bob demanded.

“I don’t want to make a mess of the deck. If you guys could come down off the boat, I promise they’ll kill you quickly. Come on.” The four men didn’t stir. “Come on or you’ll force me to do something I don’t want to do.” They still didn’t move. “One,” he said, ominously. “Two!” he warned. Since there were no Delta Force Seals, he drew out saying “three,” then, just as the moment was about to get so embarrassing that even Neil would notice, there came a soft whispering sound to their left.

The Corsairs spun and aimed their weapons into the fog. A second later the prow of a black boat slid gently into view. They breathed a sigh of relief, all except for Back-hair Bob, who cried out in anger, “Look out, you lubber! Watch the paint. Fend off! Willy, fend them off for Christ sakes!”

One of the Corsairs leapt to the other side of the deck and heaved over a series of foam fenders; they cushioned the blow as the two boats gently collided. Although his precious paint was untouched, Bob was in a fit. Screaming curses, he went to the rail and jumped across. At first, he thought the boat was abandoned. Then he saw the little creature crouched down on the stairs; he didn’t see the gun in her hands.

“Who the fu…” He lumbered right at her and for once Emily Grey wasn’t afraid. Her hands were perfectly steady and she fired without flinching. Bob was a large target, and was so close that she couldn’t miss. The bullet took him in the exact center of his barrel chest; strangely, his look was one of surprise rather than pain. Thinking that he was too big for the tiny 5.56mm round, she fired again and again until he fell backwards over the rail and splashed down between the boats.

The splash set off a firefight that created pulses in the fog and had someone been able to watch from on top of the mast of the Dead Fish, it would have seemed like the fog was breathing in and out.

Everyone began firing at once and, after the seemingly perpetual silence that hung over the Sound, the noise was horrendous. In spite of the unparalleled din, the sinister sound of the bullets could be heard whispering past each other. Most of the time, those whispers carried off into the fog, but sometimes they ended with meaty thuds as the lead penetrated flesh and bone.

Neil, who was the only one without a weapon in hand, twisted violently around to get at his rifle. In a way, he looked like a very ugly dog chasing its tail. He turned just as one of the Corsairs fired at him, so that the bullet hit the upper receiver of his M4, bending in the port cover and then winging away. With his footing less than secure to begin with, the shot in the back sent him sprawling face first into the grey water.

Troy was also hit just as he and a Corsair exchanged rounds. They both went down, each of them looking surprised. After so many years and so many near misses, the Corsair had thought he was invincible. Now his breastbone was cracked like an old, dry stick and his heart was turned inside out. Troy also had his conviction of invincibility shattered. In his case it was not himself that he thought was so tough that it could withstand bullets, but his armor.

It had always protected him. It had taken baseball bats from bandits, claws from giant zombies and even bullets from Corsairs, all except this last bullet, that is. It lanced through an overlap of two ballistic plates which spread the power of the impact so that instead of feeling as though he’d been struck with a searing hot laser, it was like taking the full force of a mule’s kick in the chest. Before he knew it, he was on his back with a foam of grey water covering over him and pouring down his lungs.

Now, it was two grown Corsairs against an eleven-year-old girl. Emily had the advantage. With her uncle in trouble and Gunner dying, she was completely without fear for herself. She was also crouched on the stairs with gossamer tendrils of fog rolling over her. One of the Corsairs didn’t know where she was, and the other was firing eight inches over her head.

A steady hand was a fine thing; what would have been even better, was if she’d had hours of practice with the weapon she carried. She blazed away, spraying bullets across the entire deck of the Harbinger, working the M4 back and forth. To a sturdy man, the recoil was negligible, to Emily it made aiming impossible. The gun, which wasn’t snugged up tight in the pocket of her shoulder as it should have been, bounced all around in her grip as she went through an entire thirty-round magazine before finally killing one of her enemies.

The other Corsair had finally located her in the fog but as he was simultaneously trying to hide behind the mast and shoot, his bullets kept missing, sometimes by as much as five feet. In the midst of his one-person battle—she was just realizing that she didn’t have a spare magazine—he leapt up and ran for the stairs leading down to the Harbinger’s galley. He dropped down, then popped up a second later to fire three wild shot. Again, he dropped low and a second later, like a deranged, murderous jack-in-the-box, he popped up to shoot. And again, and again, unable to strike a happy balance between saving his own skin and piecing hers.

Nine bullets zinged past Emily before she saw that Back-hair Bob had dropped a magazine sometime between leaping across to the Dead Fish and falling off of it. Darting up from the stairs, she snatched it and ran back to reload her gun. It should have been a simple process; however, her hands felt like they were made out of wood as she went through the unpracticed steps.

Time dragged out, marked only by the bullets missing her.

The new magazine, which looked exactly like the old magazine, seemed to be a fraction of an inch too large. It kept getting hung up; sometimes the front seemed too big and sometimes it was the back. Frustrated, she wiggled it back and forth and then, like magic, it slid easily into place. Without a thought, she hopped up to shoot at exactly the same moment that her enemy did as well, and what was truly amazing, they were both actually aiming this time. And, in the realm of unreal coincidence, they pulled their triggers as if their fingers had synchronized. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Two guns, both with their bolts back—he was out of ammo, while she had forgotten to hit the bolt release.

As if they were mirror images of the other, they both turned their guns to the side and saw the problem. He cursed while she only stared, thinking that her gun was broken. The gaping stare lasted only a moment before she remembered the final step in the reloading process. She slapped the bolt release and went to aim again, only as she brought the gun up, she saw the ass end of a bullet sticking out of the port.

Her gun had jammed!

She whined in her throat as she yanked back on the charging handle, sending the lodged bullet flying. Releasing the handle was supposed to chamber a new round, only this one had miss-fed as well. Another yank and another stove-piped round. When she looked up, she saw the Corsair as he let his bolt sink home. He didn’t hesitate to take the kill shot, and brought his weapon up, but strangely seemed to fire even before the gun was pointed—and then he pitched forward, a startled look on his face and a bloom of red spreading across his chest.

Neil Martin had finally got the gun off his back. While Emily fought a battle within a battle, one to decide who was the most inept, Neil had been in an epic struggle of his own, fighting against the strap of his rifle. He spun and twisted and grappled with the strap as if he were contending against a boa constrictor of unusual tenacity. When he prevailed against the strap, he turned the gun about, took careful aim at the back of the Corsair, slipped on a rock and accidentally drilled the man precisely between the shoulder blades.

“Ha! How’s that for shooting straight, Troy? Troy?” He glanced over to see Troy Holt drowning in three feet of water. “Oh boy. Get on up here, Troy. Can you breathe? You look sort of purplish.” Troy’s lungs hadn’t just filled with water, they had also seized up. Neil knew what he had to do. He had to do CPA. “Or is it CPU?” His zombie mind wanted to fixate on the initials, but he knew they weren’t important. What was important was giving Troy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only he didn’t think it would be right for him to do it on account of his germs.

Luckily, there was someone who could help him: the girl on the boat. He had heard her whining and figured she was a slave. “Excuse me! You-who? Young lady? Are you okay? My friend here needs a little help. He needs a little C.A.T. No, that’s not it. It’s the one with mouth-to-mouth. I’d do it but I have, uh, I have a cold sore.” There’s no sense scaring her off with the truth, he thought. And maybe she won’t even notice my little problem.

He was about to add to the lie, when the girl stood up. “Deanna?” He blinked, sure that his eyes were playing tricks on him.

“No, Uncle Neil, it’s me Emily. Goodness! What happened to you? You look like…oh boy! Get him out of the water.”

With his mind going in so many directions, he had let Troy sink back down. “Right. Sorry, Troy.” Neil dragged him back to shore as Emily climbed down into the cold water and waded to the beach.

“I’ll take care of this,” she said. “You go and make sure there’s no one else on that first boat. Be careful, got it?” She pushed him away and gazed down at Troy Holt. He was so dreadfully pale that his general lack of color had progressed to his lips, which were a very light shade of pink.

What did that mean? she wondered. Was he drowned? Or half-way drowned?

Because of his armor, she couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. “ABCs,” she told herself, remembering one of the first lessons that Jillybean had taught her. “Give two rescue breaths.” Clamping his nose shut, she went to over-inflate him just as she had done with Gunner. His lungs were filled with water and the air wouldn’t go in. She immediately rolled him onto his side, and was immediately rewarded by a trickle of water.

“You’re too up,” she yelled into his face. By that she meant he was at the wrong angle. The water was settled down into his lungs. He had to be turned around so the water would flow out of him. Grabbing his feet, she spun him so that gravity dribbled the water out of him. To assist it, she pumped his legs, though this was simply a spur-of-the-moment idea. It felt silly, so she stopped.

She tried breathing for him again and this time his lungs filled, though there was a bubbly manner to the way his lungs inflated. She gave him another breath before turning him from one side to another. The next breaths went in easier. “And now for chest compressions,” she announced. There were two problems with the idea; the first being his armor. Frantically, she tore at the velcro until she got the chest piece off of him.

Here she discovered the second problem: he was already breathing. “Ah, well, okay then.” She chalked it up as a win. There would be no celebrating, however. Troy was bleeding through the t-shirt he wore beneath his armor. The blood spread quickly with each breath…each labored breath was a more accurate description. He was in obvious pain.

“Oh jeeze,” she whispered, biting her lip.

She was just starting to feel overwhelmed by everything when she heard someone whimper, not far away in the fog. It sounded like a woman which Emily assumed meant she would be nice. “Hello? Who is it? My name’s Emily. I’m Neil’s niece.” She advanced warily, until she saw a cringing Zophie Williams, still tucked up in her shopping cart. She too was bleeding. It didn’t matter that it was an older wound, she was just one more person who depended on Emily.

One more person who is going to die, because I don’t know what I’m doing, Emily thought bitterly.

Only Neil was still on his feet, although how was something of a mystery. She knew all about the zombie virus in him, still he looked like a bag of yesterday’s garbage that the raccoons had gotten into. And his mental state might be worse than his physical one. He wasn’t going to be any help.

The frightened, childish part of her wondered if it would be too terrible to just leave these new people. She could take Neil with her and escape on the Dead Fish. It was the worst thing she had ever considered doing, and she was more than considering it. Almost on their own, her feet had turned her around and were leading her back to the Sound.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

Chapter 12

Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

When the Black Captain said he wanted rocket-propelled bombs, he meant he wanted them right away, that very day if possible. He also wanted them to replicate the missiles of old in both speed and penetrating power, something that even Jillybean couldn’t handle on such short notice. Threats were made. Little Leah was dragged forward, her new golden collar sparkling in the light of the fire that was still flickering beneath the vat.

“Hurt her, and you get nothing,” Jillybean stated, setting her chin defiantly. “For the moment, she is a hostage for us both.”

The Captain’s deep black eyes appraised his bald, abused slave. Someone testing his authority was not something he ever allowed, and he very nearly cast the little girl into the simmering water himself. He held back by the barest of margins; he wanted his rockets too badly.

That Leah lived to see another day was no real victory for Jillybean and she didn’t fool herself into thinking it was. She bowed her head to her captor. “Thank you. This isn’t a simple thing you ask for. I’m not trying to undermine you, it’s just that I need time. I have to test propellants and weights. And if you want actual penetration of the wall, of a reinforced concrete wall, the total impulse of the rocket motor will have to be at least ten times greater than I imagined. No, you’re asking too much on such short notice.”

“I have it on good authority that you’ve already tested rockets.”

“Yes, but those were designed to go against your ships, which are flimsy compared to the wall. The equivalent of a stick of dynamite could sink one. What you’re asking for is too much, especially under these time constraints. Which makes me wonder why you need all this so quickly. Is there trouble in paradise?”

He scoffed at the idea, putting just a little too much nonchalance into the denial. “Just tell me how you would take down a section of the wall.”

“You are right in one way. For an explosive to do anything more than scratch the surface, it must either penetrate or explode on contact. The difficult questions involve the delivery system and the range. And like I said, I would need time to test my theories. I would need to build prototypes. It would take a minimum of a week before I could begin building…”

“You have three days,” he told her flatly. “And that’s three days for the finished product. Three days to build me enough rockets to tear down three-hundred yards of wall. Don’t give me that look. I know you can do most of the planning in your head.”

Now it was Jillybean’s turn to scoff. “You clearly have no idea how complicated this is. Yes, I’ve shot off a few rockets, but this isn’t something you can ratio out. In other words, rocketry is not something you simply extrapolate. You might think that a thirty-pound warhead requires only three times as much thrust as a ten-pound warhead, but you’d be wrong. It’s much more. And if you have too much thrust, then you miss altogether! Which takes us into launch angles, burn times, propellants, ambient temperature, relative humidity, wind factors…”

“You have three days,” he said. “Three days or the girl gets a bath. I’ll lower her in an inch at a time. Do you understand?” Jillybean saw Leah out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she was about to puke.

“I understand.”

The Captain’s beaming smile came back. “Great. Now, I want the same set-up as you had back on Alcatraz. You know, we don’t want the left hand to know what the right is doing. Compartmentalization will be the key. And one last thing.” He leaned so close that she could smell his cologne and the mintiness of his breath. “I want to be in control of the rockets. Do you understand? Complete control.”

Jillybean kept her face neutral. It couldn’t be more obvious: he didn’t trust his men. He was afraid they’d turn traitor and use his own rockets against him. Was this why he was rushing everything? Did he need to solidify his position, or had he made promises that were coming due?

I bet it’s those new bandits of his, Eve said. She was squatting next to the vat, trying to stir up the flames with a stick. One way or another, you have a chance to exploit the situation. We can escape. Think about it. We’ll have access to explosives and tools and who knows what else. We can skip on out of here and let Jenn and Deanna take care of their own lot for a change.

“Shut up,” Jillybean growled, before turning to the Captain. “Are you asking for something like a master switch? Radio-controlled, perhaps?”

He was so used to her mumbling under her breath that he hadn’t batted an eye at her twitching and whispering. “That’s exactly what I want. It’s what you should’ve had with your torpedoes. Ha-ha! Now, I think you should get going, because three days goes fast. Start with a list of everything you’ll need and we’ll get this party started. And I should remind you not to try anything. You will watched like a hawk and searched before entering your cell every night and when I say searched, I mean thoroughly searched, inside and out. The little girl, too.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Of course, I would and you only have yourself to blame. You can’t be trusted. It’s why the weights will stay on and it’s why you’ll have a guard standing over you twenty-four hours a day.”

He grinned in that superior way of his, making Eve furious. She kicked at the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. Uncaring that her knee-high boots were in the flames, she stood seething, her white teeth clamped together, her breath coming harsh. With a will, she mastered herself. This is okay, right? We can still escape. You did it before. Remember the pit? No one could have gotten out of there, except for you. Just use your head and figure it out.

“There’s nothing to figure out,” Jillybean answered, gazing at the flames crawling up Eve’s legs. “I can’t get out. And even if I could…” She lifted the chains, letting them clink. Cutting through the thick chains with a hacksaw would be the work of hours and at least two blades. She could picture dragging the weights from house to house in the dead of night to search for a hacksaw. There’d be no escape like that. The scraping metal would make a noise to wake the dead.

You could muffle them or put them on a skateboard or something.

“Do you see a skateboard just lying around?” Jillybean cried. “Face it, Eve, it’s not happening. There are no hacksaws. There are no skateboards. There’s nothing.”

“And it’s going to stay that way,” the Captain said, studying her, looking for deception even within her crazy. “Tell Eve that if you try one more escape attempt, you’ll lose your left foot. I’ll take it right on the spot. I’ll use an old hacksaw. How does that sound?”

It sounded slow and horrible. “Not good,” she admitted.

The confident smile was back. “That’s an understatement. Now, what do you say? Should we begin? Those bombs aren’t going to build themselves and your time is already ticking away.”

The immense stress upon her was turning her muscles into steel cables and reluctantly, she agreed with a stiff mechanical nod. She called for paper and pen, and sunk herself into the work of arming her greatest enemy, and as she did, her fears faded into the background. Eve went to sulk in the corner and Ipes stopped pointing out that what she was doing would eventually destroy her home and kill the few people left who loved her. Even Sadie couldn’t compete when Jillybean’s mind was fully engaged on a project.

Five sheets of paper were quickly filled with diagrams and notes. Another seven were filled with what she considered to be crude equations, none of which were correct. She was missing something. “And I’ll never find it with all this noise!”

Immersed as she was in the mental work, her imperious manner reasserted itself, dominating her fear. Slapping her palm down on the armrest of her throne, she demanded silence from the hundred or so spectators, and when their whispers kept creeping into her thoughts, she ordered the crowd away. Next, she called for food and drink, an actual desk and, “Pencils, and make them sharp. Pens are stupid. And I need more paper!” All of this was brought to her without question.

The math involved was giving her fits, and the worst part: this wasn’t even advanced rocketry. There was no need for a secondary motor, a recovery system, or even a real avionics bay worthy of the name. All she had to do was fly a tube from A to B along a shallow hyperbolic arc. Yes, she had to find both the center of gravity and the center of pressure within the rocket, but she could rely on Barrowman equations for this.

And she knew the five to one rule—initial launch thrust should be five times the weight of the total rocket, with the weight measured in kilograms and the thrust given in Newtons.

Her problem stemmed from her inability to properly calculate the total thrust of the motor produced for the duration of its total burn time. Time and again, she scribbled out the basic formulation for the total impulse: I = ∫T F(t)dt 0, filled in her best estimates, and…cursed, scratching out the equation.

You know that’s a truncated burn time, Sadie said, looking over her shoulder. You’re starting with imprecise data. Garbage in equals garbage out.

“First off, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and second, you’re right. And third, stop peeking into my head.” She sat back and sighed.

Well, are you going to ask for help?

Jillybean hated asking for help, usually because it was a waste of time, but also being smart was her thing. It’s what made her different.

“What choice do I have?” She couldn’t simply blurt out what she wanted, so she disguised what she needed by adding it to her long list of items. Ben took one look at the list, became flustered and called for the Captain.

“What’s this about tools? Jagar says you have some suspicious items on your list.”

She laughed. “I certainly hope they’re suspicious. I’m building missiles after all. Here’s a partial list of the things I’m going to need to start with.” The list took up an entire page and included two dozen C-clamps, four hand drills, hacksaws, heavy duty pots with lids, copper pipes of various lengths and widths, PVC piping, industrial caulking, charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter.

“Saltpeter?” he asked, giving her a sharp look. “What is that? Is that a nice way of saying poison?”

“As it’s potassium nitrate, I wouldn’t eat it if that’s what you’re asking. You’ll find it and the sulphur in any big box hardware store in the lawn care section. Have your guys look for stump remover with the highest percentage of potassium nitrate. Oh, and the charcoal should be the easy starting kind like Matchlight.”

His smile wasn’t quite so confident. “You understand that I will have everything inventoried every day.”

“Of course.”

“And that the tools will be numbered and accounted for at each moment? And that your chains will be inspected periodically?”

She shrugged having guessed something of the sort would happen. “Seems like sound precautions. I’m also going to need at least one ball mill. It has to be small enough to crank by hand. Oh, I forgot one thing, I’m going to need to be escorted to the community college in South Aberdeen. I just, uh, need some books.”

“Just books?”

Her chains rattled as she shrugged. “Yes, books. You give me too much credit. I may be smart, I may even be a genius, but I don’t have an eidetic memory. I haven’t memorized every chemical formula or mathematical equation known to man. Take for instance the formula for black powder. On the face of it, it’s exceedingly simple and yet if the percentage of each ingredient isn’t exact, it will change the burn rate, which may be the difference between the rocket blowing up in your face or flying as desired.”

“Once again, you don’t give me enough credit for intelligence. I suppose you think I got where I am on my looks alone? Ha! Here’s what’s going to happen; you’ll give me a list of books to be picked up and they’ll get picked up. Trust me, your Highness, you’re not going to escape. I see this great act you’re putting on, but I know you. You’ve been planning to escape from the second I killed your boyfriend. And I’ve been planning to stop you. Would you care to wager on who will win this little competition of ours?”

In essence, there was already a bet between them. If Jillybean lost and couldn’t escape, she would eventually be killed.

But if we get free, we’ll kill HIM, Jillybean. Eve spat into the fire, enjoying the sizzle. I’ll let us hang around for that.

“No,” she said, answering both of them. Her nerve had broken and she knew if she ever got free, she would run and not look back.

“That’s what I thought,” the Captain said, pushing the paper back into her hand. Without looking up, she wrote out the textbooks she would need. When he was gone, she sighed and stood. The only way for her to stand completely upright was for her to leave her weights on the top step. Without the lead weighing her down, she almost felt human as she stretched. Almost, but not quite. With only the robe made from her dead lover’s flesh covering her, she would never be fully human.

It would take hours before she received everything and those were hours she wasn’t going to waste.

“Leah, honey, I need you to run some errands. I need a hundred slaves in here as quickly as possible. Make sure you bow to each Corsair you talk to…”

“Bow?”

“Yes, like this. Try it. Perfect. We bow because it makes them feel superior and when a man feels superior, he is far more likely to help. They’ll ask why I need the slaves and you tell them that I need the church cleared for the construction of the rockets.”

The Corsairs, who did indeed feel superior, were naturally lazy and were all too happy to volunteer their slaves as labor. They knew that if they didn’t, they would be the ones moving the pews and emptying the horrid water from the huge vat. They leaned against the walls and cracked their jokes as the slaves worked.

Jillybean oversaw the work from her throne. Her sharp eyes took in the condition of each of the poor creatures, many of whom were suffering from various ailments, diseases, improperly set fractures, and open wounds, some of which were infected. The Captain didn’t need rockets, he needed her to set up a working hospital.

“Colleen!” So far, Colleen had sulked worse than Eve. She claimed to be the Captain’s slave and wasn’t going to toil like some brute. She jumped out of a doze at Jillybean’s sharp word. “Go fetch that older woman. The one with the swollen cheek. Do it before I get angry and let Eve do things to you.”

Anyone with any sense was afraid of Eve, and Colleen had at least that much sense. The “older woman” was actually only twenty-two, although it wasn’t apparent, even close up. Since her capture six years before, her life had been especially tough; now it was a living hell. Her head throbbed endlessly and the fever had left her weak as a kitten. The pain had wizened her.

“Will you open your mouth for me,” Jillybean asked, beckoning her. “Come closer. Hmm.” The smell of rot wafted from her mouth. “It’s what I thought. Point to your master. No don’t talk, just point. Colleen ask him to come over.”

The Corsair didn’t know what to think of being so close to the Queen. He knew the Captain hated her, so he figured he should as well. “What?” His sneer was so prominent that it couldn’t possibly be missed or misinterpreted. It was practically a monument to sneers.

“Your slave has a broken tooth. It’s infected and the infection has spread to her mandible; her jawbone. If it’s not treated soon, she will die. The only remedy available is for me to take the tooth out. Would you like me to?”

The sneer remained fixed; however, his eyes took on an anxious cast. “Maybe. I guess. I don’t know if you’re allowed to. And what if she dies because of you?”

Jillybean bowed. “I make no guarantees. The procedure itself will only take a few minutes. Although she needs much more extensive treatment, I doubt you have the amenities for anything more than just a quick extraction.” The Corsair started to hem and haw once again and she stopped him by adding, “It’s not something that can be done today. The swelling will need to be reduced before I start. If you wish I will ask the Captain for permission. In the meantime, you will need to make a paste comprised of one teaspoon of turmeric powder, with a half a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of mustard or sesame oil. Have her gargle and then rinse with saltwater before she gently rubs the paste on the affected area. Do that every three hours.”

“Three hours?”

“Yes, three hours. Saltwater rinse, then turmeric powder, salt and mustard or sesame oil, and you’ll have your slave back, good as new.” He grunted, shrugged, shot a look at some of the other Corsairs, and shrugged again before snapping his fingers and leading his slave out.

The Queen called over three more slaves. “Let me see your arms,” she commanded. The three women were covered in small round circles; they were red, scaly and inflamed. “You have ringworm.”

One of the women gasped. “Worms! Are they in my intestines? Will they come outta my butt? Or my skin?” She looked at her arm in horror as if the “worms” were going to erupt through the skin at any moment.

“You’re thinking of a tapeworm. There isn’t an actual worm in ringworm. It’s actually a fungus in the Tinea family. It’s only lethal if left untreated. Can you please beg your masters to come here? Bow or kneel when you ask and make sure you say please.”

Three Corsair masters at once was a challenge, since each had to be more flippant and disrespectful than the next. Jillybean suffered through their insults and pretended not to hear Eve as she screeched in righteous fury. She remained calm and even laughed at their better jokes.

“But seriously,” she said, pretending to wipe away a tear, “ringworm is no laughing matter. If you three aren’t infected now you soon will be, and if left untreated, well, it isn’t pretty.”

“Why?” one of the three asked, trying to act like he wasn’t concerned. “What will happen?”

She called over the slave with the worst case. “Do you see how the skin is beginning to flake off? A lesion will form next. When that happens, the infection will enter the bloodstream. If the body can’t fight it off, the infection will become systemic and attack your organs, liquifying them.” The Corsairs went stiff, frozen in their nonchalance. “Luckily, the treatment is simple. In this case, cleanliness is truly close to Godliness. Everything you own should be tossed out or thoroughly cleaned. You and your slaves need to bathe daily and apply apple cider vinegar twice a day to each spot. Let it sit for thirty minutes at a time.”

All three pulled their slaves and left right away.

As the work of preparing the chapel progressed, more slaves were called over by Jillybean, one at a time. Most bowed to her, though some were desperate and knelt in front of the dais, where they begged for help. Sadly, Jillybean could only do so much, and then for just a handful of them. Despite this, they kept coming to her. Some simply stared at her; some whispered that they thought she was great.

Some felt their hopes die at the sight of her. She was just a slave, like them. Her chains were heavier than most. Her eyes twittered on the verge of crazy. Her body was small, weak, beaten. She wasn’t what they had been expecting. The slaves had heard every rumor about her, and there were a hundred of those and counting.

These had started with her being the “Girl Doctor,” which was clearly no longer a rumor.

Then, there were her victories over the Captain. At first, the Corsairs wrote them off as accidents, happenstance, freakish bad luck and even witchcraft. Next, they pretended that there had been no losses. The slaves knew better. They could count as well as anyone. During the past few weeks, supposedly invincible fleets had gone south and each time, fewer and fewer boats had come back.

What should have been moments of joy for the slaves were ruined as they suffered retribution at the hands of their masters with each defeat.

And then the Captain had announced a huge victory. He declared that the defeats hadn’t been defeats at all. They had been his way of rooting out traitors and preparing the way for the final conquest of Bainbridge and Alcatraz. He had even managed to cage the Queen. The thin ray of hope had been extinguished.

Some who came to her didn’t say a word even though they were dying. She could only prolong their agonies. These fatalistic members of the slave society were the loudest.

“If she can’t save herself, how can she save us?” they asked anyone who would listen. They appeared to be proven correct when the materials she had asked for finally arrived. A rumor started that she was planning to build a bomb big enough to blow Hoquiam sky-high and then hold the Captain hostage with it.

But she didn’t. She broke the teams into groups: the first set about building the rocket platforms. A second began the intricate process of cutting and forming the different sections of the rockets themselves: the nose, the body in two parts, and the fins. Another group worked on the propellant and another on the warhead.

She oversaw the detonators and the simple electronics. And as night fell and the church became too dark to work, she and the other slaves underwent a thorough frisking that included a cavity search. It was a degradation they could expect on a daily basis.

Jillybean hadn’t saved them, and worse, she was building engines of war for the Corsairs.

Chapter 13

Puget Sound, Washington

The fog hid the slave, but not her whimpering. Zophie Williams started in again as soon as Emily reached the edge of the Sound.

The child cringed and stopped as the icy water lapped around her ankles. Please be quiet! Emily wanted to hiss. I can’t help you, so please just die quietly. It was a horrible, horrible thought, one which she was properly embarrassed by, and yet Emily wouldn’t take it back. Zophie was going to die.

She’d probably die just getting on the boat. “And it’s not like we’re going anywhere. There isn’t any wind. So maybe she’s just better off where…”

“Th-there’s e-enough wind.”

Emily jumped, not realizing how close she was to the Guardian. Having managed to somehow pull his armor back on, he was a grey man in a grey world. The only color about him was the stark white of his face and the deep red fluid leaking from beneath his chest plate. Emily pulled her eyes away from him and turned her glance upward to where the sky should have been. As far as she could tell, there was only a breath of air struggling to move the fog.

“Enough to move the boats?”

“Yes,” he answered. “B-Barely. Don’t l-leave the slave. It’s n-not her fault th-that she got hurt.”

Ashamed of herself, Emily hung her head. “I wasn’t going to. Not really.” Not far away, a zombie moaned and she used it as an excuse to go check on her uncle, who was supposed to be making sure the Harbinger was empty. And if the boat just happened to float away when she got on it, that wouldn’t be her fault, would it?

Neil splashed down right in front of her, dunking himself completely. He probably would have drowned in five feet of water if she hadn’t been right there to preserve what was left of him. When he came up, it looked like the top of his head had been mostly sheared off. His rounded skull bone was staring her right in the face. A noise that was somewhere between a meaty burp and a groan escaped her as she pointed.

“Hmm?” He seemed confused—she felt he should have seemed dead. “What? Oh right, the head thing.” He flopped his scalp back over and squished it down so that pink juices mixed with the water streaming off of him.

Other than the altogether disgusting flap of his head coming off, the dunking seemed to have done him a world of good. Layers of mud and blood had been washed away, making him look far less dead. It was true that he didn’t look exactly alive, still it was an improvement.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “And how did you get here? The last time I saw you, you had fallen off the Queen’s Revenge.”

“Not by taking a short cut, I can tell you that. There was a big fight and then we broke into Hoquiam to rescue Jillybean, but that didn’t work out and I’m afraid Stu probably died.”

“Stu? The guy from San Francisco? That’s too bad. He was nice. Oh, wait.” She took a peek over her shoulder to where Troy Holt was struggling to get to his feet. “That’s that Guardian friend of Jillybean’s, isn’t it?” Now, she was doubly ashamed about wanting to leave him and the slave. She had only met him very briefly during their flight aboard the Queen’s Revenge, and he had seemed a decent and honorable man. And cute, as well.

“Guardian? I guess he is, though we really haven’t had time to talk about religion and such. Hey, look at that. I think he might be hurt.” His wound had to be bad for Neil to notice it.

Together, they helped the Guardian to the Harbinger, which was the closer of the two boats. Getting him on board was another thing. Even with the partial use of his arms and legs, it was a struggle, one that they would have to repeat with Zophie Williams. Only with her, instead of stoic grunts of pain, she let out little shrieks that brought more than one zombie crashing through the water.

The first was a small one, maybe only six and a half feet. It was trampled into the ooze by the next one that brought with it a wave of its own. This creature was so big that it dislodged both boats and sent them back into the fog, adrift on the Sound. By itself, the zombie was so large that when it grabbed the rail it tipped the Harbinger practically on its side.

“I got this,” Neil claimed, hoisting an M4 that looked large in his small hands. It took him more shots than Emily could count to finally kill the monster. “You know, I think there’s something wrong with this gun,” he declared, turning a scarred lip up at it. “I think it’s got a bent barrel.” Before anyone could say anything, he tossed the gun into the water.

Troy rolled his eyes.

Neil shrugged. “What? We don’t need broken guns lying around, Troy. They’re just a waste of ammo. Well, look at us, we got ourselves a boat. Now we can make it home. Your mom must be worried sick. I bet she has the entire island ready to march off to war.” He beamed at her not realizing that his words, features and expressions didn’t match. “What do you guys think? Should we cut away that other boat?”

He had a knife out and was sawing away at a rope in a flash. “No!” both Troy and Emily cried.

“What?”

“Don’t cut us away,” Emily said, hurrying over to the port side to take his knife. “Gunner’s over there. He’s hurt.”

“Gunner?” Neil asked, looking over at the Dead Fish in confusion. His expression changed a second later. “Oh, you mean Captain Grey.”

Emily had just taken the knife from his hand. “Captain Grey? No, I’m talking about Gunner. Jeeze, Uncle Neil, you must have hit your head harder than you thought.”

“Yeah,” he answered. His look wasn’t one of embarrassment as she expected. Instead he had that cheesy smile going, the one he used whenever he was trying to pass off a bad lie. “I meant Gunner. Ha-ha. It’s Gunner, right Troy?”

The Guardian, breathing in short, sharp hitches, was half-sitting, half-lying on one of the cushioned benches. “D-Don’t bring m-me into this.” He raised a bloody finger and pointed at the rope Neil had been about to cut. “Th-that r-rope isn’t holding the, the, the two boats together…either way. It’s the sh-shroud…” Unable to finish, he gestured toward the mast.

“Are you saying the rope is part of all this,” Neil waved his hands around to indicate the interwoven confusion of lines that somehow made a sailboat go. Troy nodded. Neil laughed. “It’s a good thing I didn’t cut it. Ha-ha.” The laugh had been forced and it died quickly. “So. Should we go get Cap…” He blinked before continuing, “Should we go get Gunner? I mean, we don’t need two boats, right? And this one seems sturdy enough.”

Even in the depths of his pain, which was far more considerable than he was letting on, Troy couldn’t believe his ears. One didn’t just give up a boat, willy-nilly. The idea was sickening. He grunted, “We keep both boats.”

“Also, I don’t think he’ll live if we move him,” Emily added. “Can we really tie the boats together? So, they’ll both move together, you know?” Troy nodded wearily. He then pantomimed: nose to tail; thirty feet. It meant going back into the water, but since she couldn’t trust Neil to tie even a simple granny knot, she went in with one end of a length of rope in her teeth.

“What about the wheel? Which way do I have to point it?” she called from the Dead Fish.

A second later, Neil bawled across the thirty feet separating them, “He says make it neutral for now!”

“I can hear you just fine, Uncle Neil. There’s no need to shout.” She tied the rope off at the bow and then decided to check on Gunner. Just as she turned, she remembered the leak. “I forgot to mention that this boat is sinking. It got shot like eight times and now there’s water in the bottom compartments. What do I do about that?”

There was a delay, then Neil hissed out, “See if there’s any hull patch kits aboard. He says they’re easy to use. If not see if they have any towels. What? Oh, dowels. I thought he said towels. If you can see the holes, hammer the dowels into them. For the ones you can’t see, you’ll have to go beneath the boat. Do you need some help? I can be over in a second.”

“And have to save you from drowning?” she said under her breath. “No thank you, Uncle Neil. I got this.” She went below and found Gunner staring at her from over the kettle. He had tired eyes. Everything below them was covered by a blanket he had pulled up to cover the hideousness of his face.

“You’re okay?” he asked. “I heard guns.” His voice was soft and sad.

There was something in those eyes that made her pause. He thinks he’s going to die, she thought. And he doesn’t know what to think about that. Aloud, she said, “I’m fine, not a scratch. What about you? Are you okay? Do you need anything?” A look of relief passed across her youthful features when he shook his head. “That’s good because this boat is sinking and I gotta fix the holes or she’ll go down.”

He didn’t seem to care. “Do me one favor. I heard Neil. When you finish plugging the holes, send him over. I want to talk to him.”

“You know Neil? How?”

“From before you were born. Also, I just ran into him a few days ago. Him and Stu Currans. Is Stu with him? I’d like to see him…” She had shaken her head in that way that everyone understood. “Oh, he’s dead. That’s too bad. I liked him for Jillybean. She needs someone who’ll have a calming effect on her.”

Emily stood looking down at him, feeling as though she was missing something important. It was driven from her mind when the boat let out an unexpected groan. “The holes!” she cried before running around searching for something to patch the boat with. It wasn’t hard to find since one cabinet next to the galley had the word EMERGENCY stenciled on it.

Along with a well-stocked med-kit were two fire extinguishers, a flare gun with a dozen shells and a box filled with different boat-related repair kits. There were two different types of hull repair kits. The first was designed to be used when the boat was out of the water. The second was what she needed.

There were wooden dowels and circles of cork all in different diameters. There was also a short-handled mallet, a tube of 3M5200 sealant, a plastic squeegee, a roll of fiberglass tape, and finally, a little three-page manual. Seeing it had her breathing a sigh of relief. What was even better was that the emergency repairs were childishly simple. All she had to do was find the holes, pick out a dowel or piece of cork that was the tiniest bit larger than the hole and then tap it into place with the mallet.

The relief was short-lived. She could only get at three of the holes from inside the boat. For the rest, she would have to go beneath the boat with the sealant in one hand a strip of the three-inch wide tape in the other.

She paused at the back of the boat, suddenly afraid to go in. It would be dark down there. Dark as a midnight pit, where even the shadows were drowned. She would be blind, scrambling around, trying to feel for tiny holes while her lungs burned and her clothes grew tight, constricting her, keeping her from being able to…

“Jeeze,” she whispered, her heart racing like mad. She was right on the edge of panic. It took her a few deep breaths before she could even think about going in, “Just for a look.” She expected that there would be nothing to look at, exactly.

With the sun was dropping into the west behind layers of cloud and fog, the darkness beneath the boat was pure black, pierced only by thin rays of light coming from the bullet holes. They were dazzling in the inky water.

She swam for the closest hole, thinking she’d have the boat fixed in no time. The procedure was simple: a quick squeeze of the sealant onto the tape before it was applied to the hole and voila, no more hole. She didn’t take into account the force of the vacuum created by the negative space in the hull relative to that of the surrounding water. The tape was sucked into the hole in a blink. Cursing silently she swam to the surface to get another piece of tape ready.

This time she slapped it down and held it there with her palm. Although it seemed to hold, she didn’t trust it and went back to the surface for more. She put down four strips, one on top of the other, and then went to the next hole. Again and again, she broke the surface gasping for air, and each time she stared around in fear. There were zombies in the water with her. She could hear them, but couldn’t see them.

Finally, the job was done; the first of many for her. She sent Neil over to see Gunner and while he was away, Emily raised the main on the Harbinger, and as the wind shifted, she was able to ease them to the northeast. This was with Troy’s help, of course. She thought the idea of going anywhere in the fog was insane, even at the walking pace they were currently making.

As he knew exactly where they had started and he had charts of the Sound available, he wasn’t nervous at all; about sailing, that is. His chest wound was another matter. His death felt like it was only hours away, if not sooner, and he had a strange sensation of being incomplete. Spiritually, he was ready to die, and had been for years. The problem was that he still had too much to do.

In essence, his quest was incomplete.

He had come north to defeat the Black Captain. Not that he had expected to fight an epic one-on-one battle against him. He had simply hoped to do his part, which he knew in his heart was more than just running away with a slave and a demon.

But now he had a boat. Two in fact. In his world, there was no clearer sign from God than this.

“God loves me,” he whispered, as he watched the young girl going about the boat. Just then, she was checking on Zophie, shushing her so she could take her pulse. As she felt the pulse, she bit her lip and then gave the woman a strained smile.

Next, Emily came to check on Troy. She had taken a stethoscope from the med-kit, but before she could place it on his chest, he asked, “Do you have…actual medical…training?”

“Some. Not enough.”

She went to apply the listening end a second time, and again he stopped her. “God has chosen me, and God will preserve me.” Her eyes went wide in alarm and he nodded, seeing that she understood. “You will…take the…bullet…out.”

“No, no, no. I can’t. I’m not a surgeon.” The idea was ludicrous. It was laughable. It was insane. “I’m eleven years old, for goodness sakes.”

“Then Neil…will do it.”

Neil had drawn the two boats together and had somehow managed not to fall off either one as he climbed back over to the Harbinger. It was a near thing and if it hadn’t been for Emily leaping up to catch him, he would have gone right in. He gave her a brief smile that didn’t touch his baby blue eyes. “Neil will do what?”

“Operate…on me,” Troy gasped. “Someone has to…or I’ll die.”

“Have Emily do it.”

She looked at him in shock. He shot her that brief smile again and then looked away. He was distracted. Something had happened on the other boat. “No, Emily won’t do it,” she said, “Because Emily can’t.”

“Jillybean taught you. Maybe not everything, but enough. You’re his only hope, so get going.” He left them, going below deck. When he came back, he was stuffing a sheath of papers into one of his pockets. “I’ll be back to help in a few minutes.”

Emily stopped him. “What did Gunner say to you? He told you something, I know it. I can tell by the way you’re acting.”

“Uhhhh, he, uhhhh, just wanted me tooooo,” he dragged the word out for at least ten seconds as he thought of a lie. “To, uh check the holes. And that’s what I’m going to do. So while I’m doing that, you take care of things here.” Neil clambered quickly back across to the Dead Fish, leaving Emily on the verge of crying. Tears welled in her eyes, making them seem brighter and bigger and, in a nonsexual way, irresistible.

The tears of a woman frequently undid a man. They couldn’t be fought with strength or dealt with intellectually, and were almost always a response to a problem that defied rational solutions. They were confusing. The tears cut through Troy’s pain, making him want to ignore his coming death and comfort her. “It’ll be…okay,” he hitched out and patted her shoulder.

She didn’t think it would be. She was being asked to be the mature adult in the group, to fix everyone’s problems, to cut into people, to sail ships and to fight Corsairs. She had to keep everyone safe, she had to feed them, and change their bandages, and pretend not to be afraid when all she wanted to do was go below and hide. She was exhausted, hungry and cold. And she was just a kid. This wasn’t an excuse, it was a fact. She was a kid who missed her mom and her warm home and her soft bed.

Sometimes, hiding was a kid’s best option and she took it. “I should check on the uh, boat. This boat, I mean.” She went below without looking back. A fire burned in a squat kettle that was very much like the one in the Dead Fish. It had burned low, but still put out enough light for her to see that the Harbinger was both oddly clean and monumentally disgusting. The common areas were uncluttered and smelled of concentrated lemon; the cabins were filthy and smelled of feet. All except for the captain’s cabin. His looked as though it was regularly and thoroughly cleaned.

Emily went and sat on the bed and let the tears go. They were hot on her cold cheeks. She shivered and held herself and cried. It should have been a cathartic moment. Her tears were a condensed and liquified form of stress, and each one would have brought her closer to a form of acceptance of her current predicament—if she’d been allowed actual time to release them.

After only a minute, she jumped as something began thumping on deck almost directly over her head.

With the tears still on her cheeks, she raced up the stairs, thinking that a zombie had somehow gotten on board. It was only Zophie Williams. “Hey, girl! I need some drugs. What’s in that box? Huh? I need some pain meds, okay. You gotta help me.”

A flare of anger erupted in Emily; she wasn’t even being allowed to cry in peace!

Her anger didn’t last. She was too emotionally drained to sustain anything so bitter. With a sigh and a shrug of one shoulder, she looked in the box. “Motrin is about it.”

Zophie groaned in despair and pain. “Fine. Just gimme some.” Emily shook out four pills, thought better of it and added four more. They didn’t seem to help.

When Emily asked Troy if he wanted the same, he shook his head. “Save them… for someone…with a chance.”

Emily’s anger came back hot and fast. “I don’t appreciate being guilted,” she said, imitating her mother perfectly without realizing it. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then sort of slumped. She shook out eight of the pills and put them in his hand.

He didn’t swallow them. “Take the bullet out,” he hissed. “Only way…to relieve…pain.”

It was true. One way or another, alive or dead, his pain would decrease. She almost nodded. “First, you have to tell me what’s going on with Neil. He knows something. Something about Gunner or me. I don’t trust Neil being over there. The way he is now makes him kinda gullible, you know what I mean? He could be agreeing to anything.” Even though Gunner had saved her life, she was still afraid of him and his motives. His eyes were full of lies and deception. But about what? He could have turned her over to the Corsairs at any time. And if he had wanted to take her and do “things” to her, he could have done that as well.

“Trust him,” Troy hissed between sharp breaths. “He won’t…hurt you.”

“That’s not what I asked. You can sit there until you’re ready to answer.” She was so close to channeling her mother that she only just managed to stop herself from adding: Young Lady!

“There’s no secret here,” Zophie said. “All he’s doing is hiding who he is, and Neil said his name already. It’s Captain Grey. What’s the big deal? Is he an old Corsair or something?”

Emily took a step back from Troy, her jaw going suddenly slack and her mouth forming a long O. She had heard Neil with perfect clarity, but had assumed that he had gotten his zombie-fried wires crossed and had dismissed what he said. But could she dismiss his actions? Or Gunner’s? He had saved her life at the cost of his own, and he had done so without comment, without asking anything of her, without a thought. In hindsight, she saw that he had done so naturally as only a loving father would.

“He’s no Corsair,” Emily whispered. “He’s my dad.”

Chapter 14

Bainbridge Island, Washington

All that day Deanna Grey inspected the walls of the island looking for a secret entrance, a revolving wall, or a door hidden by illusion. She tapped here and there with a stick, whistled up drainpipes, and inspected every seam and every crack. It was a long wall, which made for a long, wasted day.

The next morning, she tried a different approach to get at the explosives which she was sure were crammed to the hilt within the walls. She went to the Records Office and poured over everything she could find on the wall. This should have started and ended with the blueprints of the wall itself, except they looked altogether normal.

She even resorted to holding the separate sheets up to a light, looking for secret instructions. “Might as well be holding these up to the light of a full moon,” she said, tossing the last onto the pile.

There were seven boxes of records concerning the construction of the wall and she had to wonder if there was an iota of truth in any of them. Jillybean was too smart to label her blueprints with: Insert bomb here. “No, she would have two sets of plans.” One set for herself and one set for the government overseer, which in this case had been Deanna herself.

Deanna was the first to admit that she had not done much when it came to actual supervising. She wasn’t a construction expert and had relied on a three-man management team. Each of them had been in construction back before the apocalypse, and together they put Jillybean’s plan into place—and now they were dead. Two had died of cancer within two years of the wall being built, and the third had committed suicide not long after.

She hadn’t thought of their deaths as suspect or conspiratorial at the time, but seeing their names now sent a chill up her back. “No. She wouldn’t have killed them.” Except she might have. This was Jillybean. If the ends were important enough, then the means were wide open. Murder was definitely a possibility with her. “And she had done the autopsies on all three men. God.”

Compelled to find the truth, Deanna hurried to the clinic. It was empty as she had expected. There were only two other people with any medical background on the island. One was a former nurse who had suffered a nervous breakdown even before Jillybean’s arrival, and had happily taken up motherhood as soon as she could. The other had been a nursing assistant who had been utterly freaked out by an eight-year-old slicing into people with a smile on her face.

When it came to the health of an individual, Jillybean kept meticulous records. Deanna easily found the files of the three men in question. All had been diagnosed before construction of the wall started. One with lung cancer, one with Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Carl Grasso with chronic depression, stemming from what he described as an endless and losing battle with “the bottle.”

“Hmm,” Deanna whispered, sitting back. “So, she chose as her managers men who were not going to live that long. At least she didn’t murder them. That’s a relief I sup…” Deanna suddenly remembered rewarding the three men with bottles of aged whiskey at the unveiling ceremony. “Great. Maybe I killed Carl.”

She left the clinic in something of a funk. The fog sitting over this portion of the Sound had become thinner and didn’t hang nearly so low. Visibility wasn’t more than a hundred yards, which made the sighting of a Corsair boat even more worrisome.

Wayne French came rushing up, his cheeks rosy, his forehead glistening with sweat, his BDUs far too crisp and clean. “Deanna, thank God! The Corsairs are here!” he cried, pointing back the way he had come.

Panic seized Deanna in the span of one choking breath. “How-how many?”

“Just one that we saw, but you know as well as I do that they don’t go about one at a time. There’s got to be an entire fleet out there. Do we fire on it?”

Say the word and go from a cold war to a hot one with the pull of a trigger. And if the Corsairs were diplomats with news about her daughter? “No. Not yet. Though we should move to a war footing. I want a full muster. Everyone eleven and up will report. How long will that take?”

“Two hours or so, but what about the council? Shouldn’t we meet first to make it official? If I begin the muster and they vote not to go to war, we’ll look pretty stupid. And we might start a panic.”

Deanna didn’t like how pale he had become and how his right eye twitched at her, but she was downright shocked at what he was saying. There were Corsairs in the Sound and he was worrying about starting a panic? As far as she knew, it was the perfect time for the people to panic. She did not have that luxury. She couldn’t give in to the feeling that had her heart racing and her throat constricting. She had to retain her composure and assess the situation from a political standpoint.

There were two questions that had to be answered: Was her Chief of Security having second thoughts about the necessity of going to war? And would he vote against her in the council?

If he did, the others would follow suit one after another. There was even a chance that Veronica would as well. If that happened, there was a possibility that Andrea Clary could force a “no confidence” vote on the council and with her pushing “Peace in our time,” it just might pass. In a snap, Deanna would be ousted as Governor.

Do I dare calling for the muster? she wondered. Do I dare not to? The Corsairs were coming no matter what and the only way to fight them was if she had the full backing of the council and the people. Judging by Wayne’s nervous demeanor, she guessed that she would have neither.

“Maybe you’re right about holding off on the muster. Double the patrols and set the council meeting for this evening. We can always bump it up if we see more boats. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in Jillybean’s school.” Wayne raised an eyebrow at this, but said nothing. Just as he turned to go, Deanna remembered something about him. “You helped to build the wall way back when, right? Do you remember if there was anything strange about the construction?”

“You mean with the materials?”

She shook her head, letting her long blonde hair swing freely. “No. Just how it was built. Did you find the process strange?”

He shrugged, his shoulders suddenly looking small and weak, his neck thinner than it had. The sight of a single Corsair boat seemed to have shrunken him. “Maybe a little. It was Jillybean’s project, so there had to be some strangeness, right? We had different groups going here and there. Every day we would be at a new section. At the time, I thought it was chaotic, but it was brilliantly chaotic. She was like a conductor sending people in a hundred directions and only she knew what was really happening. Still, in the end we got the wall up and faster than I thought possible.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said, wearing her politician’s smile. Brilliantly chaotic—that had always been Jillybean. Deanna was now convinced more than ever there were bombs in the wall.

Wayne was anxious to go and she sent him off at a run. She then strode briskly to Jillybean’s school. It was easily the most frightening place on the island—there was a reason that the windows were barred and the doors were chained shut. The moans of the undead could be heard from outside. They reminded her that she had forgotten to feed them.

“I’ve been a little distracted,” she muttered as she unlocked the massive Yale padlock. She cracked the front door and listened for a few moments, afraid that the creatures might have broken their chains and were now roaming the halls. As far as she could tell, they were still secure.

Afraid that assassins were still hounding her, she left the lights off as she stepped inside. It felt like a mistake. She didn’t believe in ghosts or haunted asylums or any of that business, or so she told herself as her flesh flared with goosebumps and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. It wasn’t just the shadowed gloom and the long doleful moans that had her heart going. There was something of Jillybean’s madness hanging in the air.

From the age of eight on up, she had come to this nearly empty building and had done things.

For the most part, they were secret things; experiments mostly, and some had been extremely beneficial to the community. Jillybean had also done some other things that few people knew about. Even Deanna didn’t know everything. Only Neil was in on all of her dealings and when Deanna pressed him too closely, he would just shake his head and just say, “It’s best if you don’t know.”

Now she had to know.

On tiptoe, she made her way toward Jillybean’s labs, but one missed step sent an old Coke can clanking across the floor. The beasts went mad, their furious roars echoing up and down the empty halls, making Deanna cringe. She knew there’d be no shutting them up… “Unless they’re eating. Yuck.” As much as she didn’t want to, she made her way to the boy’s locker room, and as always, the giant creatures were an assault on the senses. Their roars made her ears ache, their overpowering stench made her want to vomit, and the sight of them made her want to run and hide like a child.

The largest of them was over ten feet in height with shoulders that were as wide as a kitchen table and arms that were fabulously long and unbelievably strong. The chains holding it in place could anchor a destroyer and yet, they looked as though they were bending as the creature tried to get at her.

“Don’t be like that, Stumpy.” It was Jillybean’s nickname for the monster. “Just eat your food.” For the most part, his diet consisted of whatever leftovers Jillybean could scrounge. She received daily deliveries from the fishermen who piled fish heads, guts and tails down a shoot. The three schools donated expired food and scraps, and farmers were quick to hand over the moldy remains of what they couldn’t sell.

The zombies were fed by the shovel-full. They screamed in fury the entire time Deanna was in the room, but forgot about her the moment she walked away. The sound they made when they ate was so revolting that Deanna stuffed her fingers in her ears as she made her way to Jillybean’s office. Most people would have used the principal’s office as their own; most people weren’t Jillybean. She used the school’s science lab because she was in it more times than not.

There were fourteen workstations, each equipped with a microscope, a laptop, a little sink, running water and a gas line. Thirteen of the stations had some sort of experiment currently running, or so Deanna assumed by the stacks of petri dishes, the whirring centrifuges, the numerous grow lights and the many beakers. Some of the latter contained what looked like black sludge and smelled of rotten eggs.

Along with all of this, the room contained nine filing cabinets. In typical Jillybean style, each cabinet had a list of the contents taped to the side.

There was no mention of Operation Otter Pop anywhere. “There’s nothing about explosives in any of these, either. Which is good, I guess.”

The stacks of paperwork on Jillybean’s desk concerned every matter under the sun, except bombs, and that left only her personal computer. Just like almost everyone else on the island, Deanna wasn’t great with computers. They were a throwback and reminded people how they had they had gotten themselves in an apocalypse to begin with.

Deanna hadn’t really cared for them back before. They had always been changing programs and apps; just enough to make things confusing and frustrating. Had it not been for the internet, she wouldn’t have toughed them. “There’s no internet now,” she whispered as she sat down and flicked on the device. It whirred and hummed into life, and she was confronted with an immediate problem.

“A password? Hmm, let’s try Ipes.” It didn’t work and neither did Sadie, Einstein, calculus or a hundred other words that she associated with Jillybean.

“I’m being stupid. She would never use a word that just anyone could guess. But I’m not just anyone. I should be able to get this.” She racked her brain without success. She gazed around the science lab, looking for clues. Her eyes fell on the Periodic Table of Elements that seemed to be a prerequisite for every science lab in the country. Her face warped in a look of disgust. Science had never been her thing either.

Apprehensively, she approached the chart, her pretty eyes flicking over the abbreviated elemental names. It was a surprise how few of them she actually knew.

“Noble gasses? How is a gas noble? Gadolinium? Krypton? Is that really a thing? Jeeze-loo-eeze, some ultra-nerd named an element after Superman’s home planet? And people were okay with that?”

With a sigh, she tore down the chart and went back to the computer and began typing in the names of elements, starting with Krypton. When those didn’t work, she actually typed in Jillybeanium. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work, either. Cursing, she shoved the chart off the desk and it was then that she heard a door close in the school. It was an accidental click, a secretive one that had her reaching for her knife and darting for the door.

Now she heard footfalls. They weren’t the striding, confident steps of someone with an innocent purpose. No, these were soft. Someone was trying to be stealthy. Deanna pictured the assassin and readied the knife; her plan was to plunge it into the person first, and ask questions later. The doorknob twisted, the door opened slowly and, unexpectedly, Deanna saw a big blonde mane of wavy hair.

“Veronica?”

The big blonde screamed, making Deanna jump and setting off the zombies again.

“You scared the crap out of me!” Veronica said, clutching her chest.

Behind her was Deberha Perkins, looking wide-eyed and pale. “Wayne said you were here. He…some of us are just sorta wondering what you’re doing here?”

Deanna tucked the knife away. “I was just…you know, checking things out. I forgot all Jillybean’s zombies. I had to, you know, feed them.”

Veronica wasn’t buying it. “Nope. Nope. Don’t lie to me, Dee. I know you better than that. You’re here for something else. Is it a weapon? It’s a weapon, right?” Deanna shook her head, not knowing whether she should let even her best friend in on Operation Otter Pop. Veronica gave her a sharp look. “Come on, Dee. We all know she was experimenting with weapons. She used to shoot them off all the time. So what are they? Missiles of some sort?”

“No. The council never trusted Jillybean, and the only times she ever shot anything off was when Neil caught her in the process of finishing a rocket or some sort of ‘sub-sonic missile.’ As if being sub-sonic made it any better. It’s my guess that she always allowed herself to get caught right when she was finishing up with something.”

Deberha glanced around nervously. “Maybe she had more rockets than she let on. Maybe there are a bunch here in the school.”

“Maybe, though I kind of doubt it. She hadn’t been able to get the guidance packages correct against moving targets, especially small ones like a sailboat, and she isn’t the kind of person who would waste time and energy on an inferior product. Trust me, I wanted her to succeed. It’s why I made sure you turned a blind eye on her, Deberha.”

“I kinda figured as much. If you’re not after missiles, then what are you doing here?”

Although Deberha was too shy and lacked the intelligence to be a spy, and Veronica was too big and brassy, Deanna hesitated. The thought of tearing down the walls was just so outrageous that she didn’t want to say anything unless she actually could do it…and even then, she didn’t know if she would actually announce it to the world. As she was thinking this, a sly idea hatched inside her. She could blow up the wall and blame it on the assassin. Everyone would believe it.

She hid the grim smile that wanted to spread itself triumphantly across her face, and pointed at the computer. “I was hoping to see if, you know, I was wrong about the missiles. Do either of you guys know anything about computers? It needs a password and I don’t know it.”

“Did you try Ipes?” Veronica asked. “Remember that little stuffed zebra she used to carry around?”

“Yep. And Sadie and Neil, and her birthday, and everything else I could think of. I was doing science words when you guys showed up.”

“It could be something mathy,” Veronica said with a curl to her lips, as if math was a disease and something to avoid at all costs.

Deanna felt her own lip curling, hoping Veronica was wrong. The password could be one of those incomprehensible formulas where letters meant numbers and there were squiggly lines, Greek signs and other gibberish that only eggheads could understand. “Maybe it’s even a math problem,” Deanna said, in horror.

The three women stood in silence until Deberha shook her head. “Naw, it couldn’t be. I had a computer back before. It was the one with the apple on it. The password wasn’t a question. It was just a word or one of those symbols on the keyboard. It was supposed to be something only you would know.”

“Yeah, but the problem is, Jillybean knows a lot. Even when she was a kid, she seemed to know everything. What I really wanted to know is if either of you knew how to get around the password.”

“Like hack into it?” Veronica asked. “Sorry, the only thing I used my computer for was email and Facebook. I once dated a guy who said he was a hacker.”

Deanna stared down at the keyboard, remembering the laptop she had carted around from class to class. It had a Free Tibet bumper sticker slapped across it, which in hindsight was the ultimate in virtue signaling. Other than buying the bumper sticker, she hadn’t done a thing to help Tibet. In fact, she wasn’t sure exactly where Tibet was or who had enslaved it, but damn it if that bumper sticker didn’t just scream: I CARE!

She wished she could go back and slap her nineteen-year-old self. She’d had a wonderful childhood and her future had seemed so bright that she had not bothered to learn anything of any real use.

“What about a work-around?” she asked. “I remember that if you hit a few keys at once, it would do things.”

Deberha leaned over Deanna’s shoulder. “Yeah, you could hit control-alt-delete and it would do something. Try it, Dee.”

Nothing happened. Veronica gave the mouse a shake. “Maybe it’s not that kind of computer. Hey, you know what? My sister used to write her password on a piece of paper and tape it under her keyboard. That hacker-guy said that was a no-no, but she did it anyway.”

“There’s no way Jillybean would do that,” Deanna said. “She’s too smart.” Smart or not, Deanna was desperate and she turned over the keyboard and, as expected, found nothing. Deberha looked on the computer tower itself and drew back with a laugh.

“Maybe she isn’t too smart.” She pointed at a small piece of paper that read: Black, this is Mink—Duzklphghv. “Quick, type that in, Dee.”

There was only space for twelve letter. “It’s not working. Read off those last jumble of letters.” It did not work either. Deanna peeled off the paper and sat back staring at it. “Duzklphghv. Is that Russian?” The other two could only shrug. “What about Black, this is Mink? Is that a code? It’s kind of familiar. Was that a movie or a song from way back before?”

Neither woman had heard of a song like that. Deberha got comfortable on one of the stations, while Veronica pulled over a chair, repeating to herself, “Black, this is Mink.” After about the seventh time of saying this she asked, “Hey, are minks black. You know, the animal, naturally, I mean?”

No one knew.

They settled back into a deep silence that was broken only by one of them saying, “Hmm,” or mumbling, “Black, this is Mink.” Deanna felt the answer to the riddle was just beyond her grasp, but the more she tried to match Russian words with black minks, the more it seemed to slip away from her. She decided that she would try to meditate and let everything go in the hope that the answer would simply present itself.

She was more than halfway asleep when a warbling cry from down the corridor made her jump. “Governor?”

Veronica spazzed at the cry, while Deberha leapt off the table and comically scrambled for her holstered gun, which she never actually managed to free. The zombies were going crazy again and over their ruckus, the man yelled again, louder this time.

“Hold on!” Deanna cried, snatching the little scrap of paper from the computer. There were two men at the door; both were armed with old M16s, which they held in sweat-slicked palms.

“Commander French told me to tell you that there are more Corsairs,” the older of the two said, sneaking a peek past Deanna. His name was Joe Collins, and just at that moment, he was far more afraid of the zombies in the school than of any Corsair. He had heard the rumors about how gigantic the zombies were, and judging by the noise they were making, he guessed correctly that in this case the rumors were spot on. His M16 felt like a little plastic toy and he hoped his relief didn’t show when Deanna started wrapping the chain through the door handles and locked the school tight.

She immediately began marching east with Joe struggling to keep up. He was only sixteen and was still growing—growing in the oddest manner possible. Parts of him were growing at different rates. First it had been his ears and the other boys had called him Dumbo. Then it his nose. It had stuck out from his face like a shark fin. Currently it was his feet. Lately it felt like he was walking about with snowshoes on.

“How many are there?” Deanna asked, speaking over her shoulder. “Are they heading this way? And what’s with this ‘Commander French’ business? Are you guys making fun of him again?”

Joe didn’t know which to answer first. “Sorry. It was a joke, but I guess it’s caught on. And the Corsairs aren’t coming here, yet. The fog lifted a little and we caught them landing some men across the way in Seattle.”

Bainbridge was so small that this short conversation was all it took before they came within sight of the wall. People were streaming to it and already the five-foot wide walkway on top was crowded with people, most of whom were nowhere near their proper battle stations.

Feeling important, Joe went ahead of her, barking, “Make way for the Governor! Make a hole. Come on, Jonny, step aside.”

The other members of the council were already on the wall staring out at the distant ships, which kept appearing and disappearing in the shrouds of fog. “We’ve counted twenty-two ships so far,” Wayne said, handing her a pair of binoculars. “Most were around fifty-footers, so I can’t imagine them having any more than twenty men per boat. Nothing we can’t handle.” He said this, expecting a cheer, and received only a few hopeful looks mixed in with a bunch of frightened ones.

“And how many of their boats did you miss because of the fog?” Andrea Clary demanded in a shrill tone. She was bundled in a long quilted parka that gave her an oddly rectangular appearance. “They could have a thousand men over there by now. Is that more than we can handle?”

“Let’s not do this here,” Deanna said softly, her smile placid and easy. “We’ll discuss tactics in chamber. Have we heard anything from the west side of the island?” It was generally thought that any attack would come from the west where the Sound was narrow, barely three hundred yards in places.

Wayne pretended that Andrea didn’t exist. “Nothing as of a half hour ago. Let me radio Paul. Crow-one, this is War Eagle, over.”

From that second on, Deanna stopped listening. She was suddenly transported back in time to a point eleven years earlier when she barely knew Jillybean. She had been a tiny little thing and needed two hands to hold the radio. Green, this is Pink, she had said into the radio.

They had been preparing to break into the River King’s prison to free Sadie. Her codename was Green, Deanna’s was Black, and Jillybean’s was her favorite color: Pink.

“Black, this is Pink,” she whispered, knowing that Jillybean had left the cryptic message for her alone. It meant that she wanted Deanna to see what was inside the computer. “But what’s the code? Who’s got a piece of paper?” It would be a simple code, one that a comparatively simple person like Deanna could figure out. “Mink for Pink. M for P.”

Paper was found and she quickly turned away from the others. With her back to them, she wrote out the alphabet twice, one over the other so that the M sat above the P. From there she was able to turn Duzklphghv into Archimedes. She had no idea who Archimedes was, but it sounded exactly like the kind of word Jillybean would use.

Chapter 15

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay

Deanna wasn’t the only one dealing with the issue of boats invading what she considered her territory.

Like she had every morning, Jenn Lockhart watched the sun rise from atop the prison roof, her long black coat flapping in the wind, her hair streaming behind her. And like every morning she watched the boats cut across the bay in a long procession, heading for Angel Island to disgorge more soldiers. And just like Deanna, the sixteen-year-old was powerless to stop it. The major difference, of course was that the ships shouldering aside the grey waves in the bay had brilliant white sails and the soldiers wore grey armor and carried shining steel spears.

Jenn wasn’t entirely upset that the Guardians were moving into the Bay area. They had an army of brave soldiers, while she only had a small parcel of sheep-like men, a bevy of ex-slaves from Sacramento, ex-prostitutes from Santa Clara, and the ragged leftovers from the Hilltop.

The Guardians also had a small, but well-trained navy of about thirty ships, while her navy consisted of the magnificent Queen’s Revenge and six wrecks that Mike Gunter had managed to salvage from the shallows. They were lying on their sides on the hill above the dock. Their black sails were in tatters and their hulls riddled with holes and gashes. Jenn wondered if they would ever float again.

And if they could be salvaged, where would she get the crews to man them when she barely had enough people to defend the Floating Fortress, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz itself?

This also brought up the very sticky question of command in general. The Guardians had a competent military man in Commander Walker, while Jenn had no one she felt she could turn to beyond Mike. At sea, he was a gifted captain, but did his genius extend beyond the edges of his own ship? Could he command a tiny fleet to victory against crushing odds? No one knew, not even Mike. On the other hand, he was the first to admit that he was almost useless on land. He was brave, no one doubted that, but his commanding stature seemed to shrink on land. He became a follower and not the leader that Jenn desperately needed.

For the most part, the few men left among the bay people were those who always managed to find ways not to be around when the fighting raged. They were the ones who had ready-made excuses to shirk actual work or who just stayed perpetually, intensively drunk. By necessity, the women picked up the slack, but only a handful had any experience actually fighting, and even fewer could sail a ship, and just one, Rebecca Haigh, had experience captaining a ship in an actual fight.

The only person Jenn felt she could count on was herself, and that scared her right down to her toes. And it was this reason that she was outside with the wind knifing past her black, three-quarter length coat. She was looking for a sign and had been every morning and every evening since her flight southward with what felt like the entire Corsair fleet after them.

In all that time no sign had come to her.

Every morning and every night had been the same. She stood on the roof of the prison until her cheeks were red and her hands were numb. Every day Shaina Hale stood with her, huddled in a blanket, her teeth chattering, and every day, the slow-witted woman would ask when the Queen was returning. Every day, Jenn would have to remind her, “I’m the queen, now.”

“You look like her,” Shaina would always say.

Everyone said the same thing, especially when she was standing on the roof with her dark auburn hair spinning in a wild dance above her head. “I just have to act her,” she told herself. Jillybean wouldn’t be wasting her time looking for a sign. She would be plotting and planning and building bombs. She certainly wouldn’t be hiding out on a rooftop second-guessing herself.

“Don’t get down on yourself, Jenn,” Jenn muttered. “She’s a genius at war…or she was.” She still didn’t understand why Jillybean had sacrificed herself. “And it wasn’t just her life she had sacrificed, either. It’s all of our lives.” Deep in her heart, Jenn did not think she had a chance of defeating the Corsairs when they finally came south. From her position she saw almost the entire bay and she saw just how weak they were.

They lacked ships, real fighters, ammo and a proper leader. There was no getting around any of this.

“We have bombs, though.”

“A lot of them?” Shaina asked, with an extra-large shiver.

Jenn patted her back. “Don’t be afraid of them, they won’t blow up without me saying so.” Actually, she wondered if they would blow up at all. She had plenty of bombs but no way to detonate them. Every electronics store in the bay area had been scrounged for radio-controlled devices to be used with the hundreds of torpedoes that had gone north with the Queen.

Counting the small cache of torpedoes that had been left behind, she only had thirty-four remote detonators to use against the Corsair fleet which still had something like two-hundred ships!

The very idea made her want to run away. They all wanted to run, and some had, mostly Santas. They snuck away at any chance they could, but they wouldn’t get far. The fires of bandit patrols could be seen in the west at night, and the Guardians had brought word that the Mexican rovers were straying far out of their usual territories. They were picking off the stragglers, while the zombies were gorging themselves on the larger groups.

A sigh escaped Jenn as she turned to Shaina. “Can I ask a favor of you?”

The dull eyes brightened. “You want breakfast again, your Queen-ness? Like yesterday? Only don’t burn the eggs this time, right? That was an accident. There was this bird. You know the ones with the black wings, and head, and all?”

“The crow scared you. I remember. There won’t be a crow this time, I promise.” Jenn was about to send her off when she saw one of the sailboats cut away from the rest. It was slowly heading towards Alcatraz. She bent over her telescope, saying, “Hold on, Shaina. Can you prepare my office? You know, clean it up a bit and make sure there’s tea enough for six people. Thanks.”

Jenn had hoped for this single boat for three days now. It was a good bet that Donna Polston was returning from her latest diplomatic mission. Was it a good sign that it had taken so long? Was it bad? Was it no sign at all? Most likely the last option was the right one. Jenn knew when she was seeing an actual sign. It almost always came with a sudden revelation, and this one did not. The boat was just a boat.

Hiding her disappointment behind her practiced queen smile—a somewhat vacant, benign, everything’s-going-to-be okay smile, she took the stairs down into the bowels of the grey, uninviting prison. As dead as the building looked from the outside, the inside was alive with noise and jammed with people. Nobody wanted to be caught out on Treasure Island when the Corsairs came, and the Floating Fortress wasn’t much better.

By definition, anything that floated could also be sunk, and while everyone thought it had been a huge asset during the last war, now that torpedoes were involved, it was thought that it would go right to the bottom in its first test. Jenn thought the same thing and only kept it around because Mike insisted that it was still a viable weapons platform. It was hard to tell whether this was because of his infinite faith in every waterborne craft under his command or because he had some sort of knowledge of the fortress that no one else had.

“I hope he’s right,” Jenn said, once she was back in her office. The view here was only slightly more limited than the one from the roof. She could see the Floating Fortress perfectly, anchored midway between Alcatraz and Treasure Island. It looked like an ugly square of metal; those parts that weren’t blackened were orange with rust.

Taking her binoculars, she scanned it, grimaced and moved on, searching the deck of the oncoming Guardian ship: a fine forty-seven foot catamaran. Donna was nowhere in sight. “It’s just cold,” Jenn muttered. “She’s there.”

She next took in the early morning work party that was boarding the salvaged Corsair ships. As always, Mike was already at work, his shoulder-length blonde hair streaming in the wind, his beard glinting with gold. He was cutting away a slimy stretch of old netting and tangles of seaweed from one of the boats.

Why the hell does she still have a gol-derned propeller? She could read his lips. She also knew that he was jealous as the Guardian ship tacked upwind. With a big boat, it was a team effort to tack so flawlessly and Mike didn’t have much in the way of sailors.

Shaina came in with her breakfast just then. “They’re not burned, see?” She pointed proudly to the undercooked eggs. The yolks were barely holding together as they jiggled precariously over a white slick of what looked like mucous.

Eggs were too valuable of a commodity to let go to waste and puking them up would definitely be a waste. “I think you should give them one more minute on the pan and then they’ll be perfect. And maybe cook the potatoes a little longer as well. White isn’t the best color. Try for golden brown or anywhere close. Make sure you get some, too. You’re way too skinny.”

They would come back burnt, which was better than runny in Jenn’s opinion. When Shaina left, Jenn returned to gazing at Mike. She felt she could stare at him for a week straight and not get sick of the sight. Another sigh was just escaping her when there was a knock at her door. It was Rebecca Haigh, looking pink-cheeked and vibrantly healthy. She wore a salt-stained peacoat that his the tar and grease that covered his blue jeans and gloves. There was even some of it in the ringlets of her red hair. “Your Highness?”

Jenn waved her in and tried not to look uncomfortable as Rebecca bowed from the waist.

“We finally finished running the cables and ropes beneath the bridge. We added six more buoys last night. I think it’s about as secure as we can get it in the time frame you presented.”

“And the approaches to the bridge? How long will those take to…what?”

Rebecca’s face had frozen and now her thin lips were only a line. She shook her head. “With the forces we have now,” she paused to shake her head again. “It’s impossible. That entire ridgeline to the north would need to be manned. The best we can do is offer a token resistance. Anything more would be a waste of lives. I don’t even think Jillybean would attempt to hold the bridge, though I guess there’s no knowing what she would do.”

“But she defended the approaches twice.” Rebecca could only shrug at this. Jenn went to the widow and stared out at the Golden Gate. “We have to at least make an effort. Even if we can’t hold the bridge for long, we can bleed them. We can make them pay. If we hold it for an hour or two, it’ll be a win, and even a small victory sets a tone for us as well as for them. Especially them. They’ve never won here. Jillybean understood the necessity of seizing both the physical as well as the moral high ground, and if we can hurt them, maybe we can convince them that they can’t win.”

“Uh, I don’t think so, at least not like this. Jillybean had a lot more real fighters and all we have…” She didn’t to say what she really thought about their so called army. “Either way, the Black Captain won’t make the same mistakes twice.”

Jenn knew she was right. “He might not make the same mistake, so we just have to get him to make a new one. Maybe if we appear weak then he just might come at…”

“We are weak. That’s the problem. We only have so many guns and so many bullets, and so few fighters. We have to be careful how they’re used. We can’t take chances with people’s lives.”

Taking chances with the lives of others was precisely what Jillybean would do in this case. It’s what she had always done. Jenn didn’t know if she could be quite as merciless. It was a weakness, one she had to conquer, one that Jillybean, for all of her coldness, had eventually given in to. It had been a mistake. Jillybean had traded away a sure win and thousands of lives in exchange for three people, and Jenn had been one of them.

Jillybean had flinched. She had let her heart get in the way. It had been a mistake, one that Jenn had to learn from. “If we have any chance of winning, we’re going to have to gamble. We’re going to have to risk the lives of everyone on this island. That includes our own. We just have to figure out what will get the Captain slip up.”

Rebecca didn’t appear confident as she promised to go back to the headlands to: “Find a way to win.”

“What would Jillybean do?” Jenn whispered, as she stared from her office window, looking down on her tiny kingdom. Mike was still working hard to free the boat from the tangled netting. Deaf Mick sat on the dock watching him, eating an apple tart. He was ugly and fearsome with his scars and his facial tattoos and yet he was nibbling on the tart delicately, like a happy child might. He was odd. Everything about him was odd, like there was a flip side to every word and deed, a flip side he kept hidden.

He claimed that since he was “helping” the Black Captain’s enemies, he was living with a death warrant signed against him. He spouted this any time anyone pointed out how lazy he was.

“We all have death warrants against us,” Jenn muttered. There was something about Deaf Mick that set off alarm bells within her. It was more than just his repugnant looks and his repellent odor, it was something undefinable. “Why doesn’t he run away if he’s so afraid of this death warrant business?” Her guess was that he was a spy and she made sure not to discuss any stratagems around him, not that she had any real ones.

Her entire defense centered on the hope that the Corsairs would come in blind and stupid, that they would try to force their way beneath the bridge and get pummeled by the rocks thrown from above. “But the Captain would never do that.”

She let out yet another sigh, and another followed that as her burned breakfast came in a second later. “It gotted burned again, sorry,” Shaina said, her face a mask of misery. “They said the Bishop was here and I wanted to see and when I got back the pan was on fire. I’m so stupid, I know. Miss Shay said I was and I said I knew that…”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll help you, if I have the time. Oh, you forgot the tea. That should be easy. You can’t burn water, right?”

“You can’t?”

Jenn laughed and patted her arm. “Of course, you can’t…” Suddenly Jenn went quiet as a memory flashed across her mind. It was in those awful moments after the Sea King had exploded, lighting up the last of the day in a blinding flash. Jenn remembered standing there thinking that only Jillybean could die in such a display and that only she could set the bay on fire. Jenn had never seen flaming waves before.

She was still trapped in the memory when the harbor bell sounded. It meant the Guardians were docking. A glance out the window confirmed this. Mike hurriedly cut away the last of the old net. For some reason, the sight of him throwing it set off a feeling within her—it was a sign. “But what does it mean?”

“Maybe it’s a breakfast bell,” Shaina said, thinking that Jenn was talking about the bell. “You know, like a dinner bell, except it’s for breakfast.” She pointed to the tray.

“That’s probably it,” Jenn said, before she shooed Shaina away. As she scarfed down her breakfast, which was simultaneously both cold and burnt, a feat only Shaina could accomplish, she mulled over the net. Nets were to catch things, to trap them. “But what are we supposed to catch? And how?”

Her mind was still in a whirl as she called for Shaina to take the tray and returned to her seat behind the desk, only a moment before Donna Polston knocked and announced: “His Excellency, Bishop Wojdan and Commander Walker.”

Although Donna’s expression was purposefully neutral, her downcast eyes let Jenn know that she had failed again to move the Bishop from his stance concerning going to war. The Guardians were planning to sit this one out.

Jenn had expected as much and was able to hide her disappointment behind a look that mingled disinterest and bland curiosity. The look was easy to fake, what took an effort for her was to remain seated when common courtesy suggested she stand. She had decided that the Guardians had turned down her request to join her because they did not take her seriously. When they looked at her, they saw only a young girl. They did not see a queen, let alone an equal.

The two men stepped in; neither making any move that could be construed as subservient. The Bishop, his cherub cheeks ablaze from the cold wind, smiled down at her like a father might smile at his daughter when she’s learned to tie her shoes. Commander Walker, who was both tall and thick with muscle, seemed to take up a good portion of the room. He scowled as he looked around and saw that Jenn was in the only chair.

There was a long silence between the three that spiraled out until Jenn asked, “Yes?”

“Yes?” Walker cried. “Yes? That’s how you greet guests?”

“Of course not, but it is how I treat squatters on my land.” Jenn had envisioned this moment and it was playing out exactly as she guessed it would. Walker choked in anger, while Wojdan stuck his hands behind his back, thrust out his belly and rocked on his heels.

Eventually, Walker made fists out of his large hands, as if strangling his anger. “Squatters. That’s rich. By what right do you lay claim to anything?”

“Why, that’s simple. The law of the jungle. Might makes right. Jillybean taught me that.”

“Ha-ha!” His laughter boomed in the room, shaking the glass. Jenn sat through it without budging; she could feel Wojdan’s eyes crawling all over her. They were judging her. Still grinning, Walker went on, “If your army is anything like your navy, then your entire ‘might’ is the equivalent to my smallest company.”

Jenn leaned back just as Jillybean would have and gazed on Walker through half-lidded eyes. It was Jenn’s favorite Jillybean move. It made the subject uncomfortable, while at the same time it allowed her a few seconds to collect her thoughts. Finally, she said, “You’re wrong. My army is far stronger than yours, seeing as I’m actually willing to use it.”

“Even against us?” Bishop Wojdan asked. His voice was just as soft and commanding as ever.

“Yes, especially against you. If I have to, that is. You’ve proven you’ll bow and scrape to a bandit. Why not for a queen? I’ll have Donna contact you for our list of demands.” Walker started to bluster and she cut him off. “If you don’t like the word demand, we can call it rent.”

Wojdan rocked some more, blinking like an owl. “We came here to talk about a trade agreement that could benefit both of our people, and instead you treat us like this? My, you have grown full of yourself.”

“And you have shrunk,” Jenn shot back. “That robe of yours can’t hide your fear.”

For a brief second, the Bishop’s eyes flared in anger. Then he hid his feelings, rocking again. “It’s a cassock actually. And you are correct. I am afraid. I’m afraid for my people and for yours.”

Jenn decided not to give him her scathing half-lidded look. Instead she turned her gaze to the window just as a gull ripped by. It was gone in a blink. “You say you’re afraid, but all you’re going to do is hide behind my skirt? That’s why you’re moving your people here. You won’t fight, so you come here, knowing that I will.”

“We never said we wouldn’t fight,” Walker said. “We only said we were going to bide our time until we are ready. Chances are we won’t hear anything from them until spring. By then, who knows? Maybe we’ll be in a better situation then.”

“No. The Corsairs will be here soon.” She hadn’t seen a sign that told her this, and she didn’t need to. She could feel the Corsairs drawing closer. They were a ways off yet, but with every passing hour they drew nearer and nearer. “They will be here very soon and I am doing everything in my power to prepare for them.”

Wojdan, who was not a military expert by any means, glanced at Walker, who shook his large head and said, “Whatever you’re doing isn’t going to work. It won’t be enough. You don’t have the ships or the manpower.” He turned and pointed his chin at the Golden Gate Bridge. With the ropes and cables crisscrossing it, the bridge was no longer a monument that inspired awe. It looked strangely messy and old.

“Take the bridge for instance. You’ve wasted your time with all those ropes and chains. What good is all that when there’s no way you can hold the approaches? The land is too rocky to dig in and there’s not a lick of cover anywhere on it. It would take hundreds of men to hold either end.”

“The former queen was able to.”

“No disrespect, young lady, but that was her.”

When she turned her slow gaze on the commander, she added a half-smirk. “No disrespect? You haven’t shown an ounce of respect from the moment you walked in that door. And now you have the…” She knew saying “balls” wouldn’t be proper; however she lacked the vocabulary to come up with “temerity” or any other word that would fit. She sputtered, “And now you call me ‘young lady?’ I guess you don’t seem to realize that this ‘young lady’ is actually a queen and that she can close the entrance to the bay like this.” She snapped her fingers.

Walker glared. He was not used to anyone snapping their fingers in his face. In fact, he couldn’t remember anyone ever even considering doing it. He began to bristle, seeming to grow even larger.

Just as he was about to explode, Wojdan put a hand on his arm. “Respect cuts two ways,” he said to Jenn. “Until you learn that, I believe our discussion is at an end. Good day.”

“Hold on,” Jenn said. She waited until both men turned back, and then waited for another ten-count, what seemed like a very long time, before saying, “You have treated me with the respect a young lady in over her head deserves. That’s my fault, not yours. I haven’t given you any reason to respect me otherwise. Allow me to change that. Donna!”

Donna Polston had been listening at the door, and now she burst in, a ridiculous synthetic smile on her face. She had no idea what Jenn was going to say and it frightened her badly. “Your Highness?”

“Could you please radio the bridge? I want all traffic below it stopped. Lower the cables and if anyone, Corsairs or otherwise, tries to get through, they are to be sunk without hesitation.” Donna’s mouth fell open. “Go on,” Jenn said.

Commander Walker’s large florid face went an angry red. “You can’t be serious. If you touch one of my ships, it’ll be war. Is that what you want? Do you want war with both the Guardians and the Corsairs?”

Jenn gazed at him, and in perfect imitation of Jillybean, she said, “You can’t be serious, your Highness.” Walker looked like he wanted to jump over the table and strangle her. She wasn’t afraid. She paused long enough for him to make the correction, and when he didn’t, she stood, realizing that her imitation of Jillybean was not as perfect as she would have wished; sweat had plastered her shirt to her back. She went to the door. “What I want from you is the proper respect shown to my rank. When you return you will kneel before me and you will kiss my hand. Now, I’ll expect you off the island in ten minutes.”

They left, Walker biting his tongue to keep from cursing and Wojdan trying to hide his anger by looking sad.

When they passed Shaina and the cold tray of tea she carried, Jenn called out to them. “Oh, and gentlemen? I wouldn’t test me if I were you. You’ve heard the old adage: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? It’s nothing compared to a queen scorned. Jillybean taught me that as well, and I think you both remember what she was like when you made her angry. I’m worse.”

Chapter 16

Puget Sound, Washington

“Did Jillybean ever tell you about her first operation?” Neil Martin asked in that I-just-got-done-swallowing-a-spleen voice of his.

Lying half-naked in front of Emily was Knights Sergeant Troy Holt. There was a quarter-sized hole in his chest, just off center, an inch above his heart. She figured that if she stuck her finger in the hole, the tip would be inside his heart and she’d be able to feel the hot blood rushing past. She had been swallowing loudly for some time and hadn’t noticed, though everyone else had.

She looked up. “Huh?” She had no idea what he was talking about. Her mind was spinning. Her actual, real father wasn’t dead as she’d been told. He was all of seventeen feet away. It was something that she was having trouble grasping. He wasn’t a hideous beast named Gunner; he was Captain James Grey. He had been the last of the heroes. That’s what Neil and Jillybean had called him.

And what had Emily called him? Her chin dropped to her chest in shame. She had called him horrible names and had reviled him and abused him. She had been almost sickened by his appearance and when he had touched her, her skin had crawled. What kind of daughter did that? Especially after the sacrifices he had made for her?

Desperate to take her mind off him, she said, “Jillybean’s first operation? I don’t think I heard that story. All I know is that she was a kid. What happened?”

“It was a gut shot,” Neil answered, raising a scarred and slightly singed eyebrow. “Some lady she was with caught a bullet right below the stomach. It was just the two of them and Jillybean knew the lady was going to die if she didn’t do something. Understandably, she was a little freaked out, so you know what she did?” He paused, building the tension like he was telling this story sitting around a campfire and not in the belly of a Corsair ship in front of two people who were slowly bleeding to death.

Curled in a ball on the floor, pale and trembling Zophie Williams asked, “What? What did she do?” Zophie, who was sure that she was beyond hope, was eager to hear how this woman was saved.

“I’ll tell you what she did, Zophie. She practiced! She got a few zombies, tied them up, shot them in the abdomen and then operated on them like they were real people. She did it all; she gave them anesthesia, she opened them up and commenced to root around in their bellies for the bullet. They lived, too. You know how old she was then?” There was a pause as he waited for Zophie to shake her head and when she did, he cried, “Seven! Can you believe that? An adult wouldn’t have thought of that, but Jillybean has always been different.”

Neil grinned at his little audience. When he didn’t go on, making it seem as if revealing Jillybean’s age was the point of the story, Zophie frowned, a look with so little distinction from the grimace she’d been wearing that no one noticed. “That’s it? You haven’t finished the story. What about the woman? What happened to her?” Zophie, who was also gut shot, had a vested interest in the outcome of the tale.

“Who? The woman? Well, she kind of died. She bled right out. It was a big soupy mess; that’s how Jillybean described her stomach. Like a big bowl of snake soup. It seems that there’s a big difference between a zombie’s fortitude and a real person’s.”

“She died?” Zophie screeched. “Why on earth did you tell us that story if she died? Why couldn’t you have told a good one with a happy ending? God! She died!”

To Neil her tears were as confusing as her piercing voice. “I was just trying to cheer Emily up. You know, so that if she kills Troy she wouldn’t feel so bad. I mean if Jillybean killed her first patient, you know, I’m just saying our expectations shouldn’t be real high. Also I was trying-ay to distract her-ay since her father-ay, is dying-ay next door-ay.”

Zophie felt like she was going insane talking to the half-zombie. “What the hell is that? Door-ay? Dying-ay? That’s not pig-Latin for God’s sake!”

“Oh, really?” Neil answered crossly. “If it’s not pig-Latin, then what is it?”

“It’s you being an idiot! I can’t believe I’m stuck with a retarded zombie and a kid. Christ, we’re all going to die.”

Emily was thinking the very same thing. They were all going to die and it would be her fault. Her face was suddenly very hot. She pushed back from the couch, nearly upending the tray of sterilized tools that had taken her hours to prepare. “Tools” was a generous word for the mismatched, cobbled together bits and pieces of hardware that looked like the leftovers from a garage sale. There were three knives, one of which was serrated and meant to cut up steak, a couple of clothes pins to act as retractors, a single sewing needle to suture with, a safety pin as back up to the needle, a spool of red thread, a screwdriver, a pry bar in place of rib spreaders, and a C-clamp just in case the aorta had a bleeder.

It all screamed AMATEUR!

“This is insane,” she said. “Jillybean is a genius and I’m just…I’m just me.” If Jillybean killed someone on her first try, even after practicing, then Emily knew Troy was a goner. “I can’t do this.” Just then she had the overwhelming urge to run up on deck, dive from the boat and start swimming. It didn’t matter in what direction.

Troy grabbed her wrist. “Do not…be afraid…I have prayed…for you.” As kind as this was it did nothing to stem her building panic. Now she was afraid that if she killed Troy, God would be mad at her, too.

“Thanks. Thanks, that’s nice. I’ll be right back, okay? Just wait here.”

Before she could run, Neil came up behind her and placed his small grey hands on her shoulders, holding her in place. “Do your best. It’s all any of us can do.” With her knees going weak, it was nothing for him to push her back down. “Just take things one step at a time. We’ll take little baby bites.” It was an unfortunate choice of words as his stomach growled right behind her head. Seeing the blood was getting him hungry. “What’s the first step? I meant baby steps before.”

She thought for a moment. “We clean him.” She only had Corsair rotgut for the purpose. Just smelling it made her dizzy, so it was a good guess that it would kill all sorts of germs.

She knelt back down, and with shaking hands cleaned the wound with the alcohol. When it was dry, she brought up one of the knives. The blade shook like it was attached to a live wire.

Everyone pretended not to notice.

“N-Next we expose the bullet track,” she said, addressing the hole. She couldn’t look at Troy no matter how brave he was pretending to be; she didn’t want him to see her fear. Letting out a breath through pursed lips, she cut into his flesh. The knife was fearfully sharp and when she dragged it across him, it seemed that Troy was sucking in the air that Emily blew out.

Jillybean had always preached that any incision should be fast, clean, even and as deep as needed with the first cut. Now Emily understood firsthand why that was so important. Her incision was too shallow and she was forced to cut again. This time, Troy refused to make any outward sign of discomfort. His body was stiff and he held his breath high up in his throat.

It was Emily who made a whining sound as she cut. She could feel his pain run along the blade and up into her arm. His blood seemed extra red as it streamed from the cut and collected on the towel she had set against his side.

“Sorry,” she whispered as she leaned over the cut and dabbed it with one of the towels she had boiled earlier. “I-I’m gonna have to go a little deeper.”

“Sure.” His voice was even more strained than it had been and his breath came in sharper hitches.

I’m killing him, she thought. She believed this with all of her heart and, with an equal certainty, she also knew she couldn’t stop. After wiping the tears from her eyes, she enlarged the hole with two more shallow cuts, dabbed it with the towel and then poured sterile water over the wound. The path that the bullet had taken was obvious. Even though it had hit him at right angles, the ballistic plates altered its course so that it had entered his flesh at a very shallow slant, going up along his ribs, nicking two of them. She could see little flecks of bone fragments embedded in the gore. They reminded her of the bits of eggshells that always got into the omelets she made for her mother. For the moment, she ignored them.

Troy’s suffering was escalating to the point where even he couldn’t hide it. He had begun to sweat and his eyes were crinkled up in his head. The bullet had to come out. She kept cutting. After three dreadful inches, her knife scraped against something metallic, causing Troy to groan.

“It’s here! It’s right here. It’s not deep at all.” More water and another dab with the towel and she saw a bit of grey. It was buried in the cartilage that connected one of his ribs to his sternum. With a pair of forceps, she could have retrieved the hunk of lead in a flash. She had to settle for picking it out with the safety pin. The oddly rubbery cartilage was something of a mystery to her. Did it heal like other body parts? Would it all come out like a hunk of wax if she wasn’t careful? She had no idea.

When she was finally able to pry the strange, potato-shaped bullet out of him, he wilted back into the couch, and breathed a tremendous sigh of relief. For several seconds, he simply breathed like a normal person. Then he prayed like a Guardian. It was a rambling whispered prayer. When he was done thanking God, he also thanked Emily, saying, “You have no idea how much better I feel.”

She grinned, her eyes sparkling through the tears that had been flowing the entire time. “I’m not done. There’s little bits of bone in the wound. It’s probably going to hurt.” But it won’t kill you, she thought.

Both the patient and the child-surgeon remained almost giddy throughout the rest of the procedure. It wasn’t a long one since she really didn’t know how to go about closing him up beyond simply sewing the edges of his wound together. Fixing chipped and cracked ribs was well beyond her, and although she knew his wound would likely need to be drained, she had nothing in the way of surgical tubing.

When she was done, Troy was able to sit up. He was pale but strong enough to ask for something to eat.

“Nothing more than soup for now,” Emily told him. The way her mom talked about broth, she acted like it held secret medicinal and spiritual properties.

While she made the soup, a primitive concoction made from fish, dried seaweed and very dubious carrots, Neil cleaned up. He spied the used safety pin and held it up with a hideous grin. “Finally!” Dropping everything he hurried to the bathroom and came back seconds later beaming with joy. “What do you think? Huh? You like it?” The safety pin glinted through the flesh of his forehead. He had pinned his scalp back on and had done a poor job of things. It looked as though he was wearing a bad toupee.

“Go away,” Zophie said in weak whisper.

This dimmed his smile only slightly. “Don’t be like that. This is good. My hair’s going to stay on and Emily here had her first successful surgery. Things are looking up.”

Emily froze at the stove. First Surgery? As happy as she was for both Troy and herself, she didn’t think what she had done counted as real surgery. She stole a look at Zophie; the poor woman was holding her belly. Emily had no doubt that if she opened her up, her insides would look like a bowlful of white snake slithering in tomato sauce. And there was a reason she had yet to go back to the Dead Fish to see her father. One way or another, she was sure he was going to die and she was absolutely certain that he would die even faster if she tried to operate on him.

He had been shot down through his neck and in order to get at the bullet, she would have to crack open his hump like a walnut. That would be the easy part. Even if she managed to find the bullet, she didn’t think she’d be able to put him back together again.

“She’s not touching me,” Zophie hissed.

“I don’t blame you,” Emily said without looking up. “Maybe…maybe now that Troy is feeling a little better, we can make it back to Bainbridge and an adult can take a look at you.”

Neil’s expression turned blank. “Maybe,” he said, unenthusiastically. “In the meantime, Emily and I are going to check on Gun…Captain Grey, I mean.” Emily started to spit out excuses why she couldn’t leave Troy. Neil wasn’t buying it and gathered up her supplies, nearly tossing them into the soup. “I’ll just get another pot and we’ll have this stuff ready in a jiffy.”

While her tools boiled, they went out on deck. The sun had set hours before and the fog had blown past and was now silently creeping through the western forests.

“Uncle Neil, I don’t know if I can go over there. What if he’s dead? What…what if he doesn’t want me? Maybe he still wants to be Gunner. Maybe he’ll think I’m…weak.” All her life she had heard about Grey’s legendary toughness and bravery, neither of which she felt she had lived up to during their few days together. All she could remember doing was whining.

It didn’t help that Neil hesitated. “Maybe. I don’t mean the weak part. No, Emily you’re tougher at eleven than I was at thirty. Hell, you’re tougher than I ever was. And I’m sure he wants you. He just might want to stay Gunner. He’s gone through a lot and he had to suffer alone. He’s the one we should worry about. Let’s just play it by ear and see how it goes.”

She pulled the Dead Fish over and helped Neil across, making sure to stay behind him all the way down into the galley. Gunner was asleep, his breath heavy and labored. The two stood in silence watching him. The blanket he used to cover his face had fallen away and his repulsive nature was on full display.

“I could make him a new mask,” Neil whispered.

Emily was more worried about his breathing than his face. There was a gurgling quality to it. She had to drain the blood somehow, but didn’t have a clue besides turning him upside down and letting it pour on out.

“Hey,” Gunner whispered, making Emily jump.

“Hey,” she replied. The two stared at each other. As always, he looked at her from top to bottom and where before she saw lewdness, now she saw he was looking at her the way her mom used to—with ninety percent approval. It was never a hundred percent. There was always a hair out of place or a slight slouch or a shirt that would have been a better choice than the one she had on.

She had complained to Jillybean about it once. “Every parent thinks they created perfection and the world would see it if only junior would act differently, or say this, or wear that, or had better friends. Trust me, if you get ninety percent approval, you’re doing something right.”

It didn’t feel right just then. It felt like he was looking right through her and seeing her many, many flaws.

The silence drew until even Neil noticed it, which was long indeed. “Oh, hey, Emily just did her first surgery on, on, that guy.”

“Troy,” Emily added.

“Yeah, Troy. And guess what? He lived. Open heart surgery at the age of eleven and she pulls it off without…”

With her cheeks going red, she stopped him. “It wasn’t open heart surgery. The bullet was just kinda, sorta near his heart. It was nothing. Like a few cuts and it was right there. It was nothing.”

“It doesn’t sound like nothing,” Gunner said, in rasping whisper. “Sounds like you did a good thing for someone. Your mother would be proud.” He made the mistake of smiling; it wasn’t pretty. Her eyes flickered away and he silently berated himself for being a fool. “I should get some sleep. Neil, you’ll make sure we head to Bainbridge as fast as possible?”

“Of course.” He pointed west which was the wrong direction. “You know you can count on me.”

Tenderly, Emily pulled the blanket up around her father’s chin. He tried to lift it to cover most of his face, but she shook her head. “No, this is better. You can breathe easier. And who cares what you look like? I know I don’t. Even if you weren’t…” She had almost blurted out his secret. Clearing her throat, she tried again. “Even if you aren’t the handsomest, I still like you.”

This time he smiled only with his eyes. It looked like he was about to cry and Emily knew that would embarrass him, so she pretended not to notice and quickly went on deck to where Neil was staring around at the ropes and the tied-up sails.

“Do you know how to work this thing? I know the sails go up and it makes the boat go, but how do we know what direction we’re going and all that?”

“Don’t worry, Troy will tell us. The Guardians are fine sailors. That’s what Jillybean always said. He’ll be the captain and we’ll do all the work. You just have to remember which way right and left is. Hey, what’s that? Is that a…it’s a light.” There was golden light flickering off their port bow. It was hard to tell how close it was. Emily only knew that it was getting closer.

“I’ll do the talking,” Neil told her. “You just keep out of sight.” She crept down the stairs of the galley as the Corsair boat angled their way. It looked like it was going to hit the Harbinger amidships, but it turned neatly and slid along on a reverse parallel course.

As it approached, the Dead Fish someone called out, “What ship?”

“What ship is what?” Neil replied. It had seemed like a trick question and he wasn’t about to fall for some dull Corsair’s joke.

“What the hell is your ship?” someone else on board barked. There were six dark figures on board, each radiated menace.

That was a difficult question for Neil. He had no idea what the name of the ship was or what it should be. “It’s the uh, the uh, the um, Ti, uh, the Titania.” In that brief window of time, he had been only able to think of three ships: The Good Ship Lollipop, the Titanic and the Lusitania. Titania was the best he could come up with.

“The what? Hell, that’s the Dead Fish. Isn’t that the one Leney was telling everyone to keep an eye out for?”

“What do I do?” Neil hissed. The Corsair ship was past them, but had now swept its boom all the way over and was coming around.

Emily didn’t like their chances with another gun battle. Surviving the last one had been a miracle and she didn’t think God would keep handing them out. She leapt to the starboard side armed the torpedo, flicked on its motor and released it. She had never steered a remote-controlled torpedo, but as she was a kid and these sorts of things seemed to come naturally to kids, she was able to guide the weapon straight into the onrushing boat. They didn’t see it coming.

The detonation disintegrated the first ten feet of the boat and killed the three men who had been standing at the bow, flinging bits of them high in the air and making it rain blood.

“Oh jeeze, wow,” Emily whispered, blinking as the fireball lit up the night, showing the sharp black silhouettes of other ships sailing in this crook of the Sound. “Uncle Neil, look!” She pointed at the nearest; however, Neil had frozen in place, staring enraptured by the fire eating up the remains of the boat. Emily grabbed him, shaking him out of his mental daze. “Uncle Neil! Come on. We have to get my dad over to the other boat. The Dead Fish is no longer safe.”

“There’s no time,” Troy Holt said in a hoarse whisper from the deck of the Harbinger. He had crawled on deck with a gun in his hands as soon as he had heard the Corsairs. “He’s too big to get across with just you two.”

Emily knew he was right. Gunner was so massive that it would take at least five minutes to haul him up from the galley and bundle him over to the next boat. They would be lucky to have three minutes. “I’m not leaving him,” she declared, fiercely. “Uncle Neil, you go with them. I’ll stay here.” She looked up at the mast with its many attendant ropes and swallowed loudly. “I’ll be fine.”

Neil began to argue to which Emily responded by shoving him toward the bow which was just then nudging up to the Harbinger. Troy had pulled it close, gasping in pain as he did. “No one’s being left behind,” Troy said. “They’re after one boat, not two. Neil will work this boat at my direction and you will pilot that one. Trust me, I won’t let you crash. We’ll stay close enough for you to hear me. Now, get that main up and Neil light across, hurry.”

As nutty as the idea was, it was the only chance her father had and after helping Neil over to the Harbinger, she ran up the mainsail in record time. The light wind immediately filled it, pushing the big ship to port. Before she could ask, What do I do? Troy had her ease the helm over, explaining, “The bow is twelve o’clock. Set the boom at three o’clock and the rudder at six.”

“Cool,” she said as the Dead Fish turned in a sweeping curve back toward the Harbinger. Suddenly sailing seemed easy—for her at least. Neil kept getting confused over which was the bow, the front or the back. And when Troy brought up this or that o’clock, it just made him hungry. Still, clearing the area wasn’t much more difficult than aiming the boat in one direction and letting the wind and the darkness do all the rest.

The lanterns in both ships were put out and their fires covered by heavy lids. From then on, they were basically invisible. Until the sun came up three hours later, that is.

By then they were far up what was called Hood Canal and making good time. Emily had a chart spread in front of her. It was only ten more miles to Tala Point at which time, they’d swing around the last jutting arm of land between them and the main part of the Sound. Then ten more miles and they’d be home.

She smiled, her face unnaturally tight. Her jaw was stiff from the stress and her usually soft cheeks felt tight from the cold.

The sunrise, though far from spectacular, was comforting. It was a typical Seattle winter morning: solemn grey clouds that looked like they were right on the edge of dropping a week’s worth of rain. Emily was still gazing at them when something caught her eye: a black sail had suddenly filled off the port side not more than two hundred yards away.

The boat had been tucked up so closely to the land that Troy had missed it as he plowed ahead in the faster Harbinger. He was a quarter of a mile away and there was no way he could get back in time to help her.

“Maybe it’s just curious.” It was Gunner. Somehow he had managed to crawl up out of the galley. She had checked on him all throughout the night. Sometimes she just stared at him for long minutes at a time when she should have been minding the wheel. In all that time, he hadn’t budged. But now he had. After so many years of living alone in the wild, he could smell danger. “He probably doesn’t know this is the Dead Fish.”

“Unless he has binoculars.” She picked hers up and scanned the deck of the ship. “Jeeze!” She found herself staring right at the ship’s captain and he too had binoculars up to his eyes. He had to know he was looking at the Dead Fish. How many Corsair boats had a girl at the wheel?

Gunner tried to sit up to see over the rail, but lacked the strength. “What is it?” he asked gasping.

“They see us. God, they know it’s me.” She couldn’t stop staring as the Corsairs on the boat ran about unfurling the jib and drawing in a smaller boat that they were towing behind. “What do we do?”

“We kill them before they kill us,” Gunner answered, and pointed at the second torpedo.

Tossing aside the binoculars, she leapt at the weapon and in her sudden panic did everything wrong. She pulled the release rope first, but only remembered to arm the torpedo once it was in the water and zipping back at the oncoming boat. She ran for the stern, jumped over the rail and held on with one hand as she stuck the other as far out as she could.

Her fingers slid down the tube and just managed to catch hold of one of the straps.

“Hurry,” Gunner hissed. The binoculars had thumped against his leg and with a tearing feeling deep inside him, he pushed himself up and was watching behind them. He could see the alarm on the other boat. The captain had not missed Emily dropping the torpedo in the water and was getting his own going.

Emily flicked on the detonator and as she released the gas from the fire extinguisher it buzzed away—two seconds later, the Corsair’s torpedo was in the water and was jetting right for them.

“How do we go faster?” Emily cried. With the wind coming down at them from the northwest, she couldn’t put the Dead Fish before the wind because that would mean heading at an angle even closer to the onrushing torpedo. She tried making little adjustments, but the boat struggled harder in the light winds.

“We might make it,” Gunner said as the two torpedoes passed each other. The Corsair torpedo was slowly eating up the distance. “But it’s going to be close.”

Not a second after he said that, there was a great heavy thump at the bow, nearly knocking Emily off her feet. She stared forward, aghast. All of her maneuverings had put her in the path of a wallowing zombie that weighed half a ton. It was so big and the Dead Fish was still shipping so much water that when it flung up a hand, it easily grabbed the rail, causing the entire ship to slew in the direction of the wind.

Their speed died away. “Steer the torpedo!” Emily cried, tossing the controls to Gunner and racing for the bow. She only slowed to grab the boat hook, which she used to jab down at the raging zombie. It was a stupid, futile gesture and yet in her desperation she managed to spear one of its greyed-over eyes and when it reached for the hook it slid away from the rail and went under the boat.

Emily could hear it as it rumbled beneath the hull and she could feel it when it struck the keel, which projected down from the center of the hull like a fin. She lost all feeling when the zombie got stuck on the keel. The boat shuddered so badly that the mast began to sing a high metallic sound.

“Come on! Let go,” she whined. It wouldn’t. The beast had a hold of the keel and now their speed was half what it had been. Emily looked back in panic as the Corsair torpedo came steadily on. They had maybe two minutes before the zombie beneath the boat would be the least of their worries.

Just like her father would have, Emily made a split decision and acted on it. She vaulted over the bow and plunged into the dark waters with the boathook as her only weapon.

Chapter 17

Bainbridge Island, Washington

“There’s another one!” The crowd on the wall sucked in a collective breath as more Corsair ships appeared in the murk. There had to be six hundred people dangerously crammed along that section of the wall and it wouldn’t take much to send dozens to their death. And yet, no one stirred and no one spoke. They watched the big black ships in endless dread.

“What do you think they want?” The question, spoken in a high carrying voice, shook Deanna Grey from the cipher that had given her the name, Archimedes. She had been the only one not watching. Quickly she hid the paper and straightened up, setting her features so that they radiated calm assurance.

It was hardly how she felt. What do they want? It was an absurd question. The Corsairs were there to take over the island and enslave the population. It was so obvious that it didn’t even need to be stated. What was worse than the question was that no one laughed the young man off the wall for asking it. Instead many of them shrugged, lying to themselves that they didn’t know.

“We’ll find out, don’t worry,” Andrea Clary told the crowd. She had managed to get her initial fear in check and was once again in politician mode. “The council has this under control.” This was the worst lie yet. What possible control did Andrea think they had? Some soaked in the lie gratefully, while others grimaced, their fear turning their features sour, and some looked lost. The overwhelming feeling radiating from the crowd was one of defeat. It was as if a long-expected doom had finally made itself known.

Deanna did not join Andrea, Wayne and a few others who were trying to calm the crowd. They didn’t need calming. They needed someone to get them angry, to light a fire in them. “But not now,” she whispered, sensing the mood of the crowd and knowing that her lone voice would not be able to sway them, especially when the rest of the council was pandering.

Standing next to her and looking as whipped as the rest was her friend, Veronica. “Could you gather the rest of the council?” Deanna asked her. “We need to meet ASAP.” Even with an impending threat, gathering the council on short notice was like herding cats. Each thought that what they were doing at the moment was the most important thing in the world.

It took roughly an hour and by that time, the sun had set, the outer chamber of the Chinese restaurant was packed with citizens. They continued to arrive in ever-increasing numbers by the minute with each announcing the sighting of yet another Corsair ship.

Wisely, Deanna chose to hold the meeting in the small private room. “The war is on us.” It was a simple statement and strangely it affected Deanna more than any of them. The Black Captain had laughed off her threat. He wasn’t afraid of them and he was right not to be. The spy must have been feeding him info on the sorry state of morale on the island. He had nothing to fear, especially as he had Emily. She could be on any of the boats and what would Deanna do if the first ship to attack had Emily tied at the bow?

Deanna knew she would fold.

That time had not come. The Corsair ships had arrived too soon for any of them to be carrying her daughter. Certainly, a ship could make the voyage from Hoquiam in a day as long as it had perfect winds, and the winds had been far from perfect.

This meant that she still had a chance.

“The facts are obvious,” she stated. “This is the buildup to a full-scale invasion. It will happen sooner rather than later. Wayne, are we prepared?”

He gunned his throat, clearing it loudly like a car revving its engine. He was in full throttle when Andrea broke in. “Hold on. We don’t know what’s going on. They could be here scrounging the city for supplies for all we know. They could be attempting to open up a dialogue. It would be ham-handed to do it like this, but when have Corsairs ever been accused of being smart?” She was clutching at straws with a tight, pert smile on her face.

“And we still have our wall,” Deberha said. “There’s no way they’ll try to attack. We’ll eat them up. Right? That’s what everyone says.”

Then why is everyone so afraid? Deanna thought.

“All true,” Deanna conceded. “They could be here for other reasons besides war, and our wall is considered to be impervious. It’s not, however. The old military technology could bring it down in minutes. We have to be prepared. If they’re here for trading, great. If they’re here for scavenging, that’s not so great since we have claimed the entire city, but it’s something we can deal with. If they’re here for war, we need to meet them head on.”

Unless they have Emily. Then all bets were off. Until then she had to do the right thing.

“Head on?” Jonathan Dunnam asked. He looked like he was made of slowly melting vanilla ice cream. “That’s not possible.” He looked to the others for confirmation.

“It is possible,” Deanna replied. “And it’s necessary. Jillybean has drawn up a number of attack scenarios by the Corsairs. They’re in the folders before you. The first winter attack option calls for a slow death from starvation. As well as we’ve done in cultivating our available land, we do not have much in the way of winter crops and so fifty-two percent of the food we eat in the winter months comes from hunting and fishing. The graph on the second page shows the personal and communal reserves available. Even with a fifteen percent rationing cut in caloric intake, Jillybean estimates that we’ll burn through our reserves by January tenth. The next graph shows a twenty-five percent cut, which is starvation level mind you, and gives us only another month.”

Jonathan raised a hand. “But they really could be here just for scavenging.” He was desperately hoping this was a fact. They all knew who the Corsairs would target for reprisals if the wall ever came down.

Deanna ignored him. “This third chart,” she went on sharply, “shows what happens if we start planting fetticus, which is about the only thing we can grow with a planting that starts tomorrow. As you can see, even a bumper crop won’t do us much good. We’ll be down to about 500 calories a day throughout March and April, and by then, those of us who are still alive will resemble scarecrows. Jillybean has been warning us for years, but we didn’t listen.”

“As true as that is, it doesn’t help us against the Corsairs, now,” Wayne French said. “They are our immediate problem. And starving may be preferable to being slaughtered wholesale. They control the Sound. Do any of your charts take that into consideration? All we have to fight them with are a couple of dozen rinky-dink little fishing boats. How on earth can we meet them head on like this?”

Every head around the table went up and down with exaggerated earnestness as if they were being controlled by an invisible puppeteer. All except for Deanna’s head. Jillybean had thought of this very predicament and as always, she had a solution. “We can win by acting right now, tonight in fact. If we fill our fishing boats with men and supplies, we can occupy the western part of the Sound before they do.”

She got up and went to the map of Bainbridge which had been ignored for the last ten years ever since it had been hung on the wall. She ran her finger along the wonky stretch of water that separated the island from western Washington. In many places the water was no more than three-hundred yards across. “This area is the key to both starving us out and launching attacks. If we work diligently, we can have two-thousand of us there before sunrise.”

“That’s almost all of us!” Andrea cried. “Are we going to just leave the island defenseless?”

“No. We’d have close to three hundred adults left.” All of whom were old, lame or burdened with small children—she made sure to gloss over that! “We’d also have over two hundred children to help out.” As she told them this, the entire council made the same cringing face; even Veronica.

Rosanna Landeros, who had two children, shook her head, her one long eyebrow pointed down into a V. “This has to be a Jillybean idea. It’s, it’s just too crazy to be anyone else’s. You want us to leave children to man the walls, while the rest of us duke it out with the Corsairs in a fight we can’t possibly win. Count me out. I’m a firm no.”

Andrea and Karen Hentz both shook their heads. Deberha looked deep in thought, while Veronica wore a pained expression. She wanted to side with her long-time friend, but she absolutely hated the plan. It was insane. Next to her, Jonathan waited to hear what Wayne French had to say. He was the military leader, after all.

Wayne cleared his throat, sniffed, and made two brief attempts to speak before he finally spoke in a harsh metallic tone, “I’m with the rest. This plan has too many holes. Think about it, if one of their ships gets wind of us while we’re crossing over, we’ll be destroyed. And if we even make it to land, how do you propose we beat the Corsairs? Did Jillybean put that into a chart as well?”

“No. I believe she wanted us to do some of our own thinking. As to how to beat them, that would be your job. 2,000 soldiers who know these lands should be able to beat a bunch of rabble like the Corsairs. How many could they have landed? Three hundred? Four? If we take a chance now, we can win.”

“Winning one battle doesn’t mean we’ll win the war!” Wayne drummed his fingers on the table and then angrily shook his head. “No. I’m a no.”

Jonathan was a no as well. Veronica wouldn’t look at Deanna as she whispered the word.

“I am a no, too,” Deberha said. “Only what happens if I am? Doesn’t that mean something?”

“It means the council has lost confidence in the Governor,” Andrea said. “It means we’ll form a new government around a new governor. One of us will take over until the next election.” Eyes shifted away, all save for Wayne’s. Andrea told him, “No. It’s a bad idea. One shouldn’t be both the military leader and the Governor. If no one else will stand up, I guess I’ll do the…”

Deberha stood up. “I don’t want the job, but I think Deanna is still the best among us. So, I guess I change my vote.”

Veronica stood as well. “I’m changing mine as well.” She tried to give Deanna a smile. Confused was the only way to describe it. “If we’re not going to go with her plan, what do we do?”

“I say we wait,” Andrea answered. “I say we give them until noon tomorrow to tell us their intentions. Then, if they don’t, we send a delegation to make our demands.”

A vote was taken on this. Deanna’s vote made it unanimous. They would wait and do nothing, while the Corsairs took up strategic positions all around them. It was a stupid plan, which meant that Deanna would have to take matters into her own hands while she still could.

The meeting broke up and she allowed Veronica and Deberha to walk her home. “There’s still a spy on the loose,” she told them, cementing the idea in their heads. In truth, there was more than one. She would have to play the part of a spy; she would have to be slick, cunning and stealthy. To that end, she went about her nightly routine without change, even going so far as to get in bed, where she stared at the clock until it was two in the morning.

When the chimes struck for the second time, she slipped out of bed, dressed in the dark, gathered up a small bag that held a flashlight and a variety of tools, and went out into the night. It was crisply cold, and that was good. The real spy, if she was out there, would have gone home hours before.

As likely as that was, Deanna wasn’t taking any chances. She went from shadow to shadow until she arrived at Jillybean’s school. Here, she used even extra caution and was so quiet that not even the imprisoned zombies heard her.

Password: Archimedes. The computer screen blinded her as it woke. Although she was familiar with computer basics, she was unprepared for the massive amount of information stored in this one. Jillybean’s screen was packed with folder after folder, each one headed with something obvious. One read Pancreatic Surgical Procedures, another said Sound Deprivation Experiment 3.0.

“Cracking Chamber Diagrams.” She made a face, wondering if that meant something about torturing a person. It turned out that it involved making gas and kerosene and things like that from crude oil. None mentioned anything like Operation Otter Pop.

At least at first glance, because it turned out there were file folders within file folders. Thousands of them. Each held more files.

“Damn it, Jillybean. You must really hate me.” Deanna started going through the files, one after another, until her eyes were red and she began to yawn three or four times a minute. She wasn’t so much tired as she was bored. Click, click, scan. Click, click, scan. Endlessly. It got so bad that she actually wanted to open a number of files that caught her attention.

Alternative Water Sources seemed like something she should read. Historical Battles: Forest Settings was another. There was no time. She did not like idea of trying to blow up the wall during daytime. It would make blaming the spy difficult.

After two hours, she had only gotten a third of the way through the files and realized she wasn’t going to make it. With her luck, she figured it would be the very last file. “Hmm,” she said, as she clicked on the last file. It opened up to twenty-two others. This time when she said, “Hmm,” it wasn’t nearly so optimistic of a sound.

This too was a dead end. She decided to take a different route, pretty sure that computers had functions and processes designed to help a person out. “Ah, a search feature!”

She typed in the ridiculous name and came up empty. Next, she tried each individual word by itself. Operation gave her sixteen files, Otter, only one, and Pop had nothing. Ten minutes later, she sat back in frustration. “Damn it, Jillybean, why’d you have to make this so tough?” It shouldn’t have been this difficult. Jillybean hadn’t given Deanna the password simply so she could learn about cracking chambers and Revolutionary War battles.

“So, the answer is here. I just have to look at this as a riddle or a puzzle. Like the password, she’ll have used something that will catch my eye and not someone else’s.” She scanned the folders on the first screen once more. The answer jumped out at her. On the second to last column was a file that read Surgical Teckniques. For anyone who knew Jillybean, the misspelling was a bit of a jolt. The girl was a perfectionist.

Opening this folder gave her access to thirty-three more. “Ha. Deep Vain Thrombosis? I don’t think so.” She didn’t know what a thrombosis was, but Vain should have been Vein. This folder opened onto forty-one individual files. The fifth one read Possible herbal Remedies. Herbal was the only word on the page that was not capitalized.

Inside was Operation Otter Pop.

It was a simple diagram of the wall, followed by an even simpler set of instructions. Deanna printed them up and then hurried from the school, almost forgetting to lock the door behind her. She then strode to the north part of the wall as the sun began to creep over the eastern mountains.

After only a hundred yards, a distant explosion stopped her. Its echo bounced around the neighborhood as if to make sure that everyone had heard it. Her first thought was a foolish one: Did I do that somehow? It was ludicrous, and yet a shiver racked her. The explosion was too small and too far away to have anything to do with the wall. Ducking her head down, she hurried on as people came out onto their porches and spoke to their neighbors in high, nervous voices.

Deanna studied the ground as she darted away from the more populated streets. Soon, the wall loomed and she stopped to re-read the instructions so as not to miss the landmarks. Where the underbrush was thickest was a drainage culvert big enough for a man to crawl through. She dropped down into it and squirmed her way beneath the wall. The culvert kept going, but she stopped when she found a heavy, rusting plate of iron on one side of her. It looked as though it was bolted into the cement with corroded metal plugs each bigger than her thumb.

The whole thing appeared as though it had been there for years, but it was a false front, an illusion. She pressed on the very center of the plate and with a click, it opened toward her, revealing a lightless little room built into the wall itself. Using her flashlight, Deanna scanned the gray cement walls, and the long 2x4s that made up the floor and ceiling.

Had she not known their secret, she would have been baffled. The planks of wood were seamless and sturdy. Each was uncut, disappearing into the wall in front and behind as if the cement had been poured around them. There were no trap doors or false ceilings—no obvious ones at least. The two boards on the far right of the room could slide forward a bare eighteen inches. It was just enough room for Deanna to slip down into a shaft and draw the boards back over her head.

In front of her was another tunnel; this one was so narrow that she had to turn sideways. It took only seconds for a minor case of claustrophobia to set in, and only a minute for it to become a major case. She was hyperventilating and about to scream when she discovered another tiny room. Compared to the tunnel, it felt like a mansion. Inside it were the main controls to the explosives Jillybean had rigged throughout the entire wall.

It had been a huge undertaking hauling in that much dynamite, Semtex, PE4, C-4 and any other type of explosive she could get her hands on. It had taken her over a year, working in the dark, to prep her greatest accomplishment for destruction.

Deanna was cold with sweat as she could almost feel the tons of cement looming over her head. It felt like it was pressing down on her. “It’s safe. Jillybean knew what she was doing.” Then why do I have to pee so badly? she thought as crept to a grid-like panel set on one wall. The switches for each zone were obvious and she flicked on the Stage 1 charges of Zone 225, which was located on a thousand-foot stretch of the northeast wall. It was the most obvious choice for a demonstration since the wall in that zone ran along a steep, almost cliff-like hill. Even without the wall, no one would consider attacking there.

With sweat running from her long blonde hair, she then synced one of four handheld detonators to the charge—and that was it. If she wanted to, she could blow up that section of the wall right at that very second. Carefully, she turned the detonator off and leaned against the wall, breathing as though she had run a sprint.

Getting out again was just as frightening as getting inside, though for a different reason. Now she was afraid that she would accidentally brush up against something and not just arm the detonator, but set it off as well. By the time she climbed out of the culvert she was limp from stress, but she couldn’t rest. The morning was getting on and soon her assistant, Shelley Deuso would knock on her door with her morning coffee.

She hurried east, gazing up at the hill and the wall. A guard was ambling slowly along the walkway—there would be others, and they would all die. Deanna’s feet faltered. Was this something she could actually do? Murder four or five of her own people? People she knew? And for what? The chance to fight a battle that no one thought they could win?

“The alternative is worse,” she told herself and took out the detonator. Only the one guard was in sight and that was for the best; maybe he would be the only one she murdered. Unless you wait until he’s out of the zone. The idea was as alluring as it was wrong. She had the sinking feeling that if she waited, more people would show up, making her wait even longer. Deep down, she knew she was looking for any excuse not to make the most difficult decision of her life.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the instructions. They were no longer needed and she tossed the piece of paper into a puddle, grinding it under her foot. Then she took out the detonator, took a deep breath and gazed down at it while her heart thudded like a heavy cowhide drum.

“Stop putting it off. Just don’t watch.” She turned away and thumbed the arming switch and on popped a friendly little green light. “Green means go.”

“Governor!”

Deanna jumped, sucking in a guilty breath. A woman in a bathrobe with unbrushed hair and crazy round eyes charged up to her. “They’re attacking!”

“Who? Who’s attacking?” she asked, hiding the detonator behind her back.

It was a stupid question. “The Corsairs! They’re attacking.”

The woman’s fear was contagious and without thinking, Deanna was running with her to the wall; the very wall she had been a second from destroying. She climbed the stairs and could almost feel the heat of the explosives through the concrete. Remembering the detonator, she turned it off and stuck it in her pocket just as someone yelled, “There she is! Someone grab her.” Even with a detonator in her pocket, Deanna didn’t think they were talking about grabbing her, and without a thought, she knocked aside a hand that had a hold of her sleeve.

In seconds, she was up the stairs and on the walkway.

The gray waters of Puget Sound seemed filled with Corsair ships coming at the island from all directions. She counted thirty of them, but there were more. Bells began ringing and people were yelling up and down the island. She strode through the gathering crowd without seeing the frightened people. Her mind was on the attack…and the bomb. Maybe she wouldn’t need it now. Maybe seeing the Corsairs in broad daylight would light a fire under them.

“Where’s Wayne French?” she called out, as she moved south along the wall. It looked like the lead boats were heading toward the island’s small harbor. “Someone get me Wayne…”

“I’m down here, Deanna.” He was below her on the ground; he seemed very small. “I’m afraid I have to put you under arrest.” Someone behind her clamped a heavy hand on her shoulder. Deanna turned and saw big Paul Daniels looking down at her. His heavy jaw was blue-black and in need of a shave.

“I got her,” he declared.

“Got me? What the hell is going on, Wayne? We’re being attacked and I have to say this is not the time for political games.”

Wayne nodded, a strange sight seen from above. It was as though he were trying to sho her his bold spot. “This isn’t a game. We know the Black Captain has gotten to you. We know you plan on blowing up the wall.”

How? was the first question that popped into her head. She didn’t dare ask that. “What on earth are you talking about? How do you know, whatever this is?”

“Paul, get off her!” It was Veronica hurrying up from behind. She pushed Paul away and thrust a piece of printer paper at Deanna. “Everyone on the council found these this morning on their doorsteps. They were also posted around the island.” Deanna read:

To my fellow citizens,

I have kept silent for too long. The Governor has been secretly working with the Corsairs for months now. She tried to recruit me, promising to keep me safe from the Corsairs. I refused until she threatened to release embarrassing information about me. I’m sorry to say that I gave in.

I helped to fake the kidnapping of her daughter so she could gain sympathy and strengthen her hold on the island. Her daughter is alive and well and living in Hoquiam like a queen.

To hide her tracks, Deanna killed her accomplices Eddie and Gina Sanders. When Norris Barns got too close to the truth, she killed him, too. I am sorry to say that I helped in covering up these murders by planting the knife—I’m deeply ashamed of this. Now she has gone too far. She plans on blowing up the wall, an idea that she and Jillybean concocted before she left. She must be stopped before it’s too late.

I am sorry

X

Deanna read this in a silent world. Hundreds of people stood watching her without saying a word. They didn’t know what to think. As a group, they were emotionally spent: murders, kidnappings, spies, assassins, trials, and now open war…every day it was something new and every day things grew worse. And here was this letter, written as if by one of them. It sounded like something from a soap opera, and at the same time it seemed perfectly in keeping with how things had been going for them for the last few weeks.

They watched their governor, perfectly ready to throw a rope around her neck and hang her from the wall at the smallest sign of guilt. If Deanna even twitched incorrectly she would be dead in seconds.

It was the spy who had written the letter, and Deanna marveled at how perfectly written it was. It struck just the right note, playing up the fear and jealousy in the average citizen, the contrition of the writer, and giving everyone a target for vengeance. Deanna looked up from the paper, thinking that she stood on the knife’s edge; if she didn’t handle things perfectly, her daughter would be doomed, the Corsairs would take over the island with ease, and the entire population would be enslaved—but only if they found the detonator on her.

“Do not be fooled!” she cried, holding the paper high overhead. “You are being tricked by the assassin. Look out there! The Corsairs are attacking, making this the perfect time to sow division, and that’s what this letter is all about.” In anger, she smashed the paper with her fist, crumpled it up and threw it over the wall. “If you don’t believe me, you can search me if you want! Come on, Wayne, get up here and search me. I don’t have a bomb on me.” She opened her jacket and showed that she wore nothing but a sweater beneath.

The crowd buzzed as Wayne called for Paul to search her. His large hands went up and down her body as she held her breath. Although Veronica was right there giving him the stink eye, he was thorough and didn’t miss a thing. He held up the tool kit and described the contents accusingly. “Those were Jillybean’s tools,” Deanna explained. “I was on my way to feed her monsters and thought I should return them.”

Before anyone could bring up the fact that she wasn’t anywhere near the school, she went on loudly, “Think about it, Wayne. I’m the only one wanting to fight the bastards. I’m the only one who thinks we have a chance at winning. And we can! Look out there!”

The crowd had momentarily forgotten the Corsairs but now they dutifully gazed out at the black ships tearing at them. Someone started to blubber.

“Don’t you dare cry!” Deanna commanded. “We will turn back this attack. We will destroy any boat that gets within a hundred yards of our shores. The only reason they think this will work is because they think we’re weak. They think we’re divided, but we are not! Wayne, send whoever you want to find a bomb or whatever. The rest of us are going to win this war!”

Someone asked, “Is there a bomb?”

“Of course not,” Deanna scoffed. “But even if there was one, would we just give up? Hell no! We would fight even harder than ever. I want everyone to get to their battle stations!” Her voice carried halfway across the island, and for once her people rushed to do what they were told.

Deanna turned to Veronica, a stunned, giddy expression on her face. “You see? All they need is proper leadership.”

Veronica was looking at her with suspicious eyes set like ice over a fake smile. “What did you put in that paper? I saw you put something in it.”

“Insurance,” Deanna answered quickly. “But it looks like we won’t need it. We’re going to crush those fools.”

Chapter 18

Puget Sound, Washington

In midair, Emily Grey turned so that she was looking back down the length of the Dead Fish. The torpedo that was chasing after them was too small and too low in the water for her to see. The Corsair ship was another matter altogether. It was coming up hand over fist with shocking speed.

With a thousand-pound undead creature hanging on the keel, their own speed had turned sluggish. They labored through the water, shuddering over the light waves instead of gliding lightly across them.

For a long second, Emily was poised in midair, then the cool water seemed to rush up and swallow her as the fifty-foot ship rode over her, slamming her down into the murk where she braced her body behind the ten-foot boathook. With a cycloning curtain of bubbles spinning around her, she could hardly see the beast as it rushed at her.

It was just a large grey blur hanging from the fin keel. The best she could do was to aim the boathook at the center of it and hold on as tight as she could. It wasn’t just the zombie bearing down on her, it was the entire weight of the ship. Her hands were too weak to keep their hold on the pole under that much strain, and she slid right down it until her feet struck something solid.

Her left foot was on a portion of the keel, while her right was on the zombie’s hip. The head of the boathook was buried deep in the creature’s bulbous, frog-like neck. In slow motion, or so it appeared to Emily, the beast raised a giant hand and snapped the pole in two.

Emily fell into the keel with the rushing water doing everything it could to peel her away and send her spinning in the boat’s wake. But she held on, as did the creature. It had a hold of the keel with one huge hand, which she kicked and stomped in vain. Her attempts were so pitiful that it didn’t even notice her, or so she guessed since it hadn’t reached through the water with its other hand to crush the life out of her.

Time was flying by and yet, she didn’t feel the desperate need for air building in her; she was totally focused on that hand. Giving up on the stomping, she jabbed the broken end of the boathook down into the webbing of the creature’s hand between the thumb and pointer finger. She had meant to get under the hand, and had to try again. This attempt worked and she threw her entire weight onto the pole. She strained with everything she had, her muscles quivering with the effort.

It was too much for the pole, which broke again, sending her tumbling into the face of the zombie.

With the murk and the bubbles, it took the creature a moment to realize that a human girl was climbing on its face. She was going crazy trying to get away from it, while at the same time, it went berserk, lashing out with its teeth and trying to grab her with both hands. The Dead Fish was free at last and it spurted ahead, sending Emily and the zombie rolling and spinning beneath the hull. Up and down changed places a dozen times in a blink of an eye, even so, Emily kept her mind focused on the swim ladder at the back of the boat. It was her only chance to get back on board.

Kicking away from the zombie she made a desperate lunge for the platform, and by a miracle, she caught hold of it with both hands. She held on long enough to take a single breath, then a giant paw ripped down her body, tearing her clothes and her flesh. It lost its grip, but so did she.

“Emily!” Gunner gave a hoarse shout and tossed a rope to her. It was as good a throw as anyone could expect from a dying man. She took two strokes to get to it and grabbed it with both hands just as the slack in the rope was taken up. It was like trying to hold onto a whip. The rope snaked right through her fingers and then she was all alone with a zombie and a speeding torpedo. Gunner didn’t slow the Dead Fish. He knew that he wasn’t going to outrun the torpedo and wanted the explosion to occur as far from Emily as possible.

But Emily wasn’t done fighting yet. The Corsair torpedo was curving in an arc towards the Dead Fish. If she could cut it off and get to the receiving end of the detonator, she could disable it. To that end, she set off with powerful strokes, slowed by her clothes which pulled at her arms and weighed down her legs. She was gasping in no time.

Breathe, she told herself. Find your stroke, breathe and ignore the pain. With every kick, there was a sharp etching pain behind her right knee. Where the zombie got me. Damn, I’m going to die. The thought killed her stroke, sucked the wind out of her and made her miss the torpedo by eight feet. The ugly contraption went whizzing by.

“No,” she whispered. The torpedo was only a hundred yards away from the Dead Fish’s stern. She couldn’t look. Turning away, she was shocked to see how close the Corsair boat was. Then she saw why. It had originally darted out from a little cove and, in order to get away from the torpedo she had fired, the boat actually had to steer at it.

It was only just then finally swinging wide, trying to escape southward with a torpedo eating up the distance. Both ships were seconds from being destroyed. Right before the first torpedo exploded, she closed her eyes. The flash from the detonation lit up the darkness behind her lids and the sound was a great THOOOM that she felt in her chest.

When she opened her eyes, the Corsair ship was a burning hulk. As she tread water, she waited for the second torpedo to explode, and waited, and finally looked back to see the Dead Fish floating languidly, actually quite casually under the circumstances. Gunner had managed to drop its mainsail, and could do nothing else.

“What happened to the torpedo?” she wondered aloud as she began an easy breaststroke towards the boat. Thankfully, the current was carrying it back towards her and, to her amazement, she saw the Corsair torpedo fetched right up against its side.

“Could you switch that detonator off before you come aboard?” Gunner asked, in a wheeze.

She did more than that, she brought the whole thing on board. She gazed down at it. “Why didn’t it work?”

“It’s a manual detonator. You have to press the button to make it go boom and whoever had the detonator got killed before they could blow it.” He took an unsteady breath. “We need to get out of here in a hurry. They might have radioed our position.”

After setting her sails as they had been, and telling Neil what had happened—the Harbinger had hurried back as fast as it ever could and was now bobbing fifty feet away—the two boats raced north, side by side. Their position had been announced, as evidenced by the half dozen black ships streaming into view. They were looking for one ship and not two, which allowed the Dead Fish to escape from the narrow inlet and out onto the Sound.

It was here that they ran into trouble since they were the only ones leaving the inlet.

“Go ahead of us,” Neil yelled. “We’ll cover you.”

She wanted to argue and tell them about the long ragged lacerations that went down her calf. Everyone knew that when a person was scratched by a zombie, especially as badly as she was, they were going to get the zombie disease. It made sense that if she was going to die anyway, that she should be the one covering them. Fear tended to make a mockery out of sense and she said nothing as the Corsairs turned and came on.

More ships suddenly appeared from the south and some came squeaking out of the little nooks and crannies that dotted the Seattle coastline. It became a race for the Bainbridge Harbor with Troy Holt shouting across to Emily how to get the most out of her ship.

Unfortunately, the Dead Fish was swimming heavy with sea water that had never been pumped out. The Corsairs were catching up.

Gunner glanced back. He grunted. He then looked forward and grunted again. “What does this entire thing look like to you?” She was too afraid for word games and shrugged without giving the questions a single thought. “It looks like an attack.” He pointed with his stump at the walls surrounding the harbor. They were bristling with guns.

“And the gate…it’s still closed,” she whispered in breathless shock. “Don’t they know it’s me?” She stood up and, leaving the wheel to a man who couldn’t scratch the back of his head, she ran to the bow and began waving her arms. Someone on the wall took a ranging shot that sent up a little plip of water thirty yards in front of her.

Another splashed off to the left, while a third blazed past them from behind. “What do we do?” she cried.

“Get over the side,” Gunner answered, “and get as far from the boat as possible. Go!”

She looked over the side and even took a step toward the rail. “What about you?”

“Forget me!” he growled.

Another shot. This one struck the boat with a Thwak! It had struck the wheel, knocking off one of the handles. It spun in the air and bounced off her unflinching father’s shoulder. Two shots from behind poked holes in the main, just above the boom. Instead of leaping overboard, she jumped to Gunner and draped her soaking wet body over his.

He was too weak to thrust her off of him. “Please, go,” he said.

“No! If you die, then I die.” It was an absurd thing to say since they were both going to die one way or another, either by bullet, blood loss, or infection. The whole idea made her feel completely absurd; irrationally she ran to the bow and tore off her jacket. It felt like it weighed forty pounds as she tried to wave it over her head.

Two hundred yards away, a triumphant Deanna Grey was ready to give the order to fire. It was a struggle for her not to grin like a child; the slaughter of hundreds of men, even enemies, was not something a proper leader should revel in. It would be unseemly.

“They’re in range!” Wayne French yelled, his voice high with excitement. “Get ready to fire.” Everyone on the wall leaned forward, aiming down the length of their guns.

“Not yet,” Deanna said, quietly contradicting him. “The first two boats are close enough. I want to get them all.” A strange, hungry bloodlust had risen in her and even though she might not have been grinning, her eyes were wide and scary. After everything she had gone through here was her chance to strike back and she wanted to hurt them so badly that she felt more than a little insane.

Wayne didn’t notice. He was hyper with adrenaline. Excitement raced through him so that his hands shook and his heart pounded. He felt wild and invincible. The Corsairs had already shot a few times, their bullets coming nowhere near the wall. “Hold on!” he yelled. “Just a little longer. Let them get in close. Hold on. Get ready. A little closer.” He sucked in a long breath and was forced to hold it as some of the black ships suddenly turned south. Disappointed about the possibility of being robbed of an easy victory, he shot a look at Deanna, who was gripping the edge of the wall with her painted nails as if they were talons.

“Destroy the closer ones,” she ordered, coldly. “They need to be taught a lesson. They can’t just come into our territory like this. They can’t just threaten us and expect us to cower. Kill as many as you can.”

“Ready!” Wayne cried out. He paused before he uselessly yelled, “Aim.” They were already aiming. Two hundred guns of every sort were pointed at the lead boats. A quarter of them were long rifles with scopes.

“That’s a girl,” one man declared. He could see Emily clear as day through his Leupold scope. It didn’t look like Emily, however. Her long blonde hair was dark and wet, plastered to her head, and her black clothes were far too large on her and made her look heavier than she was.

Another man saw the same thing and hesitated, as did another and another. Deanna heard the word girl and felt her insides turn to water. “Don’t shoot! Nobody shoot! Gimme those binoculars.” There was her daughter, waving a flap of black cloth…no it was a coat. And she was in one piece, standing tall, so tall that Deanna had to wonder if she’d grown a foot in the last few weeks.

There was a dead man on the boat with her, he looked dead, at least right up until he tried pushing himself up. It was then she saw the horror of his face.

“I think there’s a zombie on the boat with her,” the man with the scope said. “I could shoot him, maybe.”

“No. Not yet. You might hit Emily, and either way, it looks like it’s dying.” Deanna didn’t care about the hideous creature; to her it was a nonentity. She had her daughter back! With every passing second, Emily came closer and closer. It didn’t matter what sort of things were with her. There was another on the second boat and she didn’t even recognize Neil Martin until she saw the Crocs. Her stomach turned at the same time that her heart sank for her old friend.

After everything the people of Bainbridge had gone through, she didn’t know how they were going to react to him. She forced her confident politician’s smile back on her face. “Open the harbor gate! Wayne, get the harbor gate open, now.”

There was a great deal of reluctance around obeying the order. On the Dead Fish, there was an even greater reluctance on the part of Gunner in going anywhere near the gate.

“Maybe you should go over to the Harbinger,” he suggested. “You know I’m done for. I could lead the Corsairs away.”

There wasn’t much danger from the Corsairs at the moment. They had sailed south for a few miles and were now clumped together, as if the ships themselves were talking to each other. Emily saw right through her father’s lie and knew the reason for it. He had braved bullets, bombs, fire and zombies, and yet the idea of having Deanna see his real face left him a quivering mess.

Emily patted him on his good arm. “They’d catch you easily, and we’d be out a perfectly good boat. Besides, you haven’t died yet. I can do some stuff, you know. I can do IVs and I bet we can get some blood donors. When everyone finds out about you and what you did for me, they’ll…”

“No!” he snapped, savagely. “No one can know about me. Don’t even call me Gunner. Just call me…” As he hunted for a suitable name, she wanted to ask, Can I call you Dad? She didn’t, however. Especially now that her leg was infected, she thought she understood the need for secrets.

He finally blurted out the name Joe. He also asked if she could make him a new mask. Emily understood that, too. Pretty soon she would be even uglier, inside as well as out. “Sure, no problem,” she told him and left the boat to drift in the general direction of the harbor. A mask was easy to make. A clean shirt a few cuts with some scissors and she had a crude one.

Dressing him was far more difficult and not just because of his hump. He had massive shoulders and tree trunks for legs. She did her best, though he was forced to wear a sheet as though it were a cape since no shirt on board had a chance of fitting him.

Then she was busy working the boat, listening to Troy as he talked her through the tricky steps to get the Dead Fish through the gate with a light wind on her port bow. The boat began to gripe and fight her, and had it not been for ropes thrown to her from the dock, she would have run the boat up onto some rocks and maybe gutted her.

The ropes pulled her in and the Dead Fish kissed the side of the dock as neat as you please. Emily couldn’t help herself and she abandoned both the boat and Gunner. Springing up on the dock she rushed into her mother’s arms and began to cry. The tears poured out of her in great hot torrents and she went on until she heard whispering picking up around her.

She heard Neil’s name spoken in fear and disgust. The Harbinger was just being brought to the dock and there was Neil, smiling at Deanna—the unappealing look wasn’t earning him any new friends and some called out, “Don’t let him on the island!”

Sudden fierce anger flared up in the girl. “Who said that?” she demanded. “You guys don’t know anything about what’s going on out there. You’ve been here hiding while Neil was fighting the Corsairs to rescue me. And none of you better say a word about Joe.” She pointed at her father, who was fighting for breath as he sat as straight as he could, his dark eyes flicking toward Deanna every other second.

Neil appeared confused over the name though no one noticed. With him looks of confusion, constipation and blood craving were all essentially the same until one became adept at reading between the scars.

“Joe saved me a hundred times and if it wasn’t for him, the Corsairs would’ve been here days before and in far greater numbers. These people are heroes. You should be thanking them.”

“What happened to you out there?” Veronica asked. As glad as she was that Emily was back, she had a case of the willies seeing the bullet holes in the two boats, and the bloody decks and the bloody men and the one bloody woman who had been lifted from the hold. Even Emily looked as if she had been put through the wringer.

Emily answered speaking loudly and quickly, leaving off any point she felt wasn’t completely necessary, her scratches being one of those little tidbits. The crowd hung on every word, especially any battle descriptions. They marveled at Jillybean being a queen, though this wasn’t the first they had heard of it, and they were amazed at Emily’s description of her invincible armada and horrified that the tables were turned on her.

“Then we’re doomed,” Wayne French said. “Jillybean’s a slave. Her army consists of this one person.” He indicated Gunner who should have fainted dead away long before, and was holding on only because he didn’t want to look weak in front of the woman he loved. “And our only allies are hundreds of miles away and are even less of a threat than we are.”

“It’s worse than that,” Andrea Clary cried out. “Our so-called governor is a spy.”

Deanna rolled her eyes. “Not this again. Emily was kidnapped! We have witnesses who were there. One of whom is a Guardian, and they don’t lie, ever. The letter was a fake.”

“Then how do you explain this?” She held a small black device in her hand. “It’s a detonator that we found in your house.” The crowd ooohed. “It was hidden among some tools in your garage.”

“Are you sure it’s not a garage door opener?”

Andrea’s eyes glittered. “Do garage door openers have two switches, one that’s marked ‘Arm’ and the other that says ‘Detonate?’”

“I’ve had about enough of this,” Deanna snarled. “I have three wounded people to take care of and there are Corsairs gathering on the Sound. Bring me that.” She snapped her fingers. Warily, Andrea brought the detonator to her and handed it over. Without hesitation, Deanna flicked the ‘Arm’ switch upward. This quieted the crowd in an instant. “Don’t worry,” Deanna told them. “It’s a fake.” Doing her best not to show concern, she thumbed the detonate switch.

Chapter 19

Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

The woman was laid out on the altar, looking as though she was about to be tortured or sacrificed—or both. Jillybean had no qualms at all about using the altar as an operating table; it was no longer holy, and hadn’t been for some time.

“Okay, let’s see that tooth.” She noted that the swelling in the gums was still present. It had gone down as much as it ever would with just salt rinses as a relief. Jillybean didn’t let her disappointment show. She hated causing anyone pain and with Kerry’s gum so inflamed, it would make the extraction of her rotten tooth far more painful than normal, and they were never pleasant to begin with.

“I’ve seen worse,” she told Kerry. Of course, she’d had access to proper tools and medicine when she had. “There’s still a bit of swelling, so we’re going to take this in two steps. First, we’ll need to expose the root, which will entail a minor incision. It will hurt, I’m sorry to say.”

“I just want it out,” Kerry said, gazing up at Jillybean with vacant glassy eyes. Her head felt like it was about to crack open. A cut would be nothing. “It’s killing me.”

Jillybean gave her an understanding pat on the arm, then took off her gold and bone crown, and then set aside her flesh robe. Except for her gold collar, she was now completely naked, just like all the rest of the slaves. “Open wide, now. Perfect. Close your eyes and try not to flinch.” She used a razor blade and her hands were steady. The cut was quick and perfect. Perfect or not, Kerry groaned as pus and blood poured out.

“The cloth, Leah.” The little girl had giant unblinking eyes as she looked at the mess in the slave’s mouth. Jillybean had to reach over and snatch the previously boiled cloth out of her stiff hands. She used it to staunch the bleeding, dabbing it until she could see the top of the root.

“Okay. I’m going to pry it out. Once again, hold still.” The only other tool she had to work with was a sterilized screwdriver that she’d kept hidden away; nobody liked to see the tools used in this sort of rudimentary and barbaric surgery. Jillybean wedged a bit of cloth against Kerry’s other molar to act as a fulcrum. She then jabbed the screwdriver quickly down below the gum-line to where the root divided. Prying firmly upward caused the tooth to slide right out. “Leah? Don’t look in her mouth. You’ll faint if you do. I can see it in your eyes. Good. The small cloth, please.”

This too had been sterilized. Jillybean folded it twice, before she poked it down into the open socket. “Alright, Kerry. We’re all done. Keep that in place until the bleeding stops, then more salt rinses every couple of hours for the next two days.”

Kerry wore a stunned expression as she moved her jaw around. The terrible ache was gone. “Thanks. It-it feels better already.” She sat up and swung her feet around. When she hopped down from the altar, she seemed to collapse; however, she had actually sunk to her knees. Jillybean went to help her up and as she did, Kerry grabbed her hand and kissed each knuckle. “Thank you, your Highness. Thank you. That was…nice of you. No one ever does nice things here.”

“No one? Not even the other slaves?” Kerry shook her head with her eyes averted—she hadn’t been nice either, Jillybean guessed. “Well, that’s something I’ll change if I can. Now get up. You don’t want to make the Captain jealous.” The Black Captain had just walked into the church. His dark eyes were at squints. “You should go thank him as well. Make sure you kneel.”

“But it’s him.” Kerry looked understandably terrified. No slave wanted to go anywhere near the Captain. He enjoyed hurting women and rarely passed up the chance when it was presented.

Jillybean helped her to her feet. “Trust me. I can read people. The Captain is in charge. Everything must flow from him. Go on.”

Kerry only did it because her Queen had asked her to. Shaking, she went to him and knelt at his feet and whispered, “Thank you, Master.” It came out somewhat garbled because of the wad of cloth in her mouth.

If the Captain heard, he made no reaction. He walked past her, around the fire and the quivering slaves and to the raised dais. Behind him came a host of people: Eve was at his shoulder, smiling in the hope that Jillybean would be beaten. Next to her was Augustus, King of the Azael; she had blown him up with a hand grenade. And there was his greatest warrior, Brad Crane with a Bowie knife buried up to its hilt in his back. The bloody prints on it were tiny, so very tiny. The fingerprints of a seven-year-old.

And there was Earnest Smith, back from hell, and the River King a gaping hole in his face from where she had shot him, standing over him, her mind teetering back and forth between sanity and the great abyss. And there were more, hundreds more. The church couldn’t hold the number of people Jillybean had killed, and so they spilled out into the streets beyond the doors.

She dropped her chin.

“What is this?” the Captain asked, giving the bloody razor a bland look that suggested indifference. It was a lie. Behind him the ghosts echoed the question, whispering it so that the church sounded as though it were filled with snakes. “Were you given permission to perform dentistry?”

“It was implied,” Jillybean answered, without looking up. “You have made me Queen of the Slaves. A queen’s job is to protect her people and to…”

The Captain interrupted. “That’s where you’re getting things mixed up. They’re not people. They are property.”

She bowed from the shoulders up, still not daring to look past his feet. Seeing her many victims like this, completely out of the blue, had unnerved her.

Eve sneered. They aren’t victims, Jillybean. They are all the pathetic little worms that got in our way. Look at them. Look! Against her will, Jillybean’s head came up and she saw the mass of people, both men and women. Some were indistinct; these were people she had killed in passing; guards on some bridge she might have blown up, or passengers in a truck she sent tumbling end over end for a quarter of a mile. Some were perfectly recognizable; David Wolf, the bounty hunter who had come for her and who had killed Sarah Rivers. He was missing an eye because Jillybean had used a .38 to pop it out for him.

That could be Captain Moron, without an eye. Wouldn’t you like to see him bleeding at your feet? All we have to do is escape. Come on, Jillybean, you’ve gotten out of tougher spots than this.

Jillybean squeezed her eyes shut, trying to shut out Eve. “Yes, they are property. Your property. If you had made me your armorer, wouldn’t you expect me to repair any weapon that had been broken? And if I was a mechanic, wouldn’t you want me to fix the cars with broken axles? That is all I’m doing. It’s just maintenance, nothing more.”

“That’s just it, I don’t want these slaves repaired. Look at them. They’re old models. They’re past their prime. They’ll never run like they used to. And besides, I have to make room for the newer, nicer models. When I take Bainbridge, I won’t need all of these, so don’t waste your time. They’re only going to be junked in the end. Some, I might keep around.” He gave Leah a wide, white smile, that made the little girl both hopeful and frightened at the same time.

“Others,” he shrugged, and casually pulled one of his shining pistols. “Who needs a slave that can’t even eat? I should put her out of her misery right now. Wouldn’t that be the humane thing to do?” He extended an arm that seemed unnaturally long and pointed the Colt at Kerry. She bowed her head, her entire body trembling as she waited for the bullet.

The church emptied of ghosts in one blink of Jillybean’s blue eyes. “We had a deal,” she said, stepping down from the dais and coming to stand in front of the gun. “I have three days…”

“Thirty-one hours by my watch.”

“Yes, of course. Thirty-one hours, but I can’t do it without my helpers. In fact, I need more of them. I’m certain that you’ll need at least two hundred rockets and with so few people, uh, I mean slaves at my disposal, I don’t know if it’ll get done. Is there any way I can get more?”

The Captain lowered the gun. “You think I have slaves just sitting around doing nothing? I am planning two invasions. Trust me, every slave is hard at it. But if you don’t think you can get the job done in time a few of my men with whips can do wonders to speed up production.”

Jillybean shook her head. “I can’t work like that. The screams get into my mind and then they don’t stop. I-I’ll make sure we get done. I promise.”

He snorted, “I don’t want promises, I want results. If the rockets aren’t done tomorrow, I’ll relight the fire and give every one of them a nice steaming-hot bath. And you’ll watch.”

Turning on his heel, he left, walking through the center of the church with dozens of slaves cowering on either side of him. It was as if he was without a care in the world. He certainly wasn’t afraid even though the slaves could have rushed him and killed him in seconds.

See? Eve was suddenly behind her, whispering in her ear. Use the slaves. You can start a revolt. You can lead them to freedom. You can save Bainbridge. Think about it, Jilly. And what about that dippy Jenn Lockhart? You could save her, too. You could be a true hero for once.

“You want me to start a revolt with this?” It was a laughable idea. Including the Captain, there had only been five Corsairs in the church. A hundred slaves had practically wet themselves in their presence. “No. They’re too beaten down. Too afraid.”

But what about when the Captain leaves for his invasion? You could do it then. Huh? We could seize Hoquiam for ourselves.

“And when he comes back, triumphant and leading an army twice the size of our own? What then? Do you think they’ll actually fight?” For the most part the slaves were frail, downtrodden women, barely able to muster the energy to face the rising sun. The men, if possible, were worse. Every one of them bore outrageous scars as evidence of the mutilations they had suffered. They were a broken people, so it made sense that Jillybean was their queen, she was broken as well.

Eve was silent, knowing the truth. The slaves wouldn’t fight against any sort of odds, especially being led by someone else in a collar. As fancy as the gold was, it was still a collar and as long as she wore it, she was not a real queen. She was nothing more than a joke in a hideous crown.

This upset Eve more than Jillybean, mainly because Eve couldn’t lose herself in her work as Jillybean could. The melding of physics, chemistry, electronics, engineering and construction was enough to engulf a person and normally, Jillybean would have flown into her work with the eagerness of a child. Adding the pressure of a ludicrously abbreviated timeframe to the dreadful penalty of failure made the three days allotted to her something of a nightmare.

The first two days had gone by without a wink of sleep. By the middle of the third, she collapsed onto her throne and was unconscious until she was kicked awake by the Black Captain. He stood over her shaking his head, while off to the side, Colleen White grinned maliciously and Leah Stewart tried to hide in her shadow.

“I hope for your sake that you’re ready for a demonstration,” he said. “Let’s have the girl.” His latest guard a gap-toothed fiend named Derrick Wodtli grabbed Leah and dragged her forward. The Captain bent at the waist so he could look into her face. “Should we start boiling the water now, dear?”

Leah was too paralyzed with fright to do or say anything. Jillybean scratched the sleep out of her eyes and stood up. “Not yet. I’ve run the calculations a hundred times. I just need a proper launch site and something to hit that is comparable to the wall.”

She was nowhere near as confident as she sounded. If there was even one decimal out of place in any of her equations, the rocket could explode on ignition, launch itself on a suborbital trajectory, or go right into the ground. If the black powder wasn’t mixed right, the rocket could fall out of the sky. If the fin angles weren’t perfect, it could spin off at a right angle. If the impact detonation wiring was loose or crossed, the rocket might just bang into the wall uselessly. And so forth.

Still, she put on a brave face. A rocket was chosen at random, set on a hospital gurney and trundled out into the grey day. The launching platform was long and ungainly, though still light enough to be carried by five slaves. In fact, the only delay in getting to the launch site was due to Jillybean’s weights. Naked except for her terrible green-yellow bruises and her golden collar, she trudged slowly along, dragging her weights until her legs were quivering.

Eventually, two slaves were brought up. Each was forced to carry one of the 45-pound barbells. Because Jillybean had to carry one as well, they didn’t go all that much faster. A half a mile never felt so far.

Finally, they came to an open field near where the east fork of the Hoquiam River usually emptied into Grays Harbor. The Corsairs had not yet opened the dam they had created and the river was nothing but a great expanse of mud. Across the mud was an old rusting warehouse that was just under thirty feet in height.

“There you go,” the Captain said. “Do your thing. While you do, talk to my guy Kent, here about what you’re doing. He’s going to be my chief gunner.” Kent was a shifty, rat-faced man with angry eyes. “Oh, before you get started. That thing we talked about?” He shooed away the others so that it was the two of them.

“The rockets can detonate two ways,” she told him. “The first via impact but only after it’s armed, so don’t drop them after that, and secondly with the larger of the two devices that your guy Kent is holding. You can set them all off at once or you can choose them one at a time by typing in their code 001 to 200.”

He took the remote from Kent and inspected it, inside and out. “Hmmm. Seems legit enough. Of course, you know this is the closest I’ll come to these, so if you’ve planned something funny, I’ll make sure you and your family pay. Do you dig me, my little queen? I’ll make everything you’ve experienced up until now look like a vacation. Not that I’m offering clemency or anything, but if you have a trick up your sleeve, now’s the time to come clean.”

“I’ve made them just like you asked. The rockets are just rockets.”

“Every one of them?” She nodded and his smile turned beautiful again. “Alright then. Let’s see if they fly straight.”

Kent was an uneasy gunner and something of a fool. Luckily for him, she had made the rockets foolproof. “They sit on the launcher with the red strip facing up. As you can see, it’ll fire on a nearly horizontal trajectory for up to four hundred meters. So, make sure you set her off on a flat surface. I would suggest using a level and shims. Slightly high is better than slightly low. Then just aim. I think the rocket will rise slightly. We’ll see though, right?”

“Yeah.”

She had him go through the process alone with her nearby making little suggestions. When it was all ready, everyone stood back. Jillybean held her breath as Kent counted down from ten. He even cried out, “Blast off!” The eight-foot long rocket did indeed blast off. With a scream and a cloud of black smoke, it shot off the launcher, lifting, lifting, lifting and then evening out.

It struck the warehouse two and a half seconds after it left the launcher. There was the minutest of pauses, then the forty-pounds of explosives went off with a brilliant fireball. When the smoke cleared, they could see a gaping hole in the wall, twelve feet wide.

There was a cheer from the Corsairs, followed by sighs of relief from the slaves. Even the Captain seemed pleased.

Jillybean was not. The ignition charge had misfired, not completely of course. “It was too slow. It was the charcoal. Too many fillers. Kent, I’d suggest you mill your own black powder. It’s a simple procedure. Now, the launch angle. Why the lift?” She dragged the weights over to the launcher and rechecked the level.

“That was a bit of alright,” the Captain said, running his hand along the launcher. “Impressive even.”

She made a face. “It was only okay. The flight trajectory was off. It lifted higher than I had hoped or expected. There may be a thermal layer rising from the old riverbed. Decomposition of newly exposed plant and fecal matter might account for it. Maybe.” It could be twenty different things.

The Captain, who had no interest in the decomposition of any sort of matter, snorted. “Is this an act for me? Pretending to be worried about all this science stuff? We both know that you don’t really want to blow up your own people. You’re not fooling anyone. I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to make an excuse to come along. Why?” He yanked one of her chains, sending her to knees. “What sort of trick do you have up your sleeve? Some crazy plan to escape?”

“No, I’m not trying to escape,” she choked out. “It’s just…” She was embarrassed to tell him that losing herself in the rockets had been the only thing keeping her sane; as sane as she was, that is.

Eve found this hilarious and her crowing laughter made Jillybean cringe. You call this sane? What are you going to do when they come back with Deanna in chains? Eve asked. What are you going to do when they force you to watch Jenn Lockhart get gang raped? When they decorate your church with a hundred more bodies? When they start liquidating the old slaves, dipping them in the boiling water? What are you going to do when…

“Shut up, Eve!”

She was glaring at her rival when the Captain began to laugh. “Play your little games, Jillybean. It won’t matter one bit. You’re going to rot in your cell until I come back.” He grinned at the distant fire. Without looking away from it, he spoke first to Kent, “Tell me you got this?”

“Yeah, no problem.” It sure had seemed easy enough.

“Good.” He now gave Jillybean’s guard his undivided attention, staring the man right in the face. “Listen up, Derrick. I want her watched night and day. Nothing goes into her cell except for her bare ass. Food and water, only. That’s it. And I want her isolated, and I want more weight added to her collar. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, smirking through his beard. “What about the others? Do you want it done all at once or one at a time, or what?”

“What others?” Jillybean demanded. “Are you talking about the other slaves? The ones that helped me?”

The Captain backhanded her across the face. She went reeling back, stopped short with a hard jerk by the collar that tore into her throat. He laughed as she choked. “You know the old saying: Dead men tell no tales. It works for slaves, too. We wouldn’t want anyone to know how we make our rockets, right?” He laughed again, filled with the perfection of the moment. Everything was going his way. His only worry was that things were going too perfectly.

Now’s not the time for being over-confident, he told himself. There was still the “What if” factor to take into account. He stared off at the fire for a good long while, mulling over a hundred ways he could still lose, and yes, there was still a chance of that.

Operation Otter Pop had scared him more than he cared to admit. The people of Bainbridge were meek behind their walls but what would they be like when forced to take the field? Would they find their courage? Would they find an able general among them?

And how would his new allies, the Mountain Bandits behave in a fight? Would they skulk? Would they run at the first sign of trouble? The Captain had known all along that they wouldn’t stick with him through a long winter laying siege to the island, and after all the reverses of late, he had to wonder if his own men would as well. And if they did, would he still be their leader come spring? Thankfully, Jillybean had given him the keys to victory. The rockets would be a shock to the people timidly hiding behind walls.

Unlike with Jillybean’s operation, when his rockets started knocking holes in their one defensive line, the people of the island would be trapped, unable to do anything but await the inevitable. Every night more rockets would strike and every night the Corsair ships would light up the harbor, darting here and there, ready to attack at twenty different locations. Every day they would wake to see the smoke of a thousand campfires. Their minds would turn an already huge number of men into an unstoppable, overwhelming force that could crush them whenever they wished.

He was sure they’d jump at the first chance to surrender.

It would be even easier to destroy the people of the Bay. According to his intelligence network, they had less than a hundred spineless men, and only a single ship left to defend them. He discounted the seventeen hundred women out of hand. First, they were women, and second, they were either ex-slaves, or ex-whores. He had known his share of both and the idea that they would fight was laughable.

What was more laughable was their sixteen-year-old “Queen.” Jenn Lockhart was no Jillybean. Not even close. For reasons that utterly escaped him, she had dismissed two offers by the Guardians to join forces and now they were both isolated and weak.

All of this was great news and was also why he was so worried about the “What if” factor.

What if the Islanders refused to give up even with their walls in ruins? What if the Mountain Bandits tried to turn the tables on him? What if the rockets merely scratched the wall? What if a storm swept aside his fleet as they headed south to San Francisco? An act of God was just about the only way he would lose against them.

He knew he would dwell on all the “What if” possibilities during the voyage north. Because his radios were line of sight only, his string of radio operators that stretched from Hoquiam to Bainbridge would be useless. For two or three days, he would be tactically blind and for all he knew he could be sailing into an immense trap. Of course, the idea was outlandish and yet it couldn’t be simply dismissed. Jillybean was the perfect example of someone who had made the mistake of not taking into account the “What if” factor.

More crazy scenarios entered his mind. They were fueled by that little touch of nerves he always got when around the Queen. It wasn’t just that he never knew exactly who he was talking to, it was also the fact that she really wasn’t afraid of him. He had broken her mind wide open and fractured it into a million pieces, but she wasn’t personally afraid. She only feared what he would do to others.

That made him uneasy. It wasn’t normal, not even for an insane person. They tended to feel greater fear than anyone. He would know since he had driven more people insane than he could count.

Suddenly he clapped his hands. “Alright! Hold off on killing the slaves for the moment. You never know, we might need them, just make sure you divide them. Keep the people who worked on the engine separate from those that helped make the bomb, get it? Good. Let’s get the rockets loaded up. I want to be underway by the evening tide. Come on!”

Everyone rushed about, leaving Jillybean to haul her barbells with only Leah to help her. The seven-year-old tried to drag a hunk of lead that weighed as much as she did, but was kicked in the stomach by the hulking guard. “Git! Your ‘Queen’ don’t need you no more.”

Holding back her tears, she skittered to Colleen White and the two hurried away.

Make him pay, Jillybean, Eve said, materializing next to Derrick. She stared up at him, consumed with hatred. Make him cry. Let’s see how he likes it. And don’t tell me you can’t, because I know you can. You just have to escape and we all know that if anyone can do it, it’d be you.

Jillybean sighed. “That’s the problem. I don’t know if anyone can.”

Chapter 20

Bainbridge Island, Washington

Deanna Grey thumbed the switch and as she had expected, nothing happened. The detonator, which didn’t look anything like the ones Jillybean had stored away beneath the wall, was a fake. She made a show of flicking the switch over and over.

She then casually tossed it back to Andrea Clary. “It’s the spy again. And now she’s starting to become laughable. All she has are these games and as long as we fret and worry over her, the more power she’ll have over us. We have to stop jumping every time she gives us a little scare.”

“How do you know she’s a she?” Andrea asked.

“Because she came to me the other night in my own home. She held a gun to my head and tried to get me to turn against my own people. I wouldn’t, so she threatened to have Emily killed. I told her to go stuff it.” Whispers of astonishment from the crowd went back and forth. “I know my Emily. She would never allow me to trade the lives of thousands for her own. That is true courage. It’s the type of courage we all need to show, not just in the coming days, but in the coming hours. We need to get battle ready now!”

There was a weak cheer; it was as good as she could expect under the circumstances. “Wayne! Unless you’re still doing the spy’s bidding, I want a full muster in two hours. I mean I want everyone. Got it?” She spat more orders, and for a few minutes people were going in every direction. The wounded were not forgotten. Wheelchairs from the clinic were raced down to the harbor and someone ran to find the one ex-nurse on the island.

She came into the clinic, sweat on her upper lip. Her eyes popped wide at the sight of Gunner, and she quickly turned to Zophie Williams. One look at the terrible belly wound and she shrank in on herself, making a noise in her throat.

While her mom was hurrying about trying to rouse the population, Emily stayed with the wounded. One of the things she had been taught was the basics of triage. Troy wasn’t going to pass away anytime soon, while Gunner and Zophie were both terribly pale.

“We’ll give you both an IV,” she stated with far more confidence than she felt. She had never placed an IV before and hadn’t been trained to, either. Her only experience was watching Jillybean do it once to a zombie and it looked easy as pie. Of course, it wasn’t. There were so many tubes! And four different kinds of fluid, and five needle sizes.

Gunner watched her through his glazed-over eyes. “Not that needle,” he wheezed. “It’s too small. Go with the big ones, as big as you can.” He talked her through the entire procedure, which to a child was a big deal. Even with his bulging veins, it took her three tries. “You know, I taught Jillybean how to do that,” he said, slipping up. “Gunner” had never taught Jillybean anything.

“I know,” she answered, forgetting herself as well. Neither of them noticed. She ran the IV fluid into him as fast as it would go. She went to Zophie next. Without any real hope, the ex-slave held out an arm. Her veins were tiny to begin with and with the lack of blood, they were the same size and consistency as ramen noodles. Four tries were all Zophie would allow.

She asked for the nurse; however, the nurse was doing her best not to hear. “It doesn’t matter anyways,” Zophie said, without any emotion. “I’m not letting you cut me open.”

“How ‘bout something for the pain?” Emily asked. “Jillybean has some medicine for that around here.” She rushed about, opening drawers and cabinets until she found the little vials. “What should I give and how much?” she asked the nurse. The woman was in her element where drugs were concerned, and soon all three were feeling their effects.

Troy was eager to get up. Against orders, he strapped on his armor and took up his spear, pausing only long enough to wipe the mud and blood off of it. He hesitated at the doorway. “I’m claiming the Harbinger for the Guardians, if that’s okay with you two.”

“It’s my mom who you’ll have to convince,” Emily stated. “She doesn’t listen to me when it comes to the island’s business, which is okay. I’m a kid.” And I’m home, she thought. I don’t need to do any of this anymore. There should be a grown up here. Even with her father within arm’s reach, she wanted an adult, a real doctor, to be there, gravely shooing her out the door so he could save him.

And the doctor would, too. Knowing this, she would be free to run and play and find her friends and tell them of her grand adventure. But there was no doctor and she was going to be a child for only a little while longer. She glanced down past the torn pants; her scratches were scabbed over. Not wanting to think about that, she asked the nurse to look at Gunner’s wound.

“I-I just have to check on something first. My, my house. Right, I left the fire going.” A second later, she was gone, leaving Emily alone with two dying people. “What do I do?” she asked her father.

“You’re going to put a chest tube in me.”

“Okay.”

Some of Zophie’s despair had crept into Emily’s veins. Gunner picked up on it right away. “No. This is a real procedure. You can go into it afraid, or nervous, or confident, just don’t go into it with apathy. Do you know what that word means?”

Instead of being cowed by his sudden anger, she had to fight off a smile. This was her dad acting like a real dad. She didn’t realize how much she had wanted exactly this until that moment. “Jillybean half raised me. Trust me, I know every big word ever invented. Or, like, most of them.”

He beamed at this—again, the wrong attitude for a gruesome creature named Gunner—and again, neither of them noticed. With his guidance, she cleaned an area beneath one of his over-sized pectoral muscles, shot his pale flesh full of a xylocaine substitute to act as a local anesthesia, slit him open between two of his ribs and slid in the tube.

There were more steps, minor ones in her mind, but these were the ones that were impressed on her memory. That and the ugly red and black gunk that slimed its way down the tube. Her stomach rebelled at the sight and she pulled her eyes from it. With a gasp, she asked, “Do you think that’ll fix you?”

The truth, that he was forever broken and that this last bullet was likely the coup de grace which would finally drag him down into the abyss, could never be said to his daughter. “I feel better already.” As proof, he dragged in a deeper lungful of air than was possible ten minutes before. It was like drawing in a lungful of fire. “See? You did great. I couldn’t be more prou…I mean you did a good job. I could use some antibiotics and that transfusion you talked about.”

“You can have some of mine if…” Her sleeve was halfway up her arm before she remembered the scratches. “Uh, if I’m allowed to. I’m sure my mom would give some of hers. I’ll go ask.” She sprinted out of the room at top speed.

Gunner was filled with sudden dread at the prospect of Deanna seeing him like this. He tried to sit up and failed. His strength was failing him at last. His wound, the drugs, and the days without sleep dragged his lids down and he fell into a deep slumber.

Trying to organize a reluctant citizenry to fight an unpopular battle had Deanna busy flying around the island, feeling the need to be in twenty places at once. Emily kept missing her mother by minutes only catching up to her by listening for the latest problem: three cases of batteries that had been set aside for use by the landing force were all corroded—Emily dashed for the east side of the island where the replacements were kept.

Seeing her hyper, over-tired daughter, Deanna turned over the list of problems to Veronica and Andrea.

“Mom! I need you to help Gunner. He needs a transfusion…”

“Gunner?”

Emily sucked in her breath. “I mean Joe. He needs a transfusion and I, I, I didn’t think you’d let me give him blood, so I said you would.”

“Is that so?” Deanna had heard a lie in her daughter’s voice and now she transfixed Emily with her sharp, intelligent blue eyes.

The look on her mother’s face was one of the main reasons that Emily never lied to her, and now she had spat out three lies in those two brief sentences. She had to admit to at least one of them. “His name is not Joe, it’s Gunner. He says he knew you.”

“Gunner? No, the only Gunner I ever heard of was a slaver that Neil and Jillybean ran into down south. Is that really him?” Her disgust cleared away her inquisitor’s look.

“He’s changed, I promise. You’d love him. He saved me a hundred times and never asked for anything in return. And Jillybean trusted him enough to make him her chief general. You can ask Uncle Neil.”

“Oh, I plan to. We’ll ask him together, and, while we’re there you have some things you need to do.” Against her will, Emily was sent marching home to bathe, eat and sleep. She mounted a vigorous protest, which evaporated against Deanna’s wall of motherhood. “I will check on your friend, Gunner. If he can talk you through an IV, I’m sure he can do the same for a transfusion. It can’t be that hard.”

At the governor’s mansion, Emily found Neil Martin being forced to eat an immense feast by the very same tyrant.

He had been so thoroughly scrubbed that his grey flesh had taken on the luster of a diseased pearl. Clean clothes had been fetched from his house and now he was in a new sweater vest, khakis and a pair of black Crocs—his “Church going Crocs” as he called them. He was being watched over by Deanna’s assistant, Shelley Deuso. To hide the ugly flap of hair being held on by two safety pins now, he wore her gardening hat. It was a pale blue with a pink satin ribbon.

“Shower, eat, sleep, in that order,” Deanna commanded, sending Emily away. The girl took in a big breath to argue, only the breath morphed into a cavernous yawn and she was suddenly crushed by exhaustion. Slowly, she stumbled from the room. The second she did, the governor turned her ice-blue eyes on Neil.

He gulped down a monstrous bite before saying, “What?”

“You know what. Joe is really Gunner? I remember your stories. They didn’t paint a very flattering picture. In fact, wasn’t he going to put you into the arena to fight? And didn’t he kidnap Sadie? Come on, Neil? How can you trust a man like that?”

As she had been talking, Neil had loaded up a serving spoon with a chunk of carrot, a fist-sized portion of rabbit, most of a halibut and a red potato. It all went into his mouth. He had never felt so hungry in his life. “You can trust him.” Spoken around the food, this came out sounding like a foreign language. “I promise. He’s a changed man. You’d love him.” He found this humorous and laughed hard enough that a piece of carrot the size of his thumb popped out of his mouth and bounced to the floor. Without a thought, he picked it back up and shoved it back into his maw.

“Yes, Jillybean trusted him,” she said.

“Exactly,” he answered, losing the carrot again.

This was about all she could take of Neil just then. “Don’t let Emily out. She needs to sleep and so do you.” He began to answer and she used Gunner as an excuse and left as quickly as possible. With the Corsairs going back and forth on the Sound, she didn’t have time to babysit a dying man. But he had selflessly saved her daughter and for her, that earned him a pass concerning many of his previous misdeeds. But not all of them; she would never fully trust a slaver no matter what, and she had to wonder why Jillybean would.

He was still sleeping when she tiptoed into the operating room. The first thing she thought was that he was out of place. He didn’t fit in, not on the island and certainly not in the sterile operating room. His filth and blood clashed against the stark white of the room. Worst of all, his mask had fallen away sometime in the last two hours. She could see the bone of his jaw, the roots of two teeth, the hole in the side of his head where his ear had once been, and the dreadful mottled flesh. A fire had turned him into something not altogether human.

“But he saved Emily,” she told herself.

That little whisper was enough to wake him. He was like Jillybean in that he woke without moving a muscle. His eyes cracked open and he surveyed her, taking in every lovely inch of her. It had been ten years since he saw her last and he was smitten in the very same way he had been the first time he had seen her. Unlike him, she had changed very little. Deanna was one of those lucky women who had grown in beauty as she aged. She had matured in the best possible definition of the word, going from a pretty young thing to a lady, refined, self-confident and powerful.

He was nothing but a monster. With a quick move, he hid himself again, putting his mask in place and pulling up his blanket. “Hello,” he said to her when the silence between them became uncomfortable.

She took a deep breath, fixed her smile in place and returned the greeting, adding, “Thank you for saving my daughter.”

“You are welcome.” More silence and again it became painfully uncomfortable. He had no idea what to say to her and clearly she didn’t know what to say to him. They were strangers, separated by his lie. It was a lie that he could not undo. Too much time had passed, and his face…no, he could never admit the truth. So, he lay there in pain from more than just his torn-up insides.

A wasted minute went by before she glanced at her watch. Panic flared inside him. She was going to make an excuse, thank him a second time and leave.

“Emily, uh, your daughter, she’s beautiful,” he blurted out. The ham-fisted compliment produced suspicion in Deanna. Her smile dimmed and her eyes, which had been guarded turned flinty. “I-I mean beautiful in a kid way, not in the, uh the other way. And she’s kind and strong and courageous.”

“I agree completely.”

“No, you’re just saying that as a mother. I mean she really is all that in real life, where it counts. She left off half her story, because she knew it would make you worry.”

A cold wave swept Deanna. “Did…did something happen to her out there? You know? Something…wrong? Something bad?”

Many bad things had happened to Emily, starting with her kidnapping. It took him a second to catch her meaning. “Oh, that. No way. I wouldn’t let it.” She gave him a sharp disbelieving look. He grinned behind his mask. “Don’t let the face fool you, I’m a nice guy beneath the scars.”

“It’s not the face I worry about, it’s the name.” He froze, a flash of pain arcing through his insides. “Ah, I see you weren’t expecting that, Gunner. I know all about you. Slavers don’t just become good guys like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I don’t know how you fooled Neil, but I won’t stand for you being so close to my daughter. If we can fix you then great, but you won’t stay on the island a minute longer than necessary.”

The rebuke was harsh enough for a deep ebony sadness to threaten to swallow him in one gulp. It was a feeling he knew well. It had crept over him so often during his long convalescence a decade before. Thankfully he had Jillybean to nurse him through those times and he clung to her image in his mind.

“Do you also think I fooled Jillybean?”

A shrug. “How do we know it was even her? Maybe it was Eve running the show. Did that thought ever occur to you?”

“Eve? Would she trade herself for Emily? No. Never. Jillybean would and she did it twice. It was her. I think I know Jillybean better than you. She was the one who saved me, years and years ago when this happened.” He pointed his stump at his face. “We’ve been close ever since. You know, many, many times I wondered why I bothered trying to live and maybe it was because I needed to live for this moment. I mean, uh, so I could be there for Emily.”

Deanna opened her mouth to make another comment; however it hadn’t quite formed in her mind and she bit back the next accusation that was hovering somewhere just out of reach. It wouldn’t come because Gunner was right, Eve would never sacrifice herself for anyone. And Sadie hated Gunner for what he had done to her, and Ipes was so afraid of his own shadow, he would’ve run Jillybean away at the first sight of the man. No, only Jillybean could’ve saved Gunner and she was the only one who could trust him.

“Jillybean really saved you? When? What happened?”

He dodged the question, letting out a sigh and a groan. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She gazed at him for some time, noting that his IV had long ago run out. Having had a number of IVs in her time, she knew how to change out the bag for a new one. As she did, she mulled over the idea that Jillybean had chosen this man to lead her armies for a reason. “Our situation here, what would you do about it? If you were healthy, that is.”

His arm went cold from the IV. “You need to move the bulk of your forces off the island as soon as possible. Once they’re bottled up, they’ll be stuck. It’ll render you tactically blind and strategically impotent. And you can’t…” He groaned as a sharp pain ran along his spine and for a moment, his cold arm went altogether numb. Wiggling his fingers, he went on. “You can’t half-ass it. The force has to be large enough to have a legitimate shot at winning a battle.”

Deanna looked out the window, wondering if they had any chance of fighting a real battle. She was close enough that he could smell her perfume. It made him dizzy.

“How would you go about winning a battle with the Corsairs?” she asked, not noticing how pale he’d become. “I was in a battle once and they came in blind and stupid. I don’t think the Black Captain is going to do that.”

“No, he won’t. He’ll starve you out. He won’t risk another loss. While we have to risk everything to inflict that loss on him.”

She shot him a look; it was getting easier to overlook his deformities, especially when he kept his mask on. “We? Can you help in some way? Because we need someone to lead us in battle. I’m a politician, not a soldier, and our only real soldiers have become somewhat timid.”

“I might be able to help for a little while.” The tube helped, the IV was great and the drugs were a godsend—regardless, he knew he was probably still going to die. Without surgery, clots would form. Some would lodge in his lungs, some would travel to his heart and it was likely that at least one would head north and lodge in his brain, all were killers. If a clot didn’t get him, pneumonia was practically a guarantee. Then again, he could just bleed out.

“You need a transfusion!” Deanna remembered. She was O+, the closest thing to a universal donor there was, and she volunteered just as Emily said she would. He talked her through what was basically an IV in reverse. The only difficult part was that she had to stick herself, something that made many people squeamish; she was a trooper and went for a vein on her ankle and got it on her first try.

While they waited for the blood to trickle into the sterile bag, she chatted amiably, surprised at how easily the words flowed. It was his eyes, she decided. He had kind eyes and she found herself ignoring the repelling nature of everything around those eyes.

Soon even this small pleasure was interrupted by a stream of people.

The first was Troy Holt, who dragged a reluctant Deberha Perkins to the clinic. “Governor? About what we talked about earlier,” he said, standing as straight as his spear. Other than a yellow tinge to his face and dark circles under his eyes, he appeared not to be suffering from his gunshot wound.

“I told him that we need that ship,” Deberha stated.

“And I told her that you need allies,” the young Knights Sergeant replied. “I was wrong about the Queen. I see that now. I withheld my support and the Queen suffered because of that. It’s my intention to take the Harbinger back to San Francisco and do my best to convince the Bishop to ally the Guardians with the new Queen in the south.”

Deberha held up her hand. “And we can’t move any soldiers to the mainland using just that other boat. It’s got a hundred holes in it.”

Before Deanna could answer, Wayne French burst in, his mouth opened wide. He stopped abruptly so that Andrea Clary, who was there with a different emergency, knocked into him. There were another three people behind her with a list of conscientious objectors, who had decided that as much as they didn’t want to be slaves, they were against killing. The list had over five hundred names.

People began talking to her at once; the level of noise in the room rose quickly. “Can we talk in private?” Wayne asked, pushing to the forefront of the throng. “It’s the plan. I’m not sold on it. We have no idea what’s out there. We could be running into a thousand Corsairs for all we know, and with a spy among us, anything we do will be broadcast to the world. We’ll be slaughtered like pigs. And I can’t…no, I won’t be responsible for that. I-I’m handing in my resignation as Chief Security officer. I’ll stay on as an At-large representative.”

So much for talking in private, Deanna fumed. There were already ten people in the room and a few of them were outrageous gossips. In no time, the entire island will have heard that the man who was supposed to be leading their army was calling into question their only hope for survival. This sort of weakness was the last thing she needed, especially with people deciding to become conscientious objectors all of a sudden. She wanted to scream at the man for his poor timing, only that would be spread around the island as well.

Despite her blood boiling, she had to be calm about the entire situation. “I accept your resignation, Wayne. As for staying on in an At-large position, the answer is no. Those positions are filled.” He clearly wasn’t expecting that answer. He swelled with rising anger, looking ready to explode. She deflated him, saying, “Go dust off your rifle and prepare to move out with the rest of the men.”

“But…that’s…I’m too old,” he pleaded.

“Then join the ranks of conscientious objectors,” she told him, before turning to the indignant three-person committee. “May I?” She held out her hand for the list and then casually scanned through the handwritten names. “This is too bad. There are some good people on this list. I’ll miss them.”

The three lost their look of indignation right quick. Their leader, a woman with sparse black hair on her chin and splayed, waddling feet asked, “What do you mean, you’ll miss them?”

“There’s no place on this island for cowards. If you won’t fight, then you can’t stay. Gather your ‘people’, they’ll be the first off the island and clearly, since this is an emergency, we can’t allow them to take food with them or any essentials. And, since they aren’t interested in defending themselves, there’s no sense in bringing any guns either. So, I guess, it’ll be clothes only. Good luck out there, Jean.”

“But,” Jean started to say; however, with Deanna looking at her with such perfect intensity, she lost the thread of her argument after that first word, and she, as well as the two others, wandered out of the room.

When they were gone, Deanna pocketed the list and disconnected the IV from her leg. The room had gone quiet and she could feel their eyes on her as she let her blood drain into Gunner. “I’m going to need more blood for you. We got to keep you alive if you’re going to be…”

He shook his head, his dark eyes hard on hers. There was something so familiar in the look that it silenced her. “In private please,” he said, so quietly that the words barely made it through his mask. As if she were queen, she ordered everyone from the room and then put her back to the door. For some unknown reason, her heart was racing and she felt a queer thrill.

“The answer is yes,” he told her.

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”

He grinned behind his mask. “You were going to ask me to be your new Chief of Security, meaning you want me to lead your armies. I accept, of course. I’m going to need two things. That guy Wayne was right. If there’s a spy, you need to find him, quickly. Do whatever you have to because we don’t stand a chance with him out there.”

“The spy is a she,” Deanna remarked.

As her blood drained into him, he began to feel a little better, and in his usual manner, he grunted. “A woman is behind this? Somehow that makes it worse in my mind. No offense.”

“None taken. Women can be as bad as men. I just don’t know how to catch her. She’s too smart.”

“She’s not. If she were smart, she’d never have gotten involved with the Corsairs. You’ll see, she’s left clues, maybe even in plain sight.” She nodded, distracted as she thought about every interaction she’d had with the spy. “One more thing,” he said, quietly. “Because I’m like this, I’m going to need someone I can trust to help me out.”

“You can trust Neil Martin. I know he trusts you.”

Gunner hesitated. “Neil is, well he’s a good guy and he means well, he’s just not with it like he used to be. Remember that time…” He caught himself. “Uh, that wasn’t him. Either way, I need someone smarter.”

“I don’t know. There are plenty of smart people on the island, it’s just I don’t know who would be a good fit. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I think you know why,” he said. She’s started shaking her head. “Yes. I need her. I need Emily. She’s the only one that I trust with my life.”

Chapter 21

Bainbridge Island, Washington

Sitting in her office, doing her best not to watch Neil Martin terrorize a tray of lasagna, Deanna Grey realized that there were only two ways to catch the spy on Bainbridge. The first was to play private detective, root around at crime scenes and poke through the evidence that had been collected. Deanna didn’t have much hope in that. The second was to put out a trap for the spy, something she feared might be too effective.

Gunner, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a contorted position in a wheelchair, volunteered to be bait.

“It makes the most sense,” he whispered in his raw, gravelly voice. In spite of receiving three liters of blood, he sounded worse than before. On the other hand, he looked a little less pale and his dark eyes were sharper; Deanna could feel them on her whenever he thought she wasn’t paying attention. When she was watching, he studied her with an intensity that should have been off-putting and yet, wasn’t for a reason she couldn’t name.

He groaned and shifted, trying to get his hump in a comfortable position. “You could hint that I have a plan to destroy the Corsairs.”

“You mean you don’t?” Deanna asked in an accusing tone. When she got right down to it, she really didn’t fully trust anyone in the room and that included herself. Gunner was new and scary. Neil was more zombie than man. Emily was a kid, and Deanna had created a facade about her that didn’t reflect her true fears which were almost incapacitating.

Gunner frowned behind his mask and was summoning the energy to reply when Emily jumped in, defending him, her voice high and loud, and somewhat brittle. “Of course, he has a plan. You should’ve seen him before. Even with a spy with us, he had those Santas fighting like, well like anything you could think of. I bet he could whip the Corsairs with another ten bullets in him and one hand tied behind his back.”

“She’s exaggerating,” Gunner growled, shooting her a look. There wasn’t an ounce of real anger behind the look; a long nap and a bath had set her up again, and with her long blonde hair tumbling down her shoulders she was the spitting image of her mother. He had to keep from grinning like a weirdo every time he looked at her. “I have many plans depending on the situation, the lay of the land, the numbers of my opponents and their fighting qualities. What I’m talking about is hinting that I have a big Jillybean kind of plan, one that entails complete annihilation. When she hears this, the spy will either get too nosy or she’ll come right out and try to kill me.”

“And if she succeeds?” Deanna demanded. “Where will we be then? We don’t have an actual military leader. We don’t stand a chance without you. No, I’ll be bait. We’ll tell everyone that you told me the plan and that you’re too weak to carry it out.”

Both Gunner and Emily shook their heads in the exact same manner—almost like twins. “What do you think will happen if you die?” Gunner challenged. “Your people are practically begging to surrender. I haven’t been around many of them, but they all give off the same vibe. You’re needed more than I am.”

“I could be bait,” Emily said.

Now it was Deanna’s turn to pair up with Gunner. “No!” they said with equal force. Emily shrank back, startled. It was only for a second, then she smiled and laughed. Her parents shared a confused look, making her laugh even harder.

It was a manic sound and so surprisingly loud that Neil glanced up from his lasagna. “What did I miss? Someone tell a joke?”

“No, I’m just happy to be home with all of you.” She grinned and everyone was so caught up in their own worries—and in Neil’s case, his unending appetite—that they didn’t see the tears Emily wiped away. She was so happy she could sing, and she was so disappointed, she could scream. It had been six hours since she had been scratched and she knew that her head would start pounding anytime, and not long after, the fever that would eventually drive her mad would kick in.

Her father coughed and tried to hide his pain, which had to be immense. “I think it should be me. It’ll be killing two birds with one stone. By telling the men that we have a plan of annihilation, it’ll buoy their spirits. It’ll get them in the right mind frame. Fighting and dying for a cause is noble. Fighting and winning for any reason is like a drug. I might even be able to use the spy to plant disinformation among the Corsairs. It only makes sense that it’s me.”

“But Emily will be with you,” Deanna said, shaking her head. “I won’t allow you to put her in any more danger.”

“She’s in danger just sitting here,” Gunner replied, softly. “We all are. Unfortunately, we need to consider the risk of not using her.”

Emily raised her hand. “I’m not afraid. I fought the Corsairs all the way from Hoquiam and I can fight them all the way back.”

Deanna’s stomach turned sour at the thought of her daughter being anywhere near a gun. At the same time, she couldn’t be more proud. “Maybe we can follow two avenues,” she suggested, hitting on an idea. “Maybe the spy isn’t smart. Maybe she left clues like you said, and maybe if I get close, she’ll start making mistakes. I will search for clues and while I’m doing that, we’ll let Emily spread rumors about you, that way you can still be bait and she’ll be safe. Do you have a gun?”

He slid an old battered Glock from beneath his blanket. “What about you? I need to know that you’ll be as safe as can be. Neil, do you mind watching over Deanna?”

“As soon as I’m done eating, I’ll be ready to kick some butt.”

“So, you’re thinking June?” Emily said, laughing at her joke and rocking back and forth in her chair.

Neil smiled with pleasant vacantness and said, “Huh? Who’s June? Have we met?” This only set Emily off louder than ever, and her laughter could be heard down the hall by a half dozen people including Deberha Perkins and Veronica Hennesy.

Gunner coughed up something black and bloody which he hid in a fold of his sheet. “Never mind, Neil. Your job is going to be guarding Deanna. Stay with her everywhere she goes, and until we catch the spy, I don’t want you to trust anyone. One more thing, Dee I’m going to need that boat of Troy’s. Spy or no spy, we have to get every man jack to the mainland by morning.”

Deanna hesitated. The way he had said, “every man jack” had a strangely curious and familiar ring to it. “We’ll get them there and we can do it with the boats we have on hand. It’s not like our army is all that large, and half of them barely count as soldiers. Women over fifty for goodness sakes. Flabby men more used to wielding fishing poles and hoes than guns. That’s what you have to work with, and an extra boat is not going to make any difference.”

There were other reasons behind her decision not to take the ship from the Knights Sergeant. She felt it had been wrong to withhold the Calypso from Jenn, Stu and Mike when they had come looking for the “Girl doctor” months before. That one act had spawned the entire war. If Jillybean hadn’t been forced to steal a Corsair ship, Emily would never have been kidnapped and Norris Barnes would still be stretching his plaid shirts to the breaking point. Things would have gone on just as they had been, peaceful and idyllic.

The other reason she wanted to let Troy have his prize was because he was a Guardian, and she figured he would be closer to God than an ex-whore like her. She had become more religious with every passing day and wasn’t about to do anything to get on God’s bad side on the eve of battle.

Gunner scowled and seemed on the verge of arguing with her decision. She cut him off before he could start. “Now that we’ve settled that, I think that Emily and Neil should also be armed.”

“I kinda already am,” Emily said, showing a nickel-plated .40 caliber Sig Sauer that she had found in a backpack on the Dead Fish.

Neil brandished his fork. “I also have a gun, too,” he said around a mouthful of lasagna. He started patting his pockets. “It’s here somewhere. Oh, wait. I remember. It fell in the toilet when I was…uh, I mean it fell in the sink, but I washed it off so it’s all good. I should go check on it.”

“We could switch,” Deanna suggested to Gunner when Neil was out of the room. “I’ll take Emily. We can be like be like Sherlock Holmes and the guy that was always with him.”

“Doctor Watson,” Gunner told her. “I wish I could, but Neil isn’t able to follow exact orders and some things need to be precise. Besides, Emily and I are a good team. You never want to break up a team that works as well as ours.”

Emily was beaming at him in a way that Deanna just couldn’t understand. He was repulsive, and yet there was something almost adoring in her look. It was a strange look, but not one that set off alarm bells. “You’re right, and you will need her more than me. Just promise that you’ll take care of her.”

A small laugh on his part turned into a red-faced cough. When he finally brought up more terrible stuff from inside, he apologized and added, “I’d sooner let the island burn than let anything happen to her.”

It was an odd thing to say and yet, she believed it. She also felt reassured by it, and, what was more unbelievable, she felt a moment of pure happiness. Her daughter was home and safe and, although war had come to Bainbridge, Emily wouldn’t be fighting this time. She would be behind the lines guarded by this ferocious creature. And in him she had an actual general, one with Jillybean’s stamp of approval.

It was a strange sort of happy feeling that had all the substance of a retreating firefly. It pulsed inside her, growing dimmer as the terrible reality of their situation swelled inside her. The moment of happiness passed altogether with a big sigh. The spy was still out there, more Corsairs were coming and Gunner was living on borrowed time. “I should go,” she said. “There’s so much I have to do.”

“Me too,” he replied. They both hesitated, their eyes locked. Emily was so afraid that they wouldn’t get another moment like this, that she was a second from blurting out Gunner’s secret. The words: This is my dad! bubbled up in her throat like champagne, and nearly came pouring out of her in an excited rush. With difficulty, she closed her mouth and a second later Deanna nodded once and walked out of her office.

Gunner immediately sagged, his face pale and the breath in his lungs now rattling with phlegm. Alarmed, Emily knelt down in front of his chair. “Can I get you anything? Are you in pain? Do you need to lie down?”

Her honest concern was the only drug he needed. “No. I’m good. Can you help get me behind the desk?” She wheeled him into place, where he began scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad, saying, “What I need are answers. How many real soldiers do we have? You know, how many have actually trained to fight? How many weapons do we have? What types and how much ammo are there for each? What about food? I need to know how much we have. I need a logistics officer, a personnel officer, a weapons master, and a communications officer.”

He wrote all this and more, and as he worked Emily watched him from an angle, catching him on his “good” side where he still had hair. It was dark with little flecks of grey at the temples. His arm was strong and his one unaltered shoulder was broad. From where she stood, he looked nearly perfect. He didn’t sound that way, however. The rattle grew worse.

“You don’t sound good.”

“I’ll be fine,” he lied.

She ignored this, her mind gnawing at an idea that had come to her while watching Neil happily eating his lasagna. “If your wounds and all ever got bad, or worse I guess I mean, like if you might die, would you ever consider letting Uncle Neil scratch you? You know, so maybe you could have a chance?”

For him, the answer was a simple, “No. I love your Uncle Neil, but I don’t want to be like him. It’s not right and it’s certainly not natural. He would be the first to agree if things were turned around. Not to mention, we really don’t know what will happen to him in the long run. He still might turn.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”

Her strange demeanor and furtive glances were so unlike her that he worried there was more behind the question. Setting aside the pen, he focused on her and saw the nervous fear. “What’s really wrong?”

“It’s nothing. Forget I asked, okay? It was just a stupid idea.”

She was a poor liar. “No, tell me what’s wrong. Consider that an order.”

His hard gaze was too much for her and in truth she wanted to tell him one way or another. She was too afraid of turning into one of the monsters to keep it in anymore. “I might have gotten scratched by one of them. When we were on the boat and the torpedo was coming at us, that zombie got my leg. But it doesn’t hurt. It’s just like a normal scratch.”

This sent a spasm through Gunner’s chest. The pain was nasty and sharp, and drained all of the color out of his face. “For goodness sakes, why didn’t you tell me? Let me see.”

She plunked her foot up on the desk, pulled up the cuff of her jeans and showed him the scabbed-over scratches. Peering in at the wound, he rumbled out a long “Hmmm” before he hawked up some black gunk, which he spat into a potted plant. “First off, they’re not inflamed, so that’s something,” he said, first touching the flesh around the scratches and then her forehead. “And you got these on the boat? That was a while ago, six hours at least. Children tend to turn early and you’re not even warm. There’s a good chance you’ll be okay. I know saltwater kills some kind of germs, and that zombie had been in the water a long time. His claws might not have been infected.”

“Really?” She was suddenly smiling like a kid at Christmas.

“I said maybe. How’s your head? Any headache? Blurred vision? No? Look at the light. Stare into it.” She didn’t flinch or squint. He leaned back, feeling the spike of fear that had sent his heart trip-hammering, recede by degrees. “So far, you’re good, but we’ll keep an eye on you. You know, I was scratched once. I thought I was a goner. I always thought that maybe I had cleaned the scratch quickly enough, but maybe some sort of immunity runs in the fam…” He caught himself just in time. “In certain people, that is.”

She had forgotten that story until just then. Thinking that it was the end for him, he had gotten rip-roaring drunk and had come away from his near-death experience with the hangover to kill all hangovers. In the last few hours, she had felt that same sort of desire. Not to get drunk, but to lash out, to do something insane. Now that feeling was completely gone. She felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. She felt so good that she suddenly wanted to laugh and it came bubbling up out of her in a happy giggle that went on and on.

A wide grin spread out across Gunner’s face as he reveled in the laughter. Sadly, the grin was temporary and a wet, hacking cough stole it from him and killed her laughter. She grabbed his good arm, gripping it tightly. “I really think you need to try Uncle Neil’s zombie virus thing. Just a little scratch, okay? You never know, it might help you. And he’s still mostly himself. He knows right and wrong, and he understands jokes and stuff. He’s also way tougher. Won’t you just think about it?”

“No.” He pointed at his face with his stump of a left arm. “This is bad enough to live with. Besides, I need to keep my wits about me. We still have a real enemy to face. In the meantime, do me a favor and don’t mention being scratched to your mom. She’s got enough to deal with already.”

As much to keep her from letting out her secret as to spread rumors about Gunner, he kept Emily running around the island for the rest of the day and then deep into the night. He had her demanding answers here, asking questions there, getting counts of people, sleeping bags, canteens, ponchos, tents, and so on. It was endless and although she grew tired and slow from want of food, her head never took on that terrible ache.

There was too much to do to worry about the scratches. Once Gunner had his questions answered, there were battalions to be formed, and out of these companies, and then platoons were created. Each needed a commander, an executive officer and a bizarre array of majors, lieutenants and sergeants.

And of course, everyone needed to be given the juicy gossip that the new commander was an actual soldier with combat experience and that he had an exciting, can’t-miss plan to destroy the Corsairs on land and on the sea.

Emily was pressed by every person she passed for information on the plan, which made the concept of the nosiest among them being a spy a stiff competition with a hundred front runners. Many of her old friends even began following her around until it felt like she was leading a parade. She didn’t complain. Not only did they become her mouth pieces and help to spread the news of their coming victory far and wide, they also kept her safe. Now that her terrible fate had been averted, she felt the keenest desire to live.

The parade of children and teens was exactly what the islanders needed. They had a fearless energy that spread around them, infecting the adults and, as Bainbridge took on a martial air with formations of men and women marching to the harbor and guns everywhere in sight, people began to believe in the possibility of winning.

Of course, everyone wanted to know how they were going to win, to which Emily always answered: “It’s top secret. I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.” This did nothing to dampen curiosity and she had to dodge all sorts of prying questions. Late in the afternoon, Gunner told her to leak where they would be winning this great battle.

“Gorst,” she told her friend Cindi, who was a notorious gossip and was certainly no spy. She hadn’t yet met a secret that she hadn’t blabbed.

“Ah, Gorst,” she said as if she knew the relevance of the town.

Gorst was a little town five miles away down the Sinclair Inlet. There was only one reason anyone wanted to go to Gorst and that was because it was at the head of Route 3, which ran directly to Belair. Belair sat on the bridge of land that connected all of the western part of the Sound to the mainland. The army that held Belair didn’t need a navy to attack Hoquiam.

Cindi wasn’t alone in her ignorance concerning the significance of Gorst, which was proven when Veronica Hennesy came bursting into the dead quiet home of Gina and Eddie Sanders.

“The army is really going to Gorst?” she asked in a blaring, brassy voice, that disturbed the still air and made Deanna jump. This was Deanna’s third stop in her search for clues. She had been to Norris Barnes’ house and Joslyn Reynold’s place, going through each from top to bottom, trying to find any clue at all and coming up empty. The Sanders house was different. She knew she was missing something vital and knew it from the moment she had walked in, she just didn’t know what it was. Whatever little fact or clue there was remained maddeningly just out of reach.

“I’m upstairs,” Deanna yelled, dumping another drawer onto the floor. She began picking through Eddie’s socks and underwear, tossing them one by one into the immense and growing pyramid of shirts, papers, pants and whatnot in the center of the room.

Veronica huffed up to the master bedroom and stared at the mess from the doorway. “Hey Dee, I got a bunch of stuff for you to sign. A lot of the shopkeepers are getting their panties in a bunch with what Gunner’s making demands for. They want everything in writing.” While Deanna scribbled her name on each paper, Veronica asked, “We’re attacking Gorst? Isn’t that a bit far with just the one boat, the one big boat, I mean? If even one of their ships show up at the wrong time, that’ll be that. They have torpedoes, Dee.”

“I actually don’t know what the plan is,” Deanna told her. “Gunner said he had a plan to destroy the Corsairs, and made it clear it should be a secret. Hopefully you haven’t been talking to anyone.”

“I haven’t, but Emily is talking up a storm. It’s a little late to do anything about anything at least about Gorst. Maybe you should talk to her about keeping the Belair part of the plan under her hat. She trusted me because I’m a friend of the family. Others though…with the spy around she should be more careful.”

All of this was a great relief to Deanna; it sounded as though Emily was doing exactly what Gunner wanted. “I’ll tell her when I see her. Damn, I’m missing something here. There was something about this house that was important. I felt it the day I came to question Gina. But what was it?”

“A note?” Veronica suggested. “You know, from the spy? Only you didn’t know it was a note until too late. Like it was in code or something.”

It wasn’t a note. “Maybe,” Deanna said, trying to be polite.

Veronica snapped her fingers as an idea hit her. “You should retrace your steps. Come on.” Before Deanna knew it, she was being dragged downstairs. Veronica turned her around at the front door. “You walk in, and then what? What did you see?”

“Gina holding her baby.” Gina had been puffy-eyed and weak, holding her baby like he was a shield. She had refused to let go of him and, as the questioning went on, she had found the strength to be defiant. “She was sitting on the couch right there.” In her place was Neil Martin, his head back, the edge of his scalp an ugly red line held by a couple of safety pins. He was snoring softly.

Deanna tried to sift through her memory of that night, trying to find that one elusive element that was nagging at her mind. It wouldn’t come. “The problem is that the house is different. It’s been searched and searched. Nothing is exactly how it was. You know what I need? The pictures that Deberha took. Remember? She took pictures of everything. It was practically her entire investigation.”

Veronica volunteered to go find what pictures she could of the house, but was sidetracked and never came back. Deanna was still picking through the mess when the sun went down and Andrea Cleary came to find her.

“The boats are being filled up,” she said. “The first group is going to leave soon.” When Deanna only nodded, Andrea added, “Emily is with them.”

“What?” Deanna didn’t wait for an answer and was off like a shot, running for the harbor, afraid that she would miss the chance to drag Emily back by her ear. Thankfully, the boats hadn’t left yet and were only half filled. She found Emily with clipboard in hand directing platoons to different boats. In the dark she seemed older than eleven.

Deanna stared for a few moments, drinking in the sight of her daughter helping to lead her people. Without saying a word, she grabbed Emily from behind in a bear hug. “Are you really going out with the first group?”

“Mom? Oh, no. We’re going out with the last one. You know I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. Though I did ask Miss Cleary to get you. I thought you should be here when the first company sets sail. I also thought you might want to say goodbye to Knights Sergeant Holt. By the way, you authorized some supplies and a small crew for him; no one we’ll miss. It was Gunner’s idea.”

The tall handsome Guardian was standing off to the side and when Emily waved him over, Deanna went into Governor mode, thanking him and pledging the support of Bainbridge to the Guardians. The entire time she spoke, Deanna wondered if there would be anyone left to honor the pledge. He thanked her, shook her hand formally and then hugged Emily, making her blush and turning her tongue-tied.

“You saved my life,” he said, “I won’t forget it.”

A goofy laugh escaped Emily before she could stop it. “It was no problem. Oh, not that I’m bragging. It’s just…ummm.”

“She means you’re welcome,” Deanna said, smoothly. He grinned and kissed Emily on the cheek. She didn’t even try to speak until he had leapt lightly onto the deck of the Harbinger.

“This is by far the best day of my life,” she said, touching her cheek and watching as the one-time Corsair boat was pushed away from the dock. The harbor gate was opened and the black ship slipped silently out into the dark night. Now it was the fleet’s turn to leave. The fishing ships were crammed with men and gear, and were only waiting on the company commander to board the Dead Fish. Paul Daniels had been chosen and he stood to one side, scanning the sizable crowd. Pretty much the entire population of the island was there.

“Where’s Veronica?” he asked as he shook Deanna’s hand and accepted his sealed orders from Emily.

Deanna had been wondering the same thing and she too turned to look back as Emily reminded Paul not to open the orders until daybreak. “Yeah, I got it,” he muttered and stumped over to the gangway.

There was a brief cheer as the sail went up. Deanna wasn’t among those cheering. She had a cold fear beginning to take root in her chest. “Let me borrow your gun,” she said to Emily. In response to her daughter’s look of concern, she added, “I have to check something out. It’ll be okay.”

Emily had too much to do to follow after her mom as she made her way to the island’s one police station. It’s where Veronica would have gone for the pictures. It was dark and cold, and probably empty. Regardless, Deanna carried the gun openly as she approached the door. Its glass had been smashed in.

“Damn,” she whispered, gripping the gun so hard that if the safety hadn’t been on she would have shot the building. She should have yelled for help or ran to get Neil, however the idea that Veronica was in there bleeding to death decided things. She went in alone. The building was empty…mostly. Veronica’s cold body was there in Deberha’s office. The back of her head had been smashed in.

The spy had struck again. “No, the assassin had struck,” Deanna growled. She was angry now. The fire of her rage blotted out the fear completely. “I’m going to find you!” she screamed. And she believed it. Veronica had died because of the pictures. There was something on them, something that gave away the assassin.

Chapter 22

Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington

Knights Sergeant Troy Holt got his wish and more. The Harbinger was skimming along the light swell with the grace of a swan and the speed of a quarter-horse.

“We’ll keep the spinnaker aloft for the rest of the night,” he told Emanuel Powers, the man on duty. The governor had not only given him the ship, but had also provided him with a five-person crew. Yes, they were all from the objector lists, and Sara Sullivan was older, and Curtis Owens was rather slow, and Emanuel was missing a foot and hobbled around in a special boot, but they were still fishermen and knew something about boats.

None had been on an ocean-going vessel before and they were all suffering from seasickness to one degree or another. Because there were no secrets on board a ship that was exactly fifty-feet from stem to stern, they could not suffer in silence, though they did suffer without complaint. They were about as jolly as could be, under the circumstances.

In their minds, they were flying from an un-winnable battle and, as they had already managed to escape the narrowest part of Puget Sound unseen, they had high hopes that they could make it to the Pacific without incident. They were currently far out of the normal shipping lanes found in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and were practically rubbing the southern coast of Vancouver Island. It was a great dark mass a mile north of them, and from almost any distance, the black ship was lost against the black background. They carried no lights and not even a galley fire, although it was a sharp, cold night.

“Wake me if anything changes.” He went below and struggled out of his armor. His wound still gave him pains; taking a deep breath made him wince and it was murder to sneeze. This would be his first time attempting to sleep since the surgery, and he worried that the nagging pain would keep him up. He also worried about abandoning the people of Bainbridge in their darkest hour. They were clearly in need of help and he feared Gunner was not up to the task. When he thought no one was looking, the dying hunchback would slump, unable to hold himself erect.

His biggest worry was for his own people. They had participated in a highly immoral act—that of not standing up for the weak. He was as much to blame as anyone and wished he had understood the larger ramifications of Jillybean’s crusade. She had not been after power, she had been after justice.

“And I didn’t see it. The plank in my eye blinded me.” He named the plank pride and, as he lay there, he prayed for forgiveness. He also prayed for his people to see that they couldn’t just sit by while good people fought such outrageous evil alone.

“The strong have a duty,” he said, in a groggy slur. “What you do for the least of your brothers, you do for me.” Though in truth, they were not that strong and he had to wonder what seven hundred men and thirty ships could do against the forces the Captain had on hand? Even teamed up with the People of the Bay, they were too weak to do more than—a huge yawn struck him—to do more than put up a desperate defense. And didn’t they have to do more than just survive? Just checking the power of the Corsairs wasn’t enough. They would return in greater numbers as soon as Bainbridge fell…in mid-thought, his mind went black, his exhausted body sagged limply and he slipped into a deep sleep.

Three hours later, he was just this side of a coma and yet he instantly knew the feel of trouble. Quick feet thumping to the boom, heavy breathing with low curses, the feel of the Harbinger being turned into the wind, her sudden griping, and the whip-crack of the spinnaker. More racing feet and a light knock on his cabin door.

It was Teresa Byrd, a stringy little person with thin lips and grey in her floppy hair. For too many years, she had been a slave and her will to fight had long been broken. “There’s lights out on the water. It’s gotta be Corsairs. Right?” She whispered this as if the Corsairs were in the next cabin over.

“We’ll see.” This was his version of a lie. The Guardians never sailed with trawling lights or any other light if they ventured north of San Francisco; it could only be the Corsairs. Troy had stiffened up considerably. It was a struggle to get out of the bed and he winced as he tried to throw on a coat.

“Let me get that,” Teresa said, lifting the back of the coat so he wouldn’t have to stretch.

Thanking her, he hurried on deck where Emanuel was desperately hugging the spinnaker to keep it from making any more noise. Even in the dark, Troy could see his fear. It puckered his wrinkled face, giving it a hundred more lines that it had before.

A quick glance to the south showed the distant lights; eleven of them. They were somewhere around three miles away, too far to hear sails luffing. “Teresa,” he turned and saw that the woman hadn’t followed him on deck. She and two others were huddled on the companionway stairs. “Do not be afraid. And Emanuel, that isn’t necessary. Let the sail go once I turn us back on course.”

“But.” The one word was Emanuel’s sole argument in favor of giving into fear and hiding timidly.

“It’ll be okay. We are too far away to be seen or heard, and they are in the middle of the channel with no reason for them to make a course adjustment.”

His calm tone did nothing to calm anyone. The crew remained in a state of barely contained freak until the Corsairs were far astern. After that they were all smiles and manic blabbering about their “Brush with death,” as Teresa called this minor episode. To Troy, their reaction was far more frightening than seeing a few lights on the water. How would they react in a real emergency?

“Not well,” he muttered, wrapping his coat tighter around him.

It was close enough to the shift change that Teresa volunteered to come on early. “I don’t think I could sleep after that,” she admitted as the others went back to their bunks, grinning and relaxed. “It’s my nerves. They make me, I don’t know, jumpy. Kinda like I drunk a lot of coffee. You know what I mean?” He said that he did, and she went on, “Then my stomach starts hurting. There’s no sleep after that.”

“I suppose not,” he said. For a few minutes, he watched as she stared back at the fading lights with a pair of binoculars perched on her knife of a nose. Her right leg jimmied up and down as though it was having its own ongoing convulsion. “Would you like me to stay with you for a little while?”

“If you must be nervous, Teresa at least be nervous about what lies ahead. I’ll take the con for a while if you wish to go up front.” She was eager for the company, and grateful as well, thanking him over and over. Troy nestled her at the bow, wrapped her snuggly in two blankets, and told her everything would be okay.

His confidence was all a facade. The ships represented the vanguard of the main fleet, which could be just over the horizon, strung out in a long unruly line. Or they could be hours away, perhaps just then crossing the invisible boundary between the Pacific and the strait. Because the Corsairs had a well-deserved reputation for being poor sailors, unable or maybe unwilling to keep to their station, Troy was hesitant about rushing forward. Although the strait gradually widened, there was too great a possibility that some drunken captain wasn’t weaving about, this far north.

In different circumstances, a prudent sailor would have run his boat up practically on shore to keep out of reach of the Corsairs. Troy didn’t feel he had the time to waste searching the shoreline for a hidden cove that the mapmakers had overlooked. Time had begun to weigh on him. Ever since they had made it to Bainbridge, he had been restless to leave again, almost as if he were being drawn away, pulled by some unseen force. He had no reason to believe that it wasn’t a godly force. After all, he prayed for guidance daily.

He hoped to see the main fleet sooner, while it was still dark and he could see their lights, rather than later when the sun was up and they were both trying to manage the tricky waters of the mouth at the same time.

“I see lights!” Teresa hissed breathlessly.

Troy had to duck beneath the sail to see them. Because of the distance and the motion of the boats, they looked like fireflies blinking on and off. He hurried forward and took the binoculars from her, scanning everything in front of him. “There’s only forty-six?” He counted again and came up with one fewer this time. “There’ll be more,” he said. “Let me know right away when you see them.” He went to the wheel and edged the boat closer to the shore.

There they rode all the while watching the lights of the fleet glide closer and closer. Then, like the van, it passed into their wake and they looked forward, waiting to see the rest of the Corsair ships. Troy’s best guess was that they had somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and seventy ships. With the thirty that had been in the Sound already, added to the fifty-six they had just passed, he figured they still had half the fleet in front of them.

With the sky tuning from black to indigo behind them, it was a frightening prospect, especially to Teresa. “Maybe we should hide,” she suggested every few minutes as the sun crept over the mountains far to the east.

Troy might have considered it if there was anywhere to hide. The map showed nothing until they reached Port Renfrew and by then, they’d be a half mile from the ocean. No, they had to keep barreling on and pray they weren’t seen. His prayers came true, but not in the way he hoped.

They traversed the rest of the strait in the bright morning sun and saw nothing except a few gulls and a pod of killer whales. While the crew breathed a sigh of relief, their young captain grew more concerned. He turned south into the Pacific and now that the wind was right on the Harbinger’s stern, they fairly flew down the coast with everything she could bear and the mast groaning with each gust.

During this stretch, no one was happy and the fear built up with every mile. Troy kept the land in view despite the pleading of his crew. They were sure they were racing to their doom and that, at any second, they would see more black sails. Troy was afraid they wouldn’t. He disliked the very notion of a premonition; it smacked of witchcraft, something his religion expressly forbade. In spite of that, he had a dreadful feeling he knew where the other half of the Captain’s fleet was.

There was only one way to find out. “Emanuel, ease us to port a tick, please.”

Emanuel had a bristle brush head of hair and even when he shook his head violently it didn’t move a millimeter. “No way, God damn it! We all know where we’re at. That’s the entrance to Grays Harbor, up yonder.”

“I know. We’re going in just to take a peek.” When he steadfastly refused, Troy was left with few options. “It wasn’t a request, Emanuel. It was an order. Follow it or go below, and I’ll let you off the ship at my earliest convenience. And if you take the Lord’s name in vain one more time, I’ll pitch you overboard right now. Are we clear?”

Emanuel’s answer was spoken in such a low tone that Troy didn’t catch it. All the same he turned the boat. When Troy spotted the North Jetty, heavy waves breaking all along its length, he said, “Give it a wide berth, Emanuel. I doubt they do much dredging in Hoquiam.” The Corsairs were far too lazy to dredge a thing, though they did move belled buoys around the shoals that grew in size year by year. Emanuel swung the Harbinger in a wide arc before cutting straight east. He had a grip on the wheel as if he were steering up the river Styx. With the water filled with bloated corpses and giant zombies, it wasn’t a bad analogy.

As bad as the sight was, the smell was worse. Teresa went green before puking over the side, which led to Sara puking as well. Troy grimaced and whispered a prayer for the dead. Although they were unrecognizable now that they were half-decomposed and picked apart by gulls, Troy knew who these men were. They were all that was left of the Coos Bay Clan and the Magnum Killers. Their bodies had been dumped in the bay and left to rot, and were now being pulled out to sea by the current.

To avoid most of them, Troy cut south and kept going into what Teresa called “The mouth of Hell.” The harbor was five miles long and with every minute they sailed deeper into it the greater the terror on board grew.

Finally, they could see the waterfront of Hoquiam itself. Troy scanned it with the binoculars. “No ships,” he said.

Emanuel, who came stumping to the stern, nearly went headfirst into the water because of the sharp pitch of the deck. “It’s a trap!” he cried, in a high voice. He peered back along their wake, expecting to see a hundred sails charging after them.

“It’s not a trap,” Troy said. He almost wished it were. Teresa, crouching on the stairs, begged him to turn around. “Not yet. I have to make sure they’re gone. Three days ago, the west river was dammed, but that was where they traditionally moored their boats. A little further, I swear.”

“Further?” Teresa moaned. “Oh, gaw…” She stopped herself one letter short of blasphemy. He gave her a look and then went back to staring through his binoculars. There was a sudden burst of activity in the city. The people were ant-like with the distance, still he could see them running about. And now a bell was sounding. Its urgent tolling came drifting across the water.

Even though everyone begged Troy to turn around, he stayed the course, fighting his own fear. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel it in his stitches. Then he saw the edge of the wide muddy expanse. “Coming about! Curtis get ready to repo the boom.”

“Repo?”

“Reposition. Sara, drop the spinnaker as soon as she begins to luff.”

They certainly weren’t a crack crew, and Troy was really more of a soldier than a marine. They sketched a slow, somewhat jerky turn that none of them were particularly pleased about. At one point they almost stalled completely. Then they were around and the spinnaker was up and filled like a giant pregnant windsock. They picked up speed as they were running with the current and very soon, they were back in the Pacific.

Curtis started to say something about Canada, however, Troy was already turning south where the ocean had grown cross. The winds soon began to gust and the water was a slushy grey chop that made the boat shudder as she shouldered the waves aside. The spinnaker didn’t help to ease the ride and probably should have been lowered, seeing as it pushed the head down into the water with every gust. The crew became too seasick to even complain.

And still Troy raced on. Half of the Corsair fleet had gone south and, by his reckoning, they had a twelve-hour head start. He was desperate to catch up, though what his one ship was going to do against eighty or ninety boats, he didn’t know. He had faith in God and left his fate in His hands.

All through the voyage south, he tempted fate constantly, driving the Harbinger at break-neck speeds even as the wind began to gust upwards of thirty knots and the ocean turned angry, heaving the boat up and down like a child’s toy. Sometime in the mid-afternoon watch, they lost a jib, as a line parted under the strain. In seconds, the sail was slashing itself to pieces against the forestay.

Troy knew he had to shorten the sails or risk losing another one and perhaps the entire ship if she broached, but it ate at his heart to do so. It meant losing a great deal of his speed. For the sake of his crew, he reduced sail and plodded through the muck of a cold, wet and windy storm. It was the kind of storm that would have sent day-sailors scurrying back to the safety of shore, but was shrugged off by mariners who had to provide for their families.

With common sense prevailing, the Harbinger took the storm in stride. The same could not be said for the sad crew, who alternated between the abject misery of seasickness, and the terror of ten-foot swells with steep faces, coming at eight-second intervals. In Troy’s mind, the weather was just this side of “sporty.”

It calmed enough in the late afternoon for him to take a deserved rest and by morning of the following day, the crew were too exhausted to vomit or complain. They existed in something of a muted dead zone and didn’t seem to care that Troy was driving them toward the very enemy that they had hoped to be running from. They figured it out the next morning when the storm blew out and in the ethereal glow of fading mists lit by the metallic glare of a bright morning, they saw a crowd of black ships pulled in close to shore.

They were unloading men and munitions, and already there was something of a mob spread out over the beach.

“Where are we?” Teresa asked. She had lost four pounds in the last few days and now her cheekbones stood out sharp and clear.

“That’s Drakes Bay. We’re eighteen miles from San Francisco.”

She deflated, her green-tinged face falling. “What are we going to do? Do we go south to Mexico?”

Emanuel, who had the wild look in his eyes again, hissed, “There’s sails out yonder. Jesus! Look at them all.” Troy’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing to the man about his blasphemy, he was too interested in the sails. Hoping that they were the white sails of the Guardian fleet, he hurried forward and squinted against the fierce glare coming off the water. The sails were black and there were only four of them…no five. One was just a speck in the distance. They were heading to the city.

“Are they just scouting or bottling them up?” he said, speaking to himself.

Teresa overheard him. She grabbed his arm. “No. Tell me you’re not thinking about going down there. Troy, don’t you see that we have to get out of here? Right now before they see us.”

“Fleeing is not an option,” he told her before changing the angle on the mainsail. Heading back to the wheel, he turned the Harbinger further out to sea, keeping just on the fringe of the sight of the sails. He ran parallel with them for two hours until he spotted the Golden Gate Bridge; it was only an orange smudge on the horizon at that distance.

So far, he had counted fifty-seven boats and as he drew near the bay, he ticked off thirty-three more. They were in an imprecise amoeba-shaped clump about a mile from the bridge. As Troy edged his ship in closer, he trained his binoculars on the immense structure that was less of a bridge and more of an immense obstruction. It hung with a spider’s web of chains and ropes, especially along the lower part of the towers that held the bridge up out of the bay.

Between the massive supports were buoys and more chains. Strangest of all were what looked like dozens of anchors hanging beneath the bridge. They looked like an insane person had gone about decorating the bridges. Both ends of the bridge were more or less wide open. A few dozen cars had been pushed into position to form three simple walls on either side of the bridge. Troy knew they wouldn’t hold for long, especially on the northern edge where the hills rose high and dominated everything. Anyone on the bridge would be subject to withering fire from the heights.

Teresa tugged at his sleeve, her narrow face screwed up in fear. She was begging Troy to get them out of there. “Those Corsairs are signaling us,” she said, pointing at the closest boat. It was running flags up its backstay.

“It says ‘Report ASAP,’ according to this book.” Sara held up a black and white composition book to show the Corsair’s private signals.

Troy took it and glanced through the pages. He grunted once and then ordered the spinnaker up and the wheel turned so that they were pointed due south. The crew raced to get out of there and were happy when the water began to gurgle along the side. While they were at it, Troy ran up the signal for ‘Reconnaissance. Will Report.’

“That’ll give us some time.” He didn’t tell his crew that it would give him time for his own reconnaissance.

The Harbinger sped south and as it did, Troy scanned all around the horizon, certain he would see a distant white sail. The Guardians were sure to have their own ships keeping an eye on the Corsairs. Five miles went by and there was nothing. “Maybe they’re further out.” It made sense. If a chase ensued, the Guardian ship would want to lead the Corsairs away from Highton. He was in the process of turning when Curtis Owens gave a shout.

There, in the cove of Half Moon Bay, were what looked like the tips of a dozen or so spears jutting up over a little hillock of sand and weed. They were in fact, masts, silver masts, which meant they were Guardian ships. Immediately, Troy heeled the ship over and raced for the cove, excitement filling him. Here was a chance to hurt the Corsairs!

If they hurried, the Guardians could attack while the Corsair ships near the Golden Gate were disorganized and basically defenseless. He could picture the battle perfectly: They would come flying in from the west under full sail, pinning the black ships in place, making them easy targets. They would have to move, but the only way they could pick up the speed to maneuver would be to swing in close to the bridge, where they would surely be attacked by the People of the Bay.

It would be a battle of annihilation and with a third of their fleet destroyed right off the bat, the others would…

Troy’s excitement dried up as he saw that there were only fifteen Guardian ships in the cove. Where were the rest? “Maybe they’re on their way. Lord, please let them hurry! Emanuel, run up a white flag. Sara take in the spinnaker and the jib.”

While the crew hobbled about, following his orders, he went below to put on his armor and to take up his spear. On deck again, they were closer now, close enough for the Guardians to see they weren’t Corsairs. He waved his spear and dozens were waved back. A minute later, ropes were tossed to them, and they were pulled in close to the forty-eight foot Morning Dove.

Troy leapt across where he was greeted with stark relief by Captain Boon Mills. She was a perpetually grinning woman, though now there was pain in the smile. “Thank the Lord. I never thought I’d ever see you again.” She looked with some disappointment at Troy’s small, underwhelming crew. “Please tell me there are more of you coming.”

“I wish I could.” He gave Boon the briefest of accounts, concerning the situation on Bainbridge. If anything, what was going on in the Bay was even worse. The two free peoples were practically at war with each other, with both sides digging in their heels.

“The Queen cut off access to the bay,” Boon said, shaking her head. “Half of us are trapped here. We were going to cross over to the Bay on foot, but now that the Corsairs are here…” Another shake of her head. Troy understood. As a people who were dependent on the sea, they couldn’t simply leave their ships to be taken by the enemy. Boon went on, “We don’t know what to do. The Bishop has made it clear that he won’t fight for this queen. He says that she is only a puppet of the last one, and I agree. That Jillybean can claim insanity all she wants, but in the end, she was worse than the Corsairs. It’s practically as if she’s in league with them.”

“In that you are wrong,” Troy remarked. “She is far more noble than I would have guessed.” He stuck out a hand. Captain Boon gave it a perplexed look and then took it. “Watch over my ship, will you? I need to talk to the Bishop.”

Boon held him back. “You’re wasting your time. His Excellency has pulled his ships in, and the others won’t acknowledge us. I was on the bay side last night, desperate to get over to the Bishop to warn him that the Corsairs were coming, only they wouldn’t even look my way.”

“Then I’ll swim.”

This caused Boon to stare. It was a two and a half mile swim to Angel Island in choppy forty-degree water that had been teeming with zombies for weeks ever since the second battle of the Bay. “Then I’ll pray for you,” she said.

Chapter 23

The Marin Headlands, San Francisco

Mike Gunter was the only one on the hill who had his binoculars pointed the wrong way. The ten other pairs were watching the approaching Corsairs as they moved forward in dashes. First one company, then another, then a third. They were being cautious in their dispositions this time, something the Queen had anticipated.

A sigh escaped Mike as he stared back at Jenn Lockhart who had been standing on the roof of the prison since noon. Her hair was a wild menace and her black coat undulated like the wings of a manta ray as the wind swirled and whipped around her. It was the same gusting wind that had come out of the north carrying the Corsairs down to their doorstep. Mike resented its bitter sting.

He had been out in the cold since midnight of the night before, doing everything he could to put the finishing touches on their defenses. They didn’t have a plan so much as they had foolish hope that the Corsairs would come at them with insane overconfidence. Jenn had known since the day before that they wouldn’t.

Mike had come back from a long night of resetting buoys and had found her deep in the prison, gazing blankly into one of the cold, damp cells. “I don’t know what to do?” she whispered. She didn’t like the prison blocks and especially hated how her voice would come back to her if she was too loud. She thought it sounded like her own ghost was speaking. “They’re going to take the bridge.”

“What did you see?” he asked.

This made her laugh. “A cockroach. Just a cockroach.”

“You got that from a cockroach? What else did he have to say?” he asked to cheer her up. No one had been there to cheer him up, however. He had never liked their chances and more than once he had hinted that they should take the Queen’s Revenge and make a run for somewhere with clear skies and crystal-blue waters. She wouldn’t leave her people and, amazingly, they wouldn’t leave her. Apart from a few Santas, the strange unwieldy conglomeration of people had held together.

Mike suspected this was because they hoped the Guardians would join them, but even when the Corsair fleet had been spotted, Bishop Wojden had remained steadfast—they would defend their island and nothing more. This had been their way from the very start and he figured that since it had always worked before, it would always work in the future.

Jenn knew better. The Corsairs were not going anywhere until they had enslaved everyone in the bay. And the only way to stop them wasn’t just to band together, they had to band together and fight. Donna Polston’s daily excursions to Angel Island had met with a rebuff at every turn.

“They’re at two-hundred yards!” Rebecca Haigh hissed, her freckled face no longer able to hide her true feelings. Her brows were bent far down, while her lips were turned up in a smiling grimace. She was deathly afraid, as was everyone else on the hill, and that included Mike.

He was on the verge of wetting himself and his hands were so slick with sweat that he was afraid his weapon would squirt right out of his grip when he tried to shoot it. “Got it,” he said, hearing his own voice squeak.

Bean-pole, Jeff Battaglia, who was nearly too tall for the low mound of dirt they had scraped together, looked back at him, and seemed on the verge of cracking a joke, only to close his mouth with a click. It was a bad sign that Jeff had let the prepubescent voice-crack go without at least a little ribbing. “Just come on already. Charge, please,” Jeff whispered. He wanted the battle over with. He wanted it to be only a distant memory.

Five feet away, a woman Mike didn’t recognize began to whine in her throat and twist in her crouched position. She had young features and grey in her hair; Mike didn’t know what to think of her, except he knew she was going to run at any moment. It made sense. They were sixty people against five hundred, and that was just the first wave of Corsairs. The woman kept saying, “This isn’t right. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Then you shouldn’t have volunteered,” Miss Shay spat out. She was about the only person who was not afraid. She was angry, and not just at Jenn or Jillybean or even Mike. She was angry at the world and everything in it. Her son had died. It didn’t matter to her that Aaron had died a hero. Her boy was dead. Dead, dead, dead. It was all she could think of, that and the unspoken desire to die herself. Death was why she had volunteered.

Two-thousand people and only sixty volunteered for this mission. There were plenty of people who were even then hunkered down behind sandbags on Alcatraz, rifles propped up next to them, nervously blabbing to their neighbor and being blabbed back, neither hearing the other. They would fight when the time came, only they would fight from the high ground, surrounded by rock and steel. They would fight because they knew they had a chance to live.

It was generally thought that none of the sixty trying to hold the barren hilltop were going to live—it was why Mike couldn’t stop staring back at Jenn and why she hadn’t taken her telescope off of him for a second.

He had volunteered because when the call went out, no one had stepped forward. Some of the same people who had fought on the Marin headlands twice before when Jillybean was queen refused to fight for Jenn, at least not out there where retreat was practically impossible.

Someone had to be the first to step forward and Mike had been that someone. Jenn had given him that calm, queenly smile of hers. Even though they hadn’t discussed it, she had known it would be him, just as she had known he couldn’t take it back later even though it was a suicide mission. She had little room to say anything to him since they both knew that being queen was also a form of suicide. If the Corsairs captured her they would do terrible things to her before they murdered her. She wasn’t going to give them the opportunity and carried a snub-nose .38 in the pocket of her coat.

In spite of the gun, she had told Mike, “We still have a chance.” He clung to those words as he gazed at the Corsairs coming on in short rushes. They were acting more like real soldiers than ever before; Jillybean’s string of victories had taught them valuable lessons.

“Look! Smoke!” Jeff cried, pointing down to their left. Some of the Corsairs had hauled up large cauldrons which were erupting in heavy black smoke. The smoke wasn’t nearly as effective as the Corsairs imagined it would be as the gusting wind whipped it into spinning vortexes and dispersed it before it reached the top of the hill. Still, the land in front of the little group of volunteers was grey and the Corsairs took on a ghostly appearance.

Rebecca saw the first of them pass the next marker. “A hundred and fifty yards,” she called out to the group. “God help us.” She was now so pale that her freckles looked darker, like splatters of mud…or old blood. Her stomach ached with fear, worse than she could ever remember, not even when she was attacking Alcatraz as Captain of the Rapier. At least then she’d had fifty things to do at once. Just sitting there waiting to be killed was a trial.

Mike had the same feeling, but he had one distraction and once more he looked back at Jenn. Two miles was a long distance even with binoculars and he couldn’t see her face clearly. Her telescope was far more powerful and so, he gave her a hearty grin, hoping that she would see he wasn’t afraid.

“A hundred yards!” Rebecca said, whispering now in spite of the whipping wind.

It was almost time. Mike was just turning away from the woman he loved when he caught sight of something in the water; it was a man swimming to the island, laboring in the heavy chop. He pointed so that if Jenn was looking she would see the person before he drowned. He jabbed with his finger just as a gun fired.

Thankfully, it was a trigger-happy Corsair. It started a tremendous burst that swept the top of the hill, kicking up dust and dirt. “No one shoot!” Mike and Rebecca shouted at the same time. No one had been going to. All sixty people were flat against the earth as the hurricane of lead rippled the air above them. They had been warned not to waste ammo, but after a minute of doing nothing Mike thought they were taking the injunction to the extreme. At this rate they would die with full magazines.

Mike counted to three and popped up just as a group of Corsairs ran past the seventy-five yard marker. That was plenty close enough. “Jessica, in front of you!”

Jessica Mathis was only twenty and a young twenty at that. How she ended up in charge of a six-person squad, she didn’t know. She couldn’t even remember what insanity had made her volunteer in the first place. She hid her face behind a mass of black hair and pretended she didn’t hear Mike.

Kimm Reilly was hunkered down next to her. She was something of Jessica’s opposite. Her hair was blonde and tied severely back; her eyes were narrow and her brow was clear. She hit Jessica with her elbow. Jessica hit her back.

“Damn it,” Mike swore. He lifted himself just high enough to get his gun positioned before he rattled off four shots directly into the clump of men. There was a brief moment in which he heard a curse and a high scream. Then the entire Corsair army shot at him, or so it seemed by the outrageous amount of return fire that blasted into his little mound of dirt, whittling it lower and lower. The sound of so many guns going off so closely was shocking. It was like a thousand explosions erupting all across the hill below him.

The only thing more shocking was that it was still all one sided. “Someone else shoot!”

Wearing her usual cold sneer, Miss Shay fired, missing higher with each of her three shots. It wasn’t a total waste of ammo, however. She became the focal point of the enemy, so much so that Mike felt safe enough to risk a look and was shocked to see that the Corsairs were still surging forward. Already the closest was only fifty yards away. Mike fired twice and ducked again just as one of the Corsairs seemed to take a seat in the middle of the battlefield. He just sat down Indian style and didn’t move.

“Kimm! Wake up and shoot. Jessica, you too. Everyone fight!”

Some listened, some did nothing but hide, and some, like the young woman Miss Shay had yelled at earlier, ran away, racing down the back of the hill for the safety of the bridge.

Mike had no choice but to carry on with the fight. He popped up ready to do some damage and was nearly killed three times over. Bullets passed all around him, one coming so close to his cheek that it felt like a butterfly kiss. It sent him back into the dirt face first.

Jeff Battaglia took that moment to fire. “Got one!” he crowed. A bullet passing a foot from his face ended his celebration and his next few shots were fired without looking; he would expose only his rifle and part of one arm. Mike couldn’t complain, at least he was shooting. So many weren’t that Mike had to call them out by name and even threw a rock at one young man who wouldn’t listen. He screamed his volunteers into action.

Jessica Mathis rallied her squad, screaming words that weren’t English and may not have been part of any language whatsoever. She looked insane, her bushy hair standing up and her dark eyes bulging in fear. Her insanity was contagious and for eighteen precious minutes the battle became a slugging match in which the people of the Bay got the better of the fight. The Corsairs were stopped cold forty yards from the top of the hill and for a moment, Mike had the wild hope that they could win. It was hope built on illusion, which was shattered as the second wave of Corsairs arrived.

More smoke poured over the battlefield and the fire sweeping the hill was withering.

Miss Shay died, a bullet taking her squarely in the forehead with the sound of a bat hitting a baseball. In death her pinched look vanished and for the first time Mike saw the girl she had been before the apocalypse. Then Kimm lost the top of her head in a brilliant red spray as she was gunning down an entire squad of Corsairs. Right beside her, Jessica was shot through the throat. Sanity returned to her dark eyes as blood poured down the front of her coat from the gaping wound.

“Don’t hurt,” she whispered and then stood up, firing off the rest of her magazine. She died standing as every gun centered on her. Seconds later her entire squad ran away, half of whom were cut down in a blink.

When Rebecca saw that most of the remaining defenders had lost what little nerve they’d had and were firing without looking like Jeff was, she yelled over to Mike, “We gotta go before it’s too late.”

Disappointed, Mike stole a peek at the Corsairs. They had taken a good drubbing and more than a hundred were dead or wounded. It wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. “Alright. Ones get ready.” Half the force was designated either a one or a two. The ones got to retreat under the covering fire of the twos. The twos had to trust to luck.

On the word “Go!” the ones took off—as did most everyone else. It was a disaster. Only Mike, Jeff and three others did their part and their gunfire wasn’t enough to keep the Corsairs from ripping into the fleeing defenders. Not even a dozen made it to the bridge. The rest were cut down by the deadly, plunging fire.

“Mike,” Jeff whispered. “What do we do?”

Fear made Mike weak and he chanced a look back at Angel Island—their white boats had not budged. On Alcatraz, the Queen’s Revenge was just easing up to the dock and the six repaired ex-Corsair ships were out in the shallows busy setting their traps. Even if the Revenge was turned around at that moment, it would take her a half an hour to tack into the wind. A rescue wasn’t going to happen and without any cover fire whatsoever, running was out of the question. The only real option left to them was to fight and die.

“Take as many as you can with you,” he told Jeff. “You know what they do to prisoners.”

Chapter 24

Bainbridge Island, Washington

Deberha Perkins, Neil Martin and Gunner were the only ones Deanna Grey told about the murder of Veronica Henessy. There was no way she was going to tell Emily and she guessed correctly that the news of another murder would only dampen the military zeal of the islanders. That zeal, if it could be called such, was not an inferno to begin with. It was closer to something like a guttering candle that was only a puff of wind away from going out.

“You need to find the spy,” Gunner whispered, as another company boarded the newly returned boats. “If she’s still out there when the full might of the Corsairs shows up, we’re going to be screwed. Surprise is our only hope. That’s no exaggeration. And you,” he barked at Neil. “You’ve slept enough. Do you understand me?”

“Yes. I’m good now. I feel quite refreshed.” He didn’t look it. He had the mottled grey tinge that roast beef got when it had been left out for a few days. “And sorry, I should have been there for you, Deanna.”

Deberha, who was so haggard that she didn’t look much better than Neil, said, “It’s also my fault. I shoulda caught this guy a long time ago. I-I don’t think I’m really cut out for this sort of thing. I was a better sheriff when it was just like little arguments between neighbors. And I’m not even a very good councilman. Maybe I’d be better off with one of the companies.”

Deanna overrode her. “No. The council will stay and we will hold our heads high. We have to give the illusion that everything is fine.”

Very little was fine and Deanna couldn’t fool anyone that it was when the last company and the last ship slipped away an hour before dawn. Having turned a lackluster mob into a small cohesive army had exhausted Gunner and he had to be carried aboard the Dead Fish. Emily was the last to leave and the reality of their situation had turned her back into a frightened child. She clung to Deanna so tightly that she could feel her daughter trembling through their collective layers of clothing.

“It’ll be okay,” Deanna said, reflexively resorting to a platitude and very nearly uttered the perennial politician’s remark of: Things always appear darkest before the dawn. Emily was not her constituent, she was her daughter. “I love you, Em. Your dad would be so proud of you.”

Emily let out a high sweet laugh at this. At first Deanna thought it was nervous laughter, then the joy of it came through. “I like to think he is,” she said, “and I’m proud of him, and you.”

“Well good,” Deanna said. “And thanks, I guess.”

Another quick hug and Emily left her, tromping across the gangway. She waved a final time and went below to sit with Gunner.

“Keep her safe, please,” Deanna prayed as the black ship shook out its main and crossed through the gate. It was immediately shut behind them and despite her serene smile, Deanna wondered if it would ever open again. So much of their future rested on a dying man and an eleven-year-old girl.

Neil had kept to the shadows during the sendoff. Now he came forward, eating a jelly and cheese sandwich he had pulled from his pocket. He didn’t bother picking the fluff off of it. “What do you think? Is the killer out there or in here with us?”

“I hope she’s here with us. She can only do so much damage here. Don’t get jelly on your gun. If she’s here, she’ll eventually come after me.” When the Dead Fish and the rest of the gaggle of fishing boats disappeared, melding with the shadows, Deanna and Neil left with what was left of the small crowd, most of whom went home to get some sleep. The pair was not afforded that luxury; they still had to do something with Veronica before the sun came up.

They moved the body to Jillybean’s school and under the glow of the fluorescent lights they carried out a brief autopsy. Neither knew what they were looking for—the fist-sized dent in the back of her head could have been made by anything. The autopsy ended after Neil’s stomach began to growl. They decided to bury her near a section of the wall where hundreds of rose bushes had been growing in a tangle for years. At times it was the prettiest spot on the island.

Dirty and fatigued, the two then went back to the police station and stared about the crime scene. Deberha was sitting at her desk, an elbow cocked on her desk, her chin propped in her hand. “They broke my computer. Or I guess it’s a she. Whichever.” She jabbed a few buttons on her keyboard. “It’s not turning on or nothing.”

Neil tried the Enter key a few times and agreed: “Yup. This thing’s dead. I wonder why they bothered. Did you scan all the photos?” She shrugged and nodded which he took for a yes. He scrambled beneath her desk where the tower sat. “Okay. Maybe we can remove the hard drive and put it in a different computer…did you see the mess down here? Oh, they wrecked it all.” He came up holding little bits of computer innards. “I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. Jillybean has the only other working computer on the island and hers is always locked.”

“So, this is a dead end?” Deanna asked. They both nodded. She stood and paced, eyeing the single filing cabinet. “And all the files involved with this case are gone? But they left the rest. Hmmm.”

Deberha sighed. “It was the only case I ever really worked.” She pointed at the open cabinet to a single half-filled drawer. “Most of those weren’t even real cases. Remember when Travis shot his Mr. Chu? He admitted the whole thing. I took his statement and some pictures of the scene just so people would think I was doing something productive, you know?”

“It’s not all bad news,” Deanna said. “I must be getting close. Something in the files and something at Gina’s house gave away the killer.”

“I’ve been over those files a hundred times,” Deberha replied. “There’s nothing in them…but maybe the killer thinks there is. You ever think about that? The fingerprint!” Deberha was up in a flash and rushing down the hall to the evidence room, pulling keys as she went, only to stop short as her foot kicked a doorknob and sent it bouncing away. It had been smashed off by a sledgehammer.

The three stared in at the room; it had been torn apart. Shelves had been thrown down and the floor was littered with a bizarre mishmash of items. “I give up,” Deberha said and turned away.

Deanna tried to stop her. “You can’t give…” A distant bell began tolling. Her heart skipped a beat at the sound. It was one of the bells on the wall and it could only mean that the Corsairs were coming. Before she knew it, Deanna was out in the morning light and racing for the wall, yelling, “Where are they? Where?”

At sunrise the island had seemed almost completely empty; now there was an unbelievable surge of people rushing at the wall along with Deanna. Many were wild-eyed teens, or huffing, nervous older adults, but mixed in with them were a flood of little kids.

“Get these children off the wall!” she barked. The order was somewhat generalized and Neil took it upon himself to follow it, nearly causing a panic in the process.

“Zombie!” one child screeched at the top of her lungs, pointing at Neil’s grey face. Screams erupted all around him as children fled in every direction.

“It’s still me,” Neil said, holding his deformed hands out and attempting to smile. “I’m only a little bit of a zombie.” Someone threw a rock at him. “That’s not very nice. I know that was you, Sammy!”

Deanna grabbed him and pulled him along as she mounted the wall. “Forget them. Someone get me a pair of binoculars.” They almost weren’t needed. Black ships were flooding into the Sound from five directions. The thirty that had already been lurking in the many canals and inlets came out to greet the larger fleet. Altogether there were eighty-six ships and they were positively crammed with men.

The two hundred people on the wall stood in awed silence, each counting or doing simple multiplication. Most of them came up with a number that didn’t seem so terrible: seventeen hundred men.

“I thought it would be more,” Andrea Cleary said, sounding relieved.

“You’re assuming that more haven’t been marching over land,” Deberha said. “Remember what that Guardian said about the mountain bandits? They were chased all the way from Hoquiam. Maybe…maybe we should leave the island. You know, before they have a chance to attack. We can use the…”

Deanna slapped her hand down on the top of the wall. “No! We will not give up the island. But I will not stop anyone who wants to be a slave from going out there and giving up. You can start swimming right now, Deberha.” When she didn’t answer, Deanna walked down the length of the wall, watching the ships and holding herself against the chill of the wind.

The Corsairs took their time. Each filed past the big two-master that led the fleet. It flew an immense black flag that was so large that only the heavier gusts of wind could lift it. The ships dawdled, or so it seemed to the people on the wall, many of whom left to find someplace warm. After the first frightening thrill, there was little to see. As they went south, the fleet kept far out toward the Seattle side of the Sound and, as they did, the small crowd on the wall shuffled along, keeping pace.

Just before noon, the ships swung west and headed for the little city of Manchester, Washington, which sat a mile or so across from the island, just out of reach of their rifles. Two at a time, the ships unloaded their soldiers until there was a great mass of men milling about. A few fires were lit and it was thought that this was where they were going to make camp, but then they formed up into companies and set off, disappearing as they headed due west—toward Gorst.

“The spy!” Deanna hissed as she ran for the stairs, afraid that her little army would find themselves trapped. The spy was leading the Corsairs right to Gorst. She sped for the southwest edge of the island, a place called Point White where she had the best chance to reach Emily by the handheld radio she carried.

After a mile sprint, she was sucking wind as she climbed the steps of a lighthouse that erupted from the highest hill on that part of the island. By the time she got to the top, she was so exhausted that for a minute she couldn’t find the breath to speak. Finally, just as Deberha, Neil and most of the council caught up, she gasped into the radio, “They…they’re…coming! Emily? Hello? Emily?”

“Who is this?” Emily’s voice came crackling over the airways. “Mom, is that you? I can barely hear you.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Deanna yelled into the radio. “The Corsairs are heading for Gorst! Do you copy that? They’re going to Gorst right now.”

There was a loud, harsh crackle that made Deanna lean away from the radio, then Emily came back on. She was laughing, making the static rise and fall. “Gunner knew it. We’re not in Gorst. We’re hiding in the hills right above this highway. It’s sixteen, I think. It goes to Gorst and we’re planning an ambush. What was that? Hey, Gunner says I have to get off the radio. He says it’s for emergency only. Bye Mom. Love you.”

“Love you, too. Emily? Emily?” She glanced at Neil. “Do you think she heard me?”

“Oh sure. And I wouldn’t worry too much about this Gorst business. I’m sure Gunner will think of something.”

Deanna patted his arm. “He already did. He’s setting up a trap. Does anyone know how far it is to Gorst by land?” Rosanna Landeros thought it was ten miles while Karen Hentz and Andrea thought it was closer to six. “Okay, they could be there in a couple of hours if they hurry, but will the Black Captain hurry?”

No one knew and the six of them tromped off to the Governor’s mansion to stare at a map of Puget Sound. Gorst was so small that it wasn’t even listed.

“I’d swing around here if I were the Corsairs,” Jonathan Dunnam said, tracing a route around the very hills Gunner had his men hidden in.

“Not if you’re not expecting an ambush,” Karen put in. “Otherwise you’d go the straight route.” This set off an argument by a bunch of armchair generals. Deanna and Neil kept out of it. She worried over her daughter while he took his fears out on a plate of sandwiches.

Eventually, after an hour had been wasted, Deanna called an end to the little session and sent everyone but Neil away. “I don’t know how you can eat; my stomach is in knots. As long as that spy is out there we don’t stand a chance. I say we go back to the police station and look again.”

Neil was all for the idea, especially after Deanna said he could take his sandwiches with him. They crossed the island and twice they passed a tree that had “the” letter still attached to it. Deanna pulled them down and reread the accusations against her printed on them.

“That took some guts to put these up,” she said. “We’re right out in the open. What if someone saw, you know?” Neil mumbled something around the sandwich. “Yeah, I guess it was dark. And she is one of us. She’s someone no one would expect, which is every one. No one’s a suspect.” No matter how hard she tried, Deanna couldn’t picture a single person who could do all the horrible things that the spy had done. She still couldn’t believe Joslyn, Gina and Eddie had been a party to murder or to any of it.

The station was empty and Deanna took Deberha’s seat and placed the two pieces of paper in front of her—it was all the evidence left to them. She pored over the letter. She read it backward and forward. She took apart sentences and studied individual words. She held them up to the light, and even studied the font, and all the while knew that if Jillybean was there, she would have undoubtedly figured out who the spy was ages ago.

Neil held out for nearly an hour of this before he fell asleep in the chair against the wall. Deanna didn’t blame him. The day had been long, stressful and completely dull.

“I wish Jillybean was here. She would glance at the paper, give me that look of hers, as if she’s embarrassed for me and…” A very distant rattle of gunfire broke in on her thoughts. “Neil, wake up.”

“I was awake. Hey, what’s that sound? That’s gunfire.” She was already through the door and was quickly outside standing in the grass with her head cocked to one side, listening to an uncountable number of guns. It was a fully fledged battle that had sprung out of nowhere.

Neil began heading for the lighthouse, but Deanna stopped him. “Gunner will be too busy. We have to let it play out.” While the island erupted in useless energy and activity, she displayed a tremendous amount of self-control as she calmly went back inside, collected the two pieces of paper and strolled to the lighthouse. There was a crowd in the building and more people were along the wall, standing on tiptoe in the hope of seeing anything at all.

Deanna let Neil part the crowd, which he did simply by saying, “Excuse me.” People shrank away from his diseased flesh and quickly left the building. At the top was the same small glass-walled room; now it was crammed with thirty people. It emptied in seconds and the two were left alone to wait for the battle to end. From Deanna’s perspective, it was a long battle, made even longer since they could see nothing of it, so their focus remained fixed on the little plastic radio that sat mutely against the glass. The gunfire roared for an hour.

Three times someone came up the stairs to ask for an update, receiving only a shrug from Neil in answer. By the sound of the gunfire alone it was impossible to tell who was winning.

Eventually, the fire petered out a bit, picked up in a brief ten-minute flare before it died away.

“I’m going to try the radio,” she said. For her, it had grown into something of a religious talisman. She approached it slowly, touched it reverentially and spoke into it softly. “Emily, come in, Emily. This is…” She suddenly remembered the proper radio procedure. “Grey, this is Black, come in.” The radio cared nothing for procedure, and only emitted angry static.

Neil and Deanna stared at it for a few seconds. “Try again,” he urged. “Maybe they had it off or changed to a different station.”

“Yeah,” Deanna said, doing her best to hold back the tears that kept filling her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she tried again, and again and again for the next hour as the sun went down. Finally, the batteries died and the life went out of the radio. “I should say something to the people.”

There wasn’t really much she could say. She gave a quick rah-rah speech, using words like determined, vigilant and brave a number of times. To her they felt completely disingenuous since she thought she was on the verge of falling to pieces right in front of them. Somehow, she held it together long enough to make sure that the watches were set for the night and that everyone would be on full alert.

Then she and Neil walked away, alone.

“You know what happened, don’t you?” Neil asked.

She knew. The spy had warned the Corsairs of the ambush. “So, who is it? Roseanne, Karen, Andrea or Deberha?” They had been the only women in the lighthouse when Emily had told them about the ambush.

“Hold on. It could be someone with the army,” Neil replied. “That’s almost a thousand women.”

Deanna shook her head. “It’s not one of them. I’m seeing it now. The killer disguised her voice when she spoke to me. That means it’s someone I deal with frequently. And being on the council is the perfect…I don’t know the right word. Disguise? She could come and go all over the island and no one would think twice about it.”

Neil thought it over. “That makes sense, I guess. So, how do we catch her? Do we just try to arrest all four? Oh, wait. We can feed different disinformation to each one. You know, we can tell Roseanne that the army is going to Belair and we can tell Andrea they’re coming back here. Then we’ll know who it is by which way the Corsairs go.”

“That could work,” she said, lowering her voice in case the spy was lurking out in the night. “I need a map.” The pair hurried to the council chambers in the New Peking Panda and stared at the map—the once useless map that had been ignored for a decade. Right away, Deanna discovered a flaw in her plan: she didn’t know anything about what constituted a smart military maneuver. Or even an average one.

“If we say they’re going somewhere where no one would go, the Corsairs might smell a rat. Should we also come up with a reason for a move?”

Neil had only been pretending to study the map. He was too embarrassed to admit that his worm-eaten mind couldn’t make heads or tails of the colors and the squiggly lines. “Yes, that sounds right. I just don’t know…”

Deanna elbowed him and he looked up to see Deberha standing half-in the door. At first, he didn’t know why Deanna was so stiff. Then it came to him and he almost spat out an accusation. Instead, he narrowed his yellowed eyes and said, “Yes?”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you guys but we can’t find Karen. She’s supposed to be the officer in charge of the east wall tonight, but she didn’t show and she’s not at home, or at church or anywhere. I have a couple of teams looking for her. Everyone’s saying that maybe the spy got her.”

“Or she is the spy,” Neil suggested. “So far she hasn’t been shy about hiding bodies. Why start with Karen? We all know what kind of panic would occur if someone found her body.”

Deanna agreed. “She must have known her time as a spy couldn’t last. We’ll keep the searchers going just in case, but I think we should go inspect her house.” She grabbed her coat, and had to take a moment as relief flooded through her. They wouldn’t find a body; Karen was a creature of habit. Unless council business took her from her house, she was always either working her little plot of land or at church.

A rueful laugh escaped her. “Was going to church a cover? If so, it was brilliant. I’m just surprised that she didn’t come after me before she took off.” She slid her coat on just as a bell began to ring—clang, clang, clang—someone was beating it urgently. More bells began to ring, making the air vibrate in fear.

“I’ll go check it out,” Neil said and dashed out of the room.

“Maybe it’s our guys coming back,” Deberha suggested.

Ours guys? It was a ludicrous thought. “Our guys” would have sent a runner ahead with the white and red flag letting the defenders on the walls know they were coming so the bells wouldn’t be rung. Deanna stared at Deberha and was struck by a sudden blinding flash of insight. Her mouth fell open. “The spy did come for me, didn’t she?”

Deberha nodded gravely. “I’m afraid she did.” In her hand was a black gun. “What gave me away?”

Deanna felt her stomach squirreling in circles in the exact spot the gun was pointed at. She felt the greatest desire to take a large step to her right. “I want to say that I just knew but that would be wrong. A lot of little things have been piling up. I think what was nagging at me was the picture of Eddie’s little boy that you used to blackmail him into kidnapping Emily. There wasn’t anything on it that gave you away. It was what the picture was on. It was on the same sort of paper as the evidence photos. You see? It’s the little things, like how you acted like you knew next to nothing about computers and yet you and Jillybean were the only people who ever really used them. And the letter you had printed…damn I should have seen that.”

“Yeah, having the only printer on the island was pretty obvious,” Deberha said. “I thought you would have figured things out from that. Not that it would have done you any good, I was ready with an alibi just in case. Either way, it’s too bad for you that your epiphany came a little too late.”

She started to raise the gun when Neil came rushing in. “It’s the Corsairs. They must have turned the tables on Grey. And now they’re setting something up…” He jerked a little, just realizing that something was going on. He turned and gazed placidly on the gun without a trace of fear. “Am I missing something?”

“Yes,” Deanna told him. “An assassination.”

Deberha locked eyes with Deanna over the gun. “I hope you know there’s no hard feelings, Dee,” she said and fired twice.

Chapter 25

The Marin Headlands, San Francisco

The back side of the hill was a mere thirty yards away. It was thirty yards of barren rock covered by loose sand, some patchy weeds and two dozen bodies.

Down the front side of the hill were a thousand Corsairs, half were shrouded in smoke, which left five hundred, each with a weapon trained on the little built-up berm of dirt where Mike Gunter and four others huddled. The call to “Take as many as you can with you!” had been met with contorted looks of outright terror.

“Come on!” Mike cried, his voice almost lost under the thunder of gunfire. He jumped up, pulling his trigger as fast as he could. There was no time to aim and in the brief couple of seconds he was exposed, two dozen bullets ripped all around him. Although he wasn’t hit, his M4 was smacked twice. The first round skipped off the forward sight with a high whining noise that reminded Mike of a tuning fork. The second bullet struck the upper receiver an inch from his cheek, making an awful tin clank sound and sent a sharp vibration through the weapon and up into his face.

It felt a little like he had been punched, and he dropped back down holding his cheek.

As he was blinking the world back into focus, Jeff Battaglia casually asked, “You ever see Butch Cassidy?” His big brown puppy dog eyes looked sadder than ever.

“Was that a movie? I don’t remember too many. I was really small back then.”

Jeff had been eleven when the apocalypse started and by then he had seen hundreds of movies, many that his parents didn’t approve of. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of the few his dad had watched with him and that had made it special. He could remember every scene and most of the lines. Just then, it was the very end that he could picture with amazing clarity.

“At the end the two are surrounded like fifty to one, but they’re still making jokes, like it was nothing. I remember wondering how they were going to get away, because they always got away. You know?” Mike humored him with a nod. “But they didn’t get away. They decided to try to fight their way out even though they were surrounded. They rush out and…they stop the movie like right before they get lit up. I always wondered if….if they felt it. You know, getting shot like that. Getting shot like fifty times all at once.”

The other three with them were staring at Jeff in horror. Two were ex-slaves from Sacramento and the third was a gambler from Santa Rosa with a ridiculous handlebar mustache. For the life of him, Mike couldn’t remember his name.

Mike saw their fear spike. “I don’t think they felt a thing,” he said. “It would be a quick way to go. Quicker than getting picked apart here. They’re going to flank us any second.” There was too much truth in what he said for anyone to argue and the five of them squatted in silence while little bits of sand rained down on them as bullets chipped away at the berm. Death was coming for them; it was just a matter of how they wanted to die.

Unlike the others, Mike didn’t really have a choice. He had an audience: Jenn was watching him through her telescope. It meant he couldn’t run away, nor could he let his overpowering fear show on his face. He had to swallow it for her sake. “Don’t be afraid for me,” he whispered, picturing her high cheek bones, red from the cold, and her big blue eyes filling with tears. She was so young that it made him feel, perhaps not old, but older. Old enough to call himself a man.

Real men knew how to die properly. For his entire life he had watched men die and there was a right way and a wrong way.

“I’m going to go forward,” he said to the little group. “I’m attacking. Are you with me, Jeff?”

Jeff had been staring at the dirt an inch from his drooping nose. “Yeah.” This came out as dry as the dirt. “I’ll be Butch Cassidy, going out in a blaze of glory.” He tried to smile through his chattering teeth.

Mike pretended not to notice, just as he hoped no one saw the sweat in his hair that defied the freezing wind sweeping the Headlands. “And I’ll be the other one. Uh, sun something. What was it? The Sun-flake Kid?”

“Sundance! It was the Sundance Kid.” He laughed high and crazy before turning to the others. “You guys coming with us?” The two women shook their heads while the Santa didn’t even look up.

“That’s okay,” Mike said. How they wanted to die was up to them. “This was a volunteer mission and I guess it still is.” He took a huge gulping breath. “You go left; I’ll go right. You three, if you can, get down to the bridge and if you live, tell the Queen…” His throat closed over the words and he was a blink away from crying, something he didn’t want to do. He had no idea what would happen if he let the waterworks go. There was a chance they wouldn’t stop. At seventeen, that was still a possibility.

Jeff finished for him. “Tell her that Mike loved her and that we died like heroes. Promise us you’ll say that. We were heroes.” He glared until all three made their promises. Once they did he nodded and said to Mike, “On the count of three?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay then,” Jeff said and scrambled to the left and, after another gulp of air, Mike went right, crawling over the bloody bodies of the men and women who had followed him up to the barren hump of land. Jeff gave him a thumbs up, checked his weapon and cried out, “One!” He took three seconds to say, “Two!”

Mike’s body went stiff and he feared that instead of racing forward, firing from the hip, he would end up plodding like a robot and for some unknown reason he thought that there’d be nothing heroic about that. Jeff seemed to be taking forever to finish his count, and in anticipation, Mike eased up so that he could see over the berm. At that moment he saw a strangely shaped black something bouncing toward him—it seemed to be growing as it got closer.

It took one second too long for him to realize that it was a smoke bomb. “Wait!” he yelled at the very moment Jeff cried: “Three!”

Too late, Jeff leapt up and was already surging forward before he realized what Mike had said. With bullets hunting him, there was no turning back. He ran with his head cocked to the side, staring at Mike with a look of astonished accusation.

But there’s a smoke bomb! Mike wanted to scream. It seemed like the weakest justification for cowardice he had ever heard. And would it make a bit of difference to Jeff? No. He was going to die one way or the other. He ran, keeping just ahead of a wave of hot lead, living longer than anyone, including himself, thought he possibly could.

After four seconds, he remembered his rifle and began firing, somehow missing everything including the wind and sky. His eyes were wide and scared, focused on nothing at all. The world in front of him was a blur. The first bullet to find him dug into his thigh with a meaty thwap! He didn’t notice it. Nor did he feel the bullet that took off a chunk of his tricep. When his kneecap was shattered and he stumbled, he thought he had tripped on a rock.

His death was painless for him, but not for Mike, who watched in horror as he fell and struggled to stand, sprays of blood and chunks of flesh flying off of him. After eight long seconds, Jeff was finally laid out by a head shot.

“No!” Mike raged and began firing, killing three men with three shots. Many of the Corsairs had stood to shoot at Jeff. Now half of them flung themselves down and the other half turned to fire. Mike, who was kneeling behind the berm, didn’t duck down this time and expected to be killed in the first volley. “Make it count,” he growled through gritted teeth as he squeezed off more rounds, walking his shots right down the line.

He had never fired so well in his life, while the Corsairs were missing badly; most of their shots were five feet over his head and very wide. “Morons!” he crowed and laid into them until his ears rang with the thunder of his gun. He almost missed the sharp cry from behind him.

Finally, he ducked and turned just in time to see the Santa with the big handlebar mustache being riddled by bullets. His body was jitterbugging as if he was having a seizure and maybe he was. A hundred bullets blasting into someone could do that to a person.

The bullets were still hitting him when he fell across the bloody bodies of the two ex-slaves. They had stuck to the plan and had tried to make their escape, but without Mike running forward with Jeff, too many of the Corsairs had spotted them. Now they were dead and Mike was alone.

Two miles away, Jenn Lockhart whispered, “Stop shooting. Mike, just give up. They’re almost on you.” A company of Corsairs were crawling along the side of the hill and were coming up practically behind him. Mike wouldn’t stop shooting—she took her eye from the telescope. She had seen enough.

“Are we winning?” Shaina Hale asked. The stick-like woman was wrapped in a man’s heavy parka and was still shivering, her hands tucked deep into her armpits. “Are the boats afraid of us?”

It seemed that way. The Corsair fleet was not about to make the mistake of trying to force their way beneath the bridge as they had before. They were going to wait until all resistance had been stamped out before coming up. Then they would divide the bay into manageable chunks and devour the defenders in little pieces.

“No.” Jenn could only whisper. She lacked the strength to speak. It felt as though she were dying, fading into nothing. “They’re not afraid of us.”

“Oh,” Shaina pouted. “They should be, cuz you’re so great and all.” Shaina thought that only someone really great could be queen. She couldn’t seem to understand that Jenn was just an ordinary girl and that Jillybean might have made a huge mistake in choosing her to rule. “You know there’s a guy in the water.”

Jenn hadn’t been able to take her eye off of Mike; the entire bay might have been on fire for all she knew. Listlessly, she followed Shaina’s pointing finger and saw that there was a man drowning a hundred yards from the western edge of the island. His head kept slipping beneath the heavy chop as the waves clashed against each other sending up torrents of white foam.

A boat from the dock was pulling hard for the man. Jenn swung the telescope toward him. “It’s a Guardian. Run and tell whoever’s in the kitchen that we’re going to need some hot soup.” As Shaina skipped away, Jenn resisted the urge to look back at the bridge. The shooting had stopped. Mike was either dead or captured. There was no middle ground.

She did not follow Shaina down into the prison. Instead, she stood staring directly into the setting sun and cried. The tears came cold and silent. There would be no bawling for Jenn Lockhart, Queen of the Bay. Her misery had to be kept secret and her despair hidden. No one could be allowed to see that she was falling apart.

“Your Highness?” It was Donna Polston, standing discreetly back, knowing that Jenn would be crying. She waited until Jenn had dabbed her eyes before going on, “The Guardian would like to see you. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. It’s Troy Holt.”

Jenn spun. “Did he mention anything about Stu or Jillybean?” Donna shook her head, her eyes cast downward. This did not bode well. People tended to spill good news when they could. “I’ll be right down,” she told Donna.

When she was alone, Jenn couldn’t resist any longer and she squinted back down into the telescope towards the bridge. The first thing she saw were Corsairs swarming all over the last hill. Some were climbing down to the bridge while others were hauling bodies to the edge and tossing them over.

“God,” she whispered and felt her stomach begin to heave. Before it could, something flew at her, making her jump. It was just a pigeon, grey with a colorful green collar about the lower part of its throat.

“Here’s your soup,” Shaina said, coming up through the doorway. Her sleeves were wet and there was a steaming carrot in the crook of one arm. “Hey, look. It’s a rock dove.”

“That? It’s only a…” Jenn paused in midsentence. “Why would you call that a rock dove. It’s a pigeon.”

As usual, Shaina looked confused. “It’s what my dad called him and he was great, too. He was as smart as anyone. Except for the old Queen. She knew everything there was to know. She even knew stuff that hadn’t even happened yet. Kinda like you. Oh, rats. I forgot the spoon for your soup. Are you okay without one?”

Jenn was still stuck on the idea of a rock dove. Was it a sign or was it just a bird? Alcatraz was called “The Rock” and the dove was the symbol for peace. Did she dare hope? No. Without Mike, Jenn didn’t think she could ever hope again.

“The soup is for the Guardian and I suspect he would like a spoon. Here, let me take the bowl while you run and fetch a spoon.” Jenn breathed in the steam of the soup as she carried the bowl down to the infirmary where Troy was still pale and dripping, coughing up bay water every few minutes.

Although his chest still ached and his lungs felt like a pair of sponges, he dropped to one knee as Jenn stepped in. Curiosity had drawn a crowd which now oohed. No Guardian had ever knelt before their queen.

“I believe I was wrong,” he said.

This was unexpected. She set the bowl aside and put out her hand to help him up. He misconstrued the action and kissed the back of her cold hand. This had the crowd whispering, hopefully. Jenn was actually bothered by the feel of his lips on her flesh. The only lips she ever wanted to feel were Mike’s.

She gave the Guardian a lying smile. “Here, sit. Have some soup. We’ll get you a spoon in a second. In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what you were wrong about.”

“I was wrong about Queen Jillian and about you.”

“Me? Somehow I doubt that. Why don’t you explain…ah, here’s your spoon.” He ignored the soup. Time was crunching in again and he rushed out his story, starting when he and Stu left the Queen’s Revenge. If she’d had any hope left, the story would have killed it and then burnt its bones: Stu dead, Jillybean collared and caged, Bainbridge surrounded and their governor threatened by assassins at every turn. And now the Guardian kisses her hand?

It was all too much for the sixteen-year-old and she could not be blamed for losing her stoicism. “I’m sorry you’ve come such a long way only to die.”

“We have a chance if we band together,” he insisted, his youthful face set like a sharp axe.

“We need to do more than band together,” she replied. “We, all of us, need to fight, and the Guardians say they won’t.”

“And I say they will. The reason I was sent with the Queen was to decide what sort of person she was and whether or not she could be trusted. I believe she is far more noble than everyone gave her credit for. Everyone except for you.”

Shaina looked hurt by this and pulled the offered spoon back. “I always thought she was great. She was nice to me when no one else was. And she cured people. And she beat the Corsairs, something no one can do. And she was great.”

Troy bowed to her. “I should have listened to you. In my pride I failed. I would like to fix that. We don’t have a lot of time. Is there any way I can borrow a ship?”

“Take the Queen’s Revenge,” Jenn said, immediately. Not only was she their fastest ship, Jenn knew that if it was flying before the wind out on the bay, she’d be able pretend Mike was on her, coaxing every ounce of speed out of her sails, perhaps laughing and definitely flashing that white grin of his.

Troy bowed once, wincing as he came back up, and then ran from the room, ignoring the spoon Shaina held out for him. “Go as well, Shaina and make sure he eats. Donna, if you would go as well.” Jenn pulled the older woman aside. “Make sure she doesn’t fall overboard.”

The appearance of Troy created a buzz of excitement that Jenn took advantage of. She used the brief burst of excitement to wring even more work from her exhausted people. Although she had no hope of prevailing, Jenn decided to sell their lives as dearly as she could. Their ammo situation was dire and they had a scant few radio controlled detonators. On the other hand they had a few hundred pounds of explosives, smoke generators by the dozens, and more nets, buoys and rope than she knew what to do with.

Mike had known. With his innate sense of everything nautical, he was as diabolical as Jillybean when he was on the water. With him gone, she didn’t know who to turn to. “Deaf Mick?” She laughed at her little joke. There was no way she could trust that one and made sure he was kept away from any of the boats.

A sigh escaped her. She really couldn’t think of anyone. “There’s always Troy, if he comes back that is.”

He came back, flying along with a crowd of sails. With him were Bishop Wojdan and Commander Walker. They stood on deck, not gazing toward the island but out towards the Golden Gate where the Corsair ships were edging closer. Even with their soldiers marching up and down the entire length of the bridge, they smelled a trap.

Jenn waited for them in her office. Unlike the last couple of times, Jenn wasn’t nervous at all. She had nothing to fear now. She also had nothing left to lose.

When they arrived, Donna swept in, “Your royal Highness, may I present his Excellency Bishop Wojdan.”

No games this time. She stood to greet him as an equal and shook his hand. She did not do the same with Commander Walker as he remained slightly back and didn’t come forward. Jenn didn’t read anything into this. It was too much of a bother to fret over every little thing. They would either accept her as their queen or not. There was no middle ground.

Knights Sergeant Troy Holt, who was more presentable in grey armor was with them, standing behind his commander. Knowing he was injured, she offered him a chair.

“Perhaps we should come to an agreement before anyone sits,” the Bishop said. “We have come to offer an alliance in the hope that joint operations between our two people might overcome our mutual foe.”

Jenn sighed and sat in her chair, less as some sort of show but because she had not slept the night before and was tired. “Such big words. They’re exhausting. The answer is no.” Jillybean would never have accepted a role in which she would be gradually shoved aside and neither would Jenn.

For the first time Bishop Wojdan showed more than mild irritation. His soft, round face went red and his jowls shook as he cried, “Arrogant child! Look at where your foolish power politics have gotten us. You’ve divided us at the very moment we need to unite.”

“Child?” She shrugged. “Yeah, I am that. I’m also queen, and you are a bishop and Walker is a soldier. It’s like we all have our parts to play. The way I see it, if we play them like we’re supposed to we will be united. There aren’t two peoples here. There’s only one and they need spiritual guidance, they need a strong military and they need a head of state. An alliance won’t give that to them. There’ll be bickering. There’ll be mistrust. There’ll be fear.”

“There already is fear and mistrust,” Wojdan countered. “Have you seen what your leadership has given us?” Unexpectedly, he went to the door and flung it open with a sweeping gesture that included a half bow. “Let’s go up to the roof and if you can show me a single accomplishment of yours, I’ll kiss your ring.” He acted like he meant it. There was a small crowd right outside the door who had heard everything. They were looking at their young queen with poorly hidden doubt.

Jenn stood, drew her long black coat tighter around her neck and marched out. She didn’t know what she’d be able to show him in the way of an accomplishment. The anti-torpedo netting around the Floating Fortress? It seemed like a small thing. The salvage of the six Corsair boats in record time? That had been all Mike. The death of sixty volunteers? That she got sixty people to volunteer for a suicide mission was an accomplishment, just not one she wanted to ever talk about.

At least the twilight hid the bodies floating out to sea. The same tide that had been working against the Corsairs was slowly tugging the bodies away.

The telescope drew Jenn and she went to it and saw she had forgotten to put the lens cap on. She fitted it back on as Bishop Wojdan stood nearby, his hands behind his back, thrusting out his belly, going up and down on his toes.

“I prayed for you,” he said, loud enough to be heard by the crowd.

Knowing he was about to begin some sort of sermon, she answered simply, “Thank you.”

“I prayed that you would find wisdom and understanding. And that…”

“Then your prayers have been answered,” she replied, interrupting him. “It’s too bad that you didn’t ask for the same things in yourself. If you had, we would have been united days and days ago.”

“Under your leadership? I came up here to see proof, some sign that you could lead us.” He walked to the edge of the roof and lifted his arms. “All I see is failure. That battle this evening was a fiasco. It was the saddest waste of life I have ever witnessed. You sacrificed your people for nothing. It was even worse than that. All you did was show the Corsairs how weak we are. I’m sorry, but the only sign that I see is that bridge and it’s telling me that I can’t have you as my queen.”

Chapter 26

Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

Jillybean emerged from the void, blinking and confused, not knowing where she was or where she had been. The last thing she remembered was being “searched” by the grubby hands of her guard after returning from the blacksmith’s. It was Derrick Wodtli, the same foul guard who had first whipped her down the street to the chapel days before. He had been horribly thorough in his search and she felt dirty inside and out.

She had been close to retching, while he was erect and hot. Thankfully, other than the cavity searches, she wasn’t to be touched.

Colleen White didn’t have the same protection and had the misfortune of bringing Jillybean her lunch right after this. Twitching and red with shame, Jillybean had just dragged her dumbbells through the door of her cage when Colleen came in with the tray.

That was the last Jillybean remembered before a deep endless darkness enveloped her. It was wonderful in that it was filled with blessed nothingness. If it was death, Jillybean welcomed it. Sadly, it was not death and the next thing Jillybean knew, sudden light spilled over the darkness and she looked up to find Colleen standing over her, a balled-up bundle of torn clothes in one hand and the tray in the other.

“Your f-f-food,” Colleen said in a whisper, speaking through the curtain of black hair that fell across her lowered face. A tear fell into Jillybean’s soup. The bowl rattled on the tray; she was trembling.

You missed it JB, Eve said from the next cage over. Other than her lithe dark form, the cage was empty. Leah had been moved. Yeah, Derrick went to town on ol’ Colleen. I bet she wishes you had killed her now. Soon they’ll all be wishing the same thing. When the Black Captain comes back in triumph, there’ll be a perfect orgy of rape and murder on the menu. Too bad no one will lift a finger to stop it.

“Stop it!” Jillybean seethed, making Colleen lean back from her. “You know I can’t do anything to help. Look at me. Look! I can’t wish away these chains.” She rattled them back and forth savagely. A fourth barbell had been added to her collar and now she could barely move from one end of the cage to the next. “Tell her, Ipes.”

The zebra had just materialized from the far cell, the one that had been Colleen’s. He waddled to the bars, but instead of squeezing through, he hung his head between them as if he had been imprisoned for years. I’m afraid I’m with Eve. Your people need you.

“My people? What people? The only people I have are dead or will be soon enough.”

That’s not true, Sadie said emerging from Eve’s dark shadow. Colleen is yours. Ask her, you’ll see.

“Why would I want her?” Jillybean snapped. “She’s a traitorous bitch. She’s the reason Stu was killed. I hope she gets raped every day until her insides turn black and she finds the courage to hang herself.”

Eve chuckled at this; it was a manly sound. I thought you were all about protecting the weak. I thought you were all about forgiveness? Don’t you want to be forgiven for your crimes? And aren’t they a hundred times worse?

They were. She could blame Eve all she wanted, but people had been murdered with her hands. At night she could feel the hot blood run down them, and smell the harsh copper, and then there were the screams. The screams drilled into her ears, endlessly. Jillybean looked up at Colleen, realizing she hated herself more than the pitiful creature in front of her.

“Are you mine?” she asked the young woman.

Colleen had been looking at Jillybean with disgust curling her recently fattened lip. “Am I yours? What do you mean?”

“Am I your queen?”

The girl sucked in a hissing breath and held it as her eyes darted toward Derrick, who was watching Jillybean’s display of insanity as if he were watching live theater. “No. I-I belong to the Captain.”

“See?” Jillybean cried. “I don’t have people. There’s no one worth saving. I’m not going to risk breaking out for people who spit on me.”

Colleen dropped her eyes at this and Derrick suddenly seemed to wake up. “Hey! Enough of that talk. Now, take yer food or I’ll eat it.”

Jillybean took the bowl and Colleen turned away. Don’t let her leave! Eve screamed. Right now, she’s your only hope. Or do you want to stay? Is that it?

Ipes and Sadie both perked up and when Jillybean didn’t answer right away, Ipes said, If you’re going to stay, I can’t be a part of it, and neither can Sadie.

It’s not that Jillybean wanted to stay, she was just tired and in pain. Her body ached and her head throbbed. She had done everything she could to prevail only to be let down time and again by people who should have supported her. And now it was happening again. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”

Colleen was a step away from the door. Now she looked back thinking that Jillybean was talking to her. “When were we ever friends?”

Jillybean gazed at her. Colleen had always had a high opinion of herself, but that had been almost beaten out of her. Now, she was just another slave and as much as Jillybean hated her, she hated what was being done to her more. “We should have been friends. There was no reason why we couldn’t have been or why we can’t now. I appreciate strong women. When you bring me my dinner, wear your hair back and hold your head high. Don’t let them see that they’re getting to you.” She fixed Colleen with a hard stare, a stare that was filled with meaning.

“Ha-ha!” laughed Derrick. “Yeah, do something with yer hair and wear somethin’ nice. No more jeans. When I want the goods I don’t want to have to peel them off ya. Or if I’m not to yer likin’ you can send that little sweetling. It’s time a real man broke her in. They don’t call Captain Wilton, ‘Wilty’ for nothing. Ha-ha!”

He was talking about raping Leah Stewart. Colleen’s eyes widened in shock just before she fled.

You did everything you could, Ipes said. Now it’s up to Colleen. What do you think? Will she be strong? Or will she sacrifice the child?

Eve stood with her back to the cement wall. In her anger her darkness was infusing the air around her so that she was more smoke and shadow than a person. The Colleen we know will send the kid. Son of a bitch! The fate of the world depends on damn Colleen White. You should have thought of something else.

“It’s our only play,” Jillybean whispered so softly that it sounded like an asp hidden in the grass. “And if it fails then you can all run along and hide. Either that or come up with your own plan. I don’t care.”

No one had a plan. They needed Jillybean and she needed Colleen to come through. The hours went slowly by. Outside the jailhouse, preparations were being made for the Captain’s return. He had been gone not even ten hours at that point but a double victory was a certainty and everyone wanted to be ready to get to Bainbridge just as fast as they could.

Other than Derrick, Jillybean was alone in the cellblock. The shadow people who came to talk to her had retreated allowing her to sleep deeply. They knew she would need it. Escaping with nothing but her bare hands was going to be a feat that would require all of her energy.

She dreamed of her parent’s house in Philadelphia and although the dream hadn’t started in winter, it was Christmas before she knew it. This was her favorite dream, with one small twist. Unlike in real life, she didn’t go racing down the stairs to discover Ipes with his long nose sticking out of her stocking. This time she stayed in bed and let her body relax until she was in a trance. It was a healing trance, and when the outer door to the prison opened Jillybean woke refreshed for the first time in weeks. She kept her eyes closed and listened as there was a bit of bantering from the two outer guards. One laughed and there was a clatter of a spoon falling.

Colleen came into the cellblock a minute later. By her harsh breathing and the way her short dress was still hitched high enough to reveal her panties, it was obvious that she had been subject to the same terrible cavity search that Jillybean had received. Hurrying to the cage, she held the tray with one hand while she pulled at her skirt with the other. She wanted to drop off the food and get out of there as fast as possible.

She wasn’t fast enough.

Derrick caught her a few paces from the door. He loomed over her, sniffing her midnight-black hair which was piled high, just as Jillybean had asked. “Look at you. Slinky dress, hair all done up, smellin’ like some sort of flower. Ya must have liked what I gave ya earlier. Ain’t that right?”

“Yeah,” she answered, her body already beginning to tremble. “Let me just give this to her.”

For some reason this struck Derrick as suspicious. H snatched the tray from her and inspected it top and bottom, going so far as to stick those same filthy hands into the cold mush that was Jillybean’s dinner. When he found nothing he took the tray to Jillybean himself. “You’re in luck, bitch. Ya gonna get dinner and a show.”

Colleen looked to the door, her courage right on the breaking point. She was nearly sick to her stomach and had to fight her feet to keep them from running. It was one thing to be raped, it was another thing altogether to submit to this creature and allow him to violate her—and pretend to like it. She was no whore, or at least she wasn’t before getting stupidly mixed up with the Corsairs. Now she was whatever they wanted her to be.

He came at her hard and fast and at the last moment her fear won out and she headed for the door. Too late; he grabbed her from behind and threw her down, one elbow cracking hard on the white tile. She cried out which only made him want to hurt her more.

His big hands were all over her grabbing her, pinching her, smacking her, throwing her clothes aside. She tried to fight him at first—in vain. It wasn’t just that he was too strong for her, he also had some sort of innate knowledge of how to move his body so that he always ended up on top, wearing an evil grin.

To him it was a game. He toyed with her, letting her scramble around, grunting and crying. When he decided to penetrate her, the game ended and she was pinned to the floor by his manhood. The pain made her scream, which only made him go harder. During all of this, Jillybean was silent. She had dragged her weights to the bars and held out a hand.

It wasn’t to help her and Colleen had to bite back a curse and hold in the scream that wanted to rage out of her: This is all your fault! It wasn’t, of course and deep down Colleen knew it. Still, it didn’t make it any easier helping a woman who had looked down her nose at Colleen, almost as if she had known Colleen was a traitor from the very start.

But Colleen was desperate. Nothing had worked out like she had been promised. She had not become the pirate queen she had imagined she would be, she was only a worthless slave like all the rest.

As the skin on her back was peeled away by the cement, she reached into her deep, midnight-black hair, found the two bobby pins and the barrette that had been holding the black mass up, and flung them Jillybean. Afraid that Derrick would hear the tiny clink of metal, she let loose with a louder scream than before. Her pain made him laugh.

“Ya like that dontcha?”

Colleen nodded, watching as Jillybean edged around the cage grabbing the pins and the barrette, and hiding them along the edge of her cell. When they were out of sight, Jillybean mouthed the word Tonight, and then went to the bowl of mush and started eating, half turned away from the rape.

“Yeah…yeah, I like it,” Colleen answered, her voice going up and down with each thrust. Colleen closed her eyes and tried to will her mind away, but it kept returning to Jillybean. Colleen didn’t know what she had expected, but to see Jillybean turn away wasn’t it. She did nothing at all while Colleen was raped and she didn’t even look up when Derrick finally finished and stood up, saying, “We’ll see you for breakfast?”

“Y-Yeah, I g-guess so,” she stammered out. An attempt at a smile failed and Colleen quickly pulled on her skirt and left with her shirt half buttoned and her hair a mess. There were tears in her eyes and more laying on her cheek, she didn’t really start crying until she made it past the other two guards and was out in the early evening. Then she went and hid behind the building and blubbered, thinking that she had made a huge mistake.

The pain and humiliation made her weak and full of regret. If Jillybean was caught with hairpins she would be blamed and her horror of a life would get even worse. And for what? How on earth was Jillybean going to escape with guards watching her and four huge weights chained to her neck? So far the entire plan consisted of one long look, an out of the blue suggestion that Colleen do her hair up, and the mouthed word: Tonight. What was going to happen tonight?

“But what if she can do it?” She knew. The second she was out of Hoquiam, she would run away and never look back.

Colleen took a long shuddering breath and tried not to think about how her insides felt like she had been impaled with an old shovel handle. She had to escape and if they were to have any chance she would have to help. Jillybean was going to need tools to get her collar off. “And we’ll need food and warm clothes.”

She limped off to gather what she could. Unfortunately, none of the other slaves trusted her. They knew she had been spying for the Corsairs. One ragged piece of skin and bones actually slapped her and she was spat in the face by another. Even employing Jillybean’s name did nothing, though it did cause more than one of them to waiver, balanced between their hatred for a traitor and their desire to help.

Finally, Colleen hit on an idea and searched out Kerry Mize, the slave with the bad tooth. “I’ll do anything for the Queen,” Kerry said. She was gone for two hours but when she returned she carried a backpack, clothes, a jug of water, two pounds of dried fish and another two of salted venison. Before she handed it over, Kerry said, “I’m going, too.”

“Yes, but that’s it. It can only be us three.”

“And the little girl. You know she’ll insist on it.”

Colleen’s stomach twisted in pain. Leah would only slow them down. She would whine and do something stupid, and she would get them caught. It was stupid. And yet, she nodded, knowing that Jillybean would insist on it. She had built two-hundred rockets to keep the girl safe; she wasn’t about to leave her behind.

“Fine,” Colleen whispered, defeated. The plan was falling apart. “If it ever had a chance to begin with,” she muttered. A bobby pin would be as useless against a blacksmith’s weld as it would be against three hulking guards.

We’re going to die, Colleen thought, glumly as the three of them hid up the street from the jail, watching the front door. Hours went by and just as she began to sink into a suicidal depression, a small naked figure walked straight out of the front doors of the jail. It was Jillybean, impossibly without her golden collar; impossibly armed with two handguns; impossibly covered in blood.

“Impossible,” was the first thing Colleen said to Jillybean as she slipped into the shadows with them. She seemed unsurprised at the sight of Kerry and Leah. “Who helped you? Was it Derrick? Did you kill him?”

“It was Ben and I had to kill him,” Jillybean answered, looking back at the police station briefly before she squatted over a puddle and began washing away the blood. “But he didn’t help me. That was all you. Thanks. And from here on out none of us can use the word impossible. We have to believe that we can win. Even now…even now.” Colleen saw that she was mostly talking to herself, and for a long moment Jillybean stared off into the dark, seeing the night flash by in images that gradually sped together becoming something like a movie.

How long the guard raped Colleen, Jillybean didn’t know. Her mind had been turning trying to figure out how she could overcome three grown men while caged, collared and chained. The cage had been the easiest part. It required only a practiced hand, a detail orientated memory, and patience.

Patience was Jillybean’s strong suit. When Colleen left, sniffling and trying not to cry, Jillybean ate the mush and went into a trance, tuning everything out, waiting for the deep, rumbling snore that she knew would come sooner or later. A night hadn’t passed without her guard falling asleep at some point. The snoring started five hours later.

She’d been so deep in her trance that she hadn’t noticed the shift change. The man in the recliner was heavy, bearded Ben Jager, now sounding like the bear he resembled. Jillybean had paused at the sight of him. It would have been so much easier to kill Derrick.

Don’t back down now, Eve rasped from out of the shadows. As there was only one lantern burning, the shadows dominated the cellblock. He’s as bad as the rest of them.

That was the problem. Ben hadn’t been so bad at all. He could have hurt Jillybean many times with the least provocation, and yet he never had. He only hurt her when he was ordered to. In Hoquiam he was a veritable prince of kindness.

Turning side on, Eve slid between the bars of the cage without even a whisper of cloth. So, he never whipped you for fun. Big deal. What did he do for all those slaves who were boiled alive? What did he do for Leah? Or Stu. He probably hung Stu on that church, hammering five-inch nails through his body. He’s no good guy, Jillybean. And does it matter if he were? You have to escape. The Captain has a sixteen hour head start on you and if he gets past the wall, think about what will happen to little Emily.

Eve tried to send a sickening picture into Jillybean’s mind. “Stop. I’ll do it.” There was never any question whether she would or not. Ben had to die.

One at a time, Jillybean carefully slid each of her weights to the cage door and then worked the hairpins and the barrette from beneath the edge of the cage where she had hidden them. From there it was simply a matter of depressing the interior pins correctly with the hairpins and turning the lock using the barrette as a handle. Some locks were easy and some were beyond aggravating; this was one of the latter and if this had been the first lock she’d ever tried to picked, she would have given up in frustration.

Two hours went by and midnight was long past before the lock finally turned. It had taken so long that she didn’t think she had time for even a sigh of relief. Without a pause, she dropped down and pushed the first 45-pound weight across the threshold of the cage, then the second, and third, and the fourth. She eased forward a foot and a half and repeated the process.

This was a dangerous time. If Ben woke, there’d be nothing Jillybean could do or say. The guards would beat her and never let another person in the cell. They could even weld the lock and she would be trapped forever. Flesh cannot overcome metal, she thought as she pushed her chain-welded weights closer and closer to Ben. He snorted when she was a foot away and then went back to snoring.

It was the closest she would come to being caught. Slowly, she stood with her feet set wide. Picking up one of the 45-pound weights took both hands leaving none to mask the sound of the links of the chain clinking together. It didn’t matter, Ben snored right up until she smashed the barbell into his forehead. His frontal bone cracked like an egg and blood geysered up, spraying Jillybean.

The red fountain gushed for not even twenty seconds and then Ben died. Jillybean heaved him from the chair. It was a big leather beast and when her weights were settled on the seat, she could barely move it. Desperation gave her just enough strength to get it to the door of her cage.

“Flesh cannot overcome metal,” she said under her breath, “but the mind can overcome anything.” Once under the metal door, she climbed up on the chair, reached down and lifted one of the weights. With a grunt she heaved it up until it was tucked just under her chin, then she bent her knees and launched it up over her head in a move that every weightlifter would recognize as the “clean and jerk.”

She was just tall enough to push the weight over the crossbar of the door. When it fell over the top, the chain that was attached to it yanked Jillybean’s collar up. The edge of the gold collar dug cruelly into her throat. The only way to keep from strangling to death was for her to stand on her tippy-toes, hook her fingers through the collar and pull herself up as best she could. From an outside point of view it looked as though she were trying to kill herself, and when she kicked the chair over, the idea would have been cemented in a person’s mind.

The three other weights attached to the collar dropped from the chair, their chains snapping tight, holding them a bare three inches above the floor where they swung back and forth.

Jillybean swung back and forth as well. Her position had improved considerably. She still had her fingers hooked up under the collar, but she had her feet perched on the lower weights. Now all the weight was on a collar that had been made with pure gold, the most malleable of metals. Slowly it began to stretch. To speed up the process, Jillybean pushed down on the barbells, straining with all her might.

The metal bit into her fingers until she thought it would cut right through them, but still she persevered until gradually the metal stretched just far enough for her to slide her ears through. The rest of her head followed easily and she was able to step down.

She could not rest even then. She went to Ben’s body and searched it, finding a 9mm Glock and two extra magazines. From there, things went quickly. The door from the holding cells to the corridor had never been locked and nor was the door that led to the lobby where the two other guards were playing cards to fight off sleep.

It was very late by then and they were slow-witted and unwary. Jillybean caught them at gunpoint, one in mid-yawn and the other pulling an ace from beneath his thigh.

“Eve wants to kill you,” she told them. They knew about Eve and had laughed at her when she raged. They weren’t laughing now. Jillybean looked like she had bathed in blood. She looked like a demon. “I don’t want to kill you,” she said. “But I will if you try anything.”

She led them back to the holding cells and shot them both in the back of head, execution style. Lying to them had been more difficult than killing them.

And now standing in the cold night with Colleen White looking at her with frightened eyes, Jillybean said again, “Nothing is impossible.”

Chapter 27

The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

As Bishop Wojdan thrust out his belly and gazed with unexaggerated sadness at the Golden Gate Bridge, Mike Gunter clung with freezing hands to one of the diagonal crossbeams beneath it that were part of the interlocking structure of girders, trusses, beams and rusting joists.

The smoke bomb that had caused him to hesitate just when Jeff Battaglia ran out and died alone, had sent dark clouds billowing over Mike not thirty seconds later—just as he thought it would. They could have all escaped if the timing had been just a tiny bit off. As it was, Mike used the smoke to retreat just as the Corsair who threw it had attacked.

The Corsair found only bleeding bodies. By then, Mike was already clambering beneath the bridge, hoping to God he wasn’t alone.

As suicidal as the first part of the plan was, the second part was even more so, and he feared that the other volunteers had simply kept going across the bridge never to be seen again. If so, he wouldn’t have blamed them. The second part of the trap required them to climb beneath the bridge where there were no walkways, safety harnesses or lifelines. They were two-hundred and fifty feet above the water. Death was a slip away.

There were eight others beneath the bridge, four congregating near the north tower, three near the south, and Rebecca Haigh on her own in the middle. It was generally thought that the survivors would be able to escape by going down through the towers. It was a self-deceit that Mike hadn’t tried to correct. The second the anchors started to drop, the Corsairs were going to make a charge for the towers in overwhelming numbers. No one was getting down that way.

Mike had known from the beginning that there was only one way any of them were going to get down and that was to fall…or jump.

“We’re not going to think about that,” Mike whispered to himself as he struggled along. “We’re going to just keep our eyes forward. What we’re not going to do is look down.” For some reason, saying “we” made him feel less alone.

As Mike climbed among the struts, the cold wind came in alarming, icy gusts. It felt like an evil wind, one that was doing everything it could to peel him off the metal and send him tumbling to his death. Moving slowly with great deliberation was the only way to keep that from happening—it was also the best way to get shot to death by the first Corsair to duck under the structure to take a quick look.

Mike had no choice except to tempt fate as he scurried along, barely catching himself time and again.

Above him on the bridge, he could hear the Corsairs going from car to car, checking for survivors or for traps. The traps were obvious. Hundreds of various sized anchors hung from one end of the bridge to the other but were impossible to get to from above. Someone would have to climb down and get in among the girders and the struts.

Mike’s hope to destroy the Corsair fleet rested on the belief that none of the Corsairs were brave enough to climb down. It was one thing to come down just far enough to take a look down the long underbelly of the bridge, it was another thing altogether to climb further out.

The metal was slick with green mold or algae, Mike didn’t know which. And it emanated an intense cold that seeped through anything that made contact with it. The cold went right through a person’s clothes. There were safety wires, but because they had been exposure to the elements for so long, they had become brittle and snapped easily. Perhaps most unnerving of all, was that the entire bridge groaned as if in constant pain, making it seem as though the next gust of wind would send it crashing down into the bay.

Desperation drove the nine surviving Islanders beneath the bridge. Nothing else could have. The Corsairs were certainly not desperate enough, not at night and not with the icy wind howling among the struts.

Terrified right to his core, Mike moved slowly along. After two hundred yards of climbing, he came across a woman, one of the volunteers. She was hugging a girder with all her might. With the hood of her parka up and tied tight, there was no telling who she was.

“You’re too close,” he said to her. She was only forty yards from the near side of the first support tower.

“I’m good,” she answered.

“No, you’re not. With the gusts, the ships will head for the center of the bridge to pass through. You got to keep going.”

“I-I said I’m good,” she said again.

She wasn’t. She had hit the limit of her courage which was something Mike couldn’t judge in another person. Everyone had their breaking point. “Alright. Can you do me a favor? When things get going can you keep an eye on that door?” He pointed to the tower access door. “Someone’s gonna pop their head out of there and it would be good if you could kill him.”

“I can do that.” She would be happy to murder her fellow man as long as it didn’t entail climbing any more than she had.

Mike kept going, monkeying past the tower and getting two more of his crew to move further down the bridge where they could be of some use when the time came. The most frightening spot to be was in the exact center of the bridge. It’s where he found Rebecca Haigh, her red hair snapping across her dead-white face.

“You’re in my spot,” he joked.

“You’re alive? What about Jeff and Monica? I know they stayed back…” She read the look in his eyes. “Oh, okay. Maybe they were lucky, right? I never liked heights. They make me want to throw up. I did already. Ha-ha. Back there before the tower. I puked but I don’t know if it ever hit the water. It was gross. The wind just broke it apart. You know? By the way, I talk a lot when I’m scared and right now I’m so scared…”

She suddenly ducked back behind the girder she was wedged up to “They’re here,” she hissed.

Mike chanced a look back and in the lowering light, he saw the door to the north tower grinding open. Three distant dark figures came out onto the little fenced-in balcony and gazed up and down the tower and out along the metal grid-like structure beneath the bridge.

“Go back in,” Rebecca whispered. “Please, go back in. Please, please God make them go back in.”

They didn’t, and worse, the door to the south tower opened with a high, metallic shriek. More Corsairs came out. One had a flashlight which he beamed all around. It was weak and too far away to pick out any of Mike’s team. Still, it was frightening as all hell and made Rebecca want to vomit again. She began making an ugly urrgh sound deep in her throat.

“It’ll be okay,” Mike said. “They can’t see us and with the wind, they can’t hear us.” Unless the wind drops at the wrong time and you’re one of those loud pukers, he didn’t add.

The sun was all the way down by then and the world was in that strange twilight phase where the shadows played tricks. One of the Corsairs nudged his friend and pointed off to Mike’s left. He raised his gun and rattled off a string of bullets that whined and ricocheted around the structure. This was answered by more shots from behind Mike, making him think that the final battle for the bridge had begun.

It hadn’t. The shooting was coming from the Corsairs at the north tower. “They’re trying to spook us into giving away our positions,” Mike told Rebecca.

“Well, I doubt it’s going to work,” she replied. “Right now bullets don’t scare me at all. I’m too afraid to let go of this girder to even think about shooting.” It seemed like that was the overwhelming sentiment among his team. Other than the brief barrage by the Corsairs and the whipping wind, it was dead quiet beneath the bridge.

Up above was another story. The earlier battle had attracted gangs of zombies and now the Corsairs were being besieged by rampaging beasts that came lumbering fearlessly from the southern end. Pretty much the entire bay could hear the fight raging, and from Alcatraz to Angel Island, people prayed that the Corsairs were battling one of those titanic hordes that swept down on the world, eating everything in sight. Even a small horde of a thousand beasts would be able to completely destroy the Corsair army.

It was only a few dozen of them, enough to send the first line of Corsairs reeling all the way to the south tower where they rallied. The battle was intense, but disappointingly short.

When it was over the Corsairs decided to try getting their ships past the chains and ropes strung beneath the bridge. They didn’t rush things and only brought up a single squadron of twelve ships. These were their smallest ships, not one over forty-six feet. They came easing slowly up to the chains in five spots. Mike was shocked to see that four of those spots were centered on the towers. The fifth was almost directly below him and Rebecca.

She could have holed one easily, but the plan was to wait. When Jenn and Mike had come up with the plan, they hadn’t taken into account the cold. The metal beneath the bridge was untouchable by bare flesh. Mike could feel the cold coming off it the way heat came from a fire. And the wind was like a knife of ice, slicing through their clothes. Mike flesh became numb, his joints stiffened and his muscles contracted until they were bunched steel.

In spite of the cold, his team persevered, or perhaps they were too afraid to move. Either way they did nothing as the Corsairs cut gaps in the chains. After the first fifty-foot gap was opened, a cheer went up and lights were flashed. The closest ship slipped under the bridge and was followed by three more. When the third lane was opened, the other crews simply packed up their tools, heaved away from the chains and followed their fellows into the bay.

Now the main fleet surged forward. Where before everything had been orderly, now there was a sense of not wanting to miss out on the fun. The bigger ships shouldered aside the smaller ones and made straight for the openings, sometimes getting so close to each other that boathooks were used to push the other away. Angry curses and harsh laughter floated across the bay.

“Now’s our chance to sting them,” Rebecca said and began moving across one of the girders using only her hands and arms; she kept her legs straddling the beam, holding tight as if it might think about bucking her off. It was slow but safe and soon she sat above a swaying anchor hanging from a sixty-foot rope. They thought sixty feet was a good drop point. It was high enough so that any of the anchors would go through a boat, but not so high that the wind under the bridge would change its course much.

Mike sat above his own rope and, peering down its length, decided he would miss the nearest boat to the left. He went on to the next beam, crossed at a diagonal and sighted down another rope.

Two boats were coming through at once, their short-handed crews, too busy worrying about scraping some paint to even look up. “Anchors away,” Mike said and slashed at his rope with a knife. The anchor sliced through the air like a dart. It was seventy-five pounds of steel, traveling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour when it hit the boat dead center. The blasted through the deck, exploded a toilet and continued through the flooring and out through the hull as if it were made of a sheet of tinfoil.

Despite the mortal wound, the ship’s momentum carried it into the bay where it quickly began to sink, water fountaining up through the gaping wound.

At first, the crews of the ships around it thought that something had exploded beneath the ship and someone cried out, “She hit a mine!” This set off a panic. The boats in front all tried to stop or turn, while the boats in back were oblivious to the entire incident. The crash of the anchor had been largely swallowed up by the wind and, as the ships were as black as the night, and boats didn’t come with brake lights, most didn’t even notice the change in speed until it was too late.

In the meantime, Rebecca cut her first anchor away. The boat below her was half turned and she couldn’t miss. The anchor sheered through the boom line and crashed through the deck barely slowing. It hit the galley stove, which checked its speed enough so that it didn’t completely pierce the hull, but sat embedded in it with water gushering up.

Salvaging the ship would have been possible if a gust of wind hadn’t swung the boom around and turned the boat completely sideways in the open lane. Two seconds later, a third ship rammed it amidships, breaking its back. Water flooded the first boat and with the two boats entwined in a violent embrace, they both started to sink.

It was then that someone finally noticed the falling anchors. A storm of bullets started flying up at Mike and Rebecca, while at the same time, more guns were fired across the maze-like structure by the Corsairs on the towers. If any of the Corsairs had an actual target that person would have been dead in a blink. Thankfully, it was midnight dark beneath the structure and the Islanders were in more danger from the blazing hot lead ricocheting back and forth than a direct hit. Still, it felt like forever that they were trapped, unable to do anything but cringe behind twelve-inch wide girders as bullets bounced all around them.

The odds were that eventually one of them would have been hit if the woman in the oversized parka hadn’t finally started shooting. At forty yards, she had a good view of the north tower and she laid into the Corsairs like a marksman. Pop, pop, pop, pop! In the span of three seconds, two men died, a third was hit and the rest fled back into the tower.

With the focus of the shooting partially shifted in her direction, Mike chanced a quick move. He hopped up on his girder and ran across it with short, light steps, his arms out to catch the next beam in a bear hug. It had only been fifteen feet—fifteen feet over a two-hundred foot drop with gusts pushing him back and forth, and nothing but empty air on either side. He sagged against the beam, trembling and breathing in great gulps.

Running like that had made him a target, and as he bent to cut away another anchor a bullet whined off the metal, nearly cutting the rope for him. This time, he didn’t even flinch. A slash of the rope sent the anchor plummeting down where it smashed through the deck of a forty-five footer with such force that it nearly sheared its bow completely off. It made a huge jagged hole through which water surged. In seconds, what was left of its bow was ten-feet below the waterline and its ass was heaved up out of the water.

Now more anchors were falling. Not every one was a direct hit. But they didn’t need to be. When sails caught the anchors, booms would snap in two and masts would bend like taffy, making steering impossible.

Before long, all three holes in the barrier beneath the bridge were plugged with dead or dying ships, while all along the front edge of the bridge, the Corsairs were fighting to get away. In some cases, they were killing each other to get away. Quick, brutal gunfights erupted among crews as they tried to fight both wind and tide. Ships began to ram each other, and in a dozen cases, sails and booms became interlocked.

Even though most of the ships edged just out of reach of the falling anchors, they weren’t out of reach of the rifles of the Islanders. Mike straddled a girder like it a horse and went through five magazines; he didn’t think he missed with a single shot. Rebecca emptied four and managed to set two boats on fire.

There was no telling how many boats were sunk or forced to be abandoned by the deadly fire from the little team.

The Corsairs hit back savagely, sending dozens of men up into the towers where they burst out onto the platforms, firing in all directions. The woman in the parka was the first of the defenders to die. She fought to the last, making her shots count until her lifeless body dropped like a stone.

The next one of them to fall did not do so with quite so much dignity. His or her scream, Mike couldn’t tell the sex of the individual, was a high terrified shriek that went on and on, only to end with a sickening crash among the boats below.

Mike and Rebecca shared a look of dread.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mike said. When Rebecca hesitated, he whispered, “I think it’s fair to say we’ve done all we could. Now come on!”

“It’s so far,” she answered in a timid voice.

The far southern end of the bridge was still wide open and was their only option. It was a half mile away, a half mile of inching along the frozen girders, hoping not to fall or be seen.

“We can make. We’ll just take it in sections. I’ll start with moving to your girder. Then we’ll go together. Can you do that?” Her mouth moved but nothing came out. “Okay good,” Mike said. “Get rid of your gun. There you go.”

She tossed aside her weapons, laid almost on the horizontal beam so that she was hugging it, and slowly, slid forward. Mike cheered her on as the wind kept whipping and the bullets never stopped tinging off the metal around them. In the deep shadows beneath the bridge they became all but invisible, but that didn’t stop the Corsairs from shooting in their direction. Some bullets struck so close it made Mike’s testicles shoot up into his body. Others missed by half a football field.

Most of the time, the wind was their biggest enemy and they clutched desperately at the metal with wooden fingers. They had travelled only forty or fifty yards when a sudden burst of fire from another of the defenders drew every eye, and every gun.

Hundreds of Corsair bullets ended the battle and another body took the long, long fall.

When the Corsairs went back to shooting at Mike and Rebecca, they were firing at the segment of girder right behind the one they were on. This gave the pair a full seven minutes of hope—then they saw lights begin to splash about the far end of the bridge. The Corsairs had cut off their one line of retreat.

“What do we do?” Rebecca whispered. Her eyes kept darting down to the dark water. From directly above the chop and small waves disappeared, and the mouth of the bay looked like a sheet of black steel. It would feel like that as well if they were to jump from where they were. As though she were reading his mind, she asked, “We don’t have a choice, do we?”

Dying of exposure was another option. Or they could just sit there and wait for sunrise and get picked off by the Corsairs.

“If one of their boats come this way, I’ll do the world’s greatest cannonball,” Mike said. But one wouldn’t come. The ships were tacking relentlessly back out into the Pacific, and besides, the open lanes were well behind them. He’d have to use one of the ropes and hope that he could launch himself that far on a few swings.

He was picturing the heroic swing when his mind clicked on an idea. “We can climb down the ropes!”

Rebecca was far less excited. “That’ll leave us with what? A hundred and thirty foot fall? That’s like twelve stories. It’ll still kill us.”

“What if we tie two of the ropes together? Or three?”

“And what if the Corsairs see us? Tying ropes takes time that we don’t have. Look.” Some of the braver Corsairs were venturing out onto the girders. “We’d be sitting ducks out there.”

Mike considered this. “Okay maybe not three ropes, but we can do two. Instead of a knot we’ll hook two of the anchors together. It’ll take seconds. Then we’ll slide down the rope and when we get to the bottom,” he paused to swallow, “we just drop.”

It would be seventy or eighty feet. He didn’t know if a person could live after a fall from that height, but it was their only alternative. Rebecca nodded, agreeing despite the horrible fear curdling up into her stomach.

The two closest anchors were chosen and Mike hauled up the first. It was nearly sixty pounds of awkward metal. He tied the end of the rope around his waist and let the anchor dangle far below his feet. Then he edged to the next rope, which was awkward as well with the anchor swinging back and forth, trying to tip him first one way, then the other.

He pretended he wasn’t about to crap himself and his fear only escalated once he reached the second rope. Looking down it was the worst thing he could do it, but he had to. “Okay, okay, okay. Don’t come down until you hear me hit the water. Then count to three and come on down. Wrap your legs around the rope to control your descent. Got it?”

She nodded, her lips pressed together so tightly not even a whisper could’ve slipped between them. Mike left her, wondering if she would follow. She didn’t have someone drawing her on like Mike did. He had Jenn and he kept her firmly in mind as he slid down the rope. Perhaps because of the anchor weighing him down, he went down the first rope like a bat out of hell and when he fetched up against the first anchor, the rope actually bounced, nearly sending him flying off. He clung desperately as the rope shivered and shook, and swayed alarmingly. The sane thing to do would be to wait until things calmed down before he tried to hook the second anchor to the first.

Sanity had flown out the window the moment he had crawled beneath the bridge.

With his feet perched on the flukes of the first anchor, he muscled up the second, hooked the two together Barrel of Monkeys style, pulled the tail of the slip knot and watched as the sixty feet of rope played out. The end of it still seemed impossibly far from the water.

“Just don’t look down,” he told himself as he wrapped his legs around the rope and started to slide. He looked anyway. It was impossible not to, especially as the free end of the rope was coming faster and faster. His hands burned as he tried desperately to slow down. He came to a halt a foot above the end.

“Please God,” he said, and let go.

This time he didn’t look down. He stared straight up, looking through his outstretched hand as the bridge seemed to fly away from him. The wind whistled in his ears, growing louder until it was a shriek. Then he hit the water with an explosion of sound and pain. It felt as though the bottom of his feet had been hit with a bat. It was agony. Still, he was alive and whole enough to kick to the surface.

Groaning, he rolled over on his back and watched as Rebecca came down. She stopped for a good twenty seconds at the point where the anchors joined and if one of the Corsairs hadn’t seen her and started shooting, she might have frozen to death up there. The gunshot got her moving and she came down the rope like it had been greased.

“Too fast. Too fast. Oh God, she’s going too fast.” Right at the last second she squealed in pain as her body jerked almost to a stop and then she was falling, her arms pinwheeling, her body at an angle. “No,” Mike whispered just before she hit the surface with a great geyser of water.

Mike took a deep breath and dove under the water, knowing she was in trouble. He had gone in perfectly straight and the pain had been terrible. He couldn’t imagine what she had felt. Her dark clothes blended with the black water, but her dead-white face had an ethereal glow to it. He found her fifteen feet down. She was alive and struggling weakly for the surface, using only one arm. Grabbing her, he kicked mightily upward. She was like an anchor herself and it took everything he had to get her to the surface.

“Are…are you…okay?” he gasped.

She was on her on her back, floating listlessly, staring up at the bridge. “My arm. I can’t move it. It hurts. It hurts down into my chest. Everything hurts.”

“Just hold on.” He took hold of the collar of her coat and kicked for the chain and rope barricade below the bridge. It wasn’t far and yet he was close to drowning himself by the time he made it. Thankfully, she was able to hold on to the rope with her one good hand.

Despite their pain, they both looked back at their handiwork. Twenty ships had sunk or were in the process of sinking; three hundred men were killed and the remains of the Corsair fleet was fleeing west.

“They’ll be back,” Mike guessed. The Corsairs had paid a terrific price to open the way into the bay and they weren’t going to give that up now. They had the bridge. They had the numbers, and they had the will to fight. Mike had done little except put off the day of reckoning for another twenty hours.

“I’ll get you set up somewhere safe and dry,” he told her. “Then I need to get to the Guardians before it’s too late.”

“You can’t swim all the way to Angel Island. Not in this water. It’s too cold.” They were both shivering uncontrollably.

Mike was under no illusions on that account. “Not those Guardians. I mean the ones in that little cove. They’re going to fight one way or another. If they don’t fight for me, I’ll make sure the Corsairs know exactly where they are, and then they’ll have no choice.”

The one lesson Mike had learned from Jillybean: All was fair in war.

Chapter 28

Bainbridge Island, Washington

In her slow, “Aw, shucks” way, Deberha Perkins had been running rings around Deanna, Neil and the rest of the people of Bainbridge Island for so long that when she received her new orders to kill the governor, she hadn’t felt the slightest fear. And, although she had known Deanna for nearly ten years, she knew she wouldn’t feel even a hint of remorse after she put two shots in her face.

Murder was nothing new for Deberha. Since the beginning of the apocalypse, she had killed many times. The old pre-apocalyptic Deberha would have wept and crawled into bed for a week if she had hit a dog with her car. Of course, that was before when she had lived in heaven. Compared to what the world had become, pre-apocalypse America had been heaven, and she and everyone else had been too blind to see it.

She could remember becoming upset at the stupidest things: the price of gas going up a dime, the shoes she was eyeing not being available in her size, the milk going bad because she would always buy a gallon instead of a quart. Unbelievably, she used to whine to her husband about having to drive a Toyota and would have killed for a BMW.

But now she had to wonder why? The Toyota had been a perfectly reliable car that got her from A to B. It had lights and a stereo. Hell, it even had air conditioning. What more did a person need?

And, she was embarrassed to recall, just how terribly green with envy she used to be that her friends could afford to go to Cabo when all she could afford was Corpus Christi. Wasn’t it the same sun up above? Wasn’t sand just sand? Both places even had Mexicans by the ton, so why hadn’t she been satisfied?

A certain amount of clarity had come when she’d been cast out of heaven and forced to live like an animal. Survival had become her entire focus and not just in the short term. Deberha had begun working for the Black Captain because she had seen the writing on the wall years before. The people of Bainbridge had built themselves a tiny version of heaven and then promptly forgot that they were surrounded by hell.

Deberha knew that one day, sooner rather than later, it would all come crashing down.

And the reason? It was because they had become soft and weak. Slowly, with each passing year they were growing fat and lazy. Deberha despised them. She looked down her nose at them in her own secretive way. She even looked down her nose at Deanna. With all of her natural gifts, she had gone from being a whore to the one thing that was even worse: a politician, which was simply whoring on a grand scale.

For the most part, her contempt was deserved; however, there was one person Deberha should not have discounted. Despite his mild manners and his diminutive size, Neil Martin was the one person who had proven to be unkillable even by the rather extreme standards of the day.

Neil was generally dismissed by everyone, and just then, ragged, torn-up, and glass-eyed, Deberha barely acknowledged him, thinking he was as useless and harmless as a child’s old teddy bear that was falling apart, losing a button here, an eye there, fluff coming out in the seat of his pants.

Sadly, he had just a touch more mental capacity than a teddy bear. He saw the gun in Deberha’s hands; he noted the intense look on Deanna’s face; he heard the words. It all became a mush in his muddled, mixed-up mind. Despite that, his instincts did not failed him, and he rushed between the two women just as Deberha fired her gun.

Both shots smashed into the right side of his chest, shredding his lung and throwing him off his feet. He stumbled into Deanna as she clawed furiously for the pistol she’d been carrying for exactly this moment. Just as she cleared the gun, a foot came down on her ankle.

“As always, you’re just a bit too slow. Always one step behind, that’s you.” Deanna glared past the gun and was about to spit, when she sucked in her breath. Deberha laughed. “What? You got something to say? Last words perhaps?”

“Yeah, I do. Emily, you can shoot anytime. Don’t worry about me.”

“Emily? What the hell does she have to do with…” It was then she felt the deadly cold gun barrel against her neck. Very little ever frightened Deberha, however feeling the cold against her flesh and seeing the eleven-year-old out of the corner of her eye sent a shiver down her back. Emily didn’t have the eyes of a child. Hers were like ice.

What Deberha was seeing was impossible. Emily had left the island. Deberha had watched her board the Dead Fish, personally. She had made sure of it so there would be no surprises when the time came to take out dear old mom, and yet here she was, sopping wet and dripping from her half-mile swim across the west channel of Puget Sound.

It shouldn’t have been her standing there, it should have been Wayne French. Hours before, when the Corsair’s had come screaming out of the woods above Route 16, it was clear to both Gunner and Emily that the spy was still on Bainbridge and could only be someone close to Deanna, someone she trusted. In his usual gruff manner, Gunner volunteered Wayne French to: “Swim the channel, find Deanna, warn her and then guard her with your life.”

Wayne seemed the likely choice. After all, he had been a naval officer and could swim as well as anyone on the island.

Emily had fretted for her mom all through the terrifying battle. Bullets hadn’t scared her, but afterward, seeing a perfectly dry Wayne French chatting with Paul Daniels, had nearly given her a heart attack.

“Why are you still here?” she had screamed. “You’re supposed to be on Bainbridge protecting my mom!”

“Huh?” Wayne tried to appear shocked and confused. “Gunner wanted me to go before the battle? Sorry, I didn’t know. Let me see if I can find a wetsuit. There’s probably one in that marina south of Tracyton.”

“Tracyton?” Emily couldn’t believe her ears. Tracyton was seven miles out of the way. “You coward!” Wayne had bristled and made indignant remarks that Emily hadn’t heard. She was already running northeast, heading for the Sound, afraid that she would be too late. That growing fear drove her on so that three miles passed under her feet almost unnoticed.

At the Sound, she threw off her coat and dove into the icy waters. The shock of the water gave her a burst of energy that carried her for a few hundred yards. From then on it was a long dreadful slog as her clothes weighed her down and clung to her, hampering her arms as they wheeled round and round. It was only a half mile swim and yet, after a while she could barely keep her head out of the water.

She switched to side-stroke and plowed on, dragging herself forward, foot by foot. When she came to one of the wallowing zombies that grew to insane proportions in the Sound, she ducked under the water and swam beneath its long, long arms.

All her life she had been afraid of the “slimers,” as the kids of Bainbridge called the water-logged zombies that were scattered throughout the Sound. They didn’t frighten her just then. Too much had happened to her for her to be afraid of something so easily avoided—although they floated, zombies couldn’t swim and as long as they didn’t suddenly grab her from beneath and suck her into the depths, she had nothing to fear. She gambled that none were floating in the current ten-feet down.

Eventually, she neared the western end of the island and, as it was another two miles around to the harbor entrance, she decided to come in under the wall through Jillybean’s secret passageway. Without pausing to catch her breath she ran for home. By then she was almost done, and her run was a lurching, meandering jog along dark, empty streets. She was nearly there when she caught sight of Neil running for the old Chinese restaurant where the council met. After the long swim and the mile run in her sopping wet clothes, she was gasping and far too winded to call out.

The best she could do was to follow doggedly after him and hope he was heading to see her mom.

Why wasn’t he with her in the first place? Had something terrible happened? Had the spy attacked again? And who the hell was it? That was the biggest question. Emily thought that Kay Gallagher was too stupid, Rosanna Landeros was too old and Andrea Clary, at five-foot even, was too small; she could never have killed big Norris Barnes.

Emily didn’t want to think such a horrible thought, but she guessed it was Veronica Hennesy. She was so convinced that it was her that even as she slipped into the restaurant with the sound of the gunshots ringing in the air, and saw Deberha Perkins holding the gun, she couldn’t believe it.

Deberha couldn’t be a spy, she was too boring. She was a dumpy nothing of a woman who had never showed any sort of desire beyond simply existing.

Which makes her the perfect spy, Emily thought just as she jabbed her pistol into the side of Deberha’s neck and dug it into the sheriff’s soft flesh. Everything except the feel of the trigger against the pad of her finger fell away just then: her exhaustion simply vanished, her trembling muscles became still, her fear evaporated, replaced by a scarcely discernible current of fury.

Even the cold that had been slowly killing her seemed to poof out of existence. She was almost entirely numb. Only her gun hand really felt anything. That one hand was strangely hot and frightfully eager. It held the power of life and death, and oh, so badly it wanted to unleash death on Deberha Perkins.

The only thing holding her back was the idea that Deberha might jerk when her larynx was blasted out the side of her throat. If Deberha jerked, she could accidentally squeeze off a last shot and with the gun pointed at her mom…Emily couldn’t take the chance.

But she could fake it. “Maybe you have some last words,” Emily said, nearly adding “sheriff,” but biting it back at the last second. The only title Deberha deserved was traitor.

“We both know you won’t pull the trigger, Emily,” Deberha answered, pulling herself together. “I’ve known you your whole life. You’re too sweet to hurt anyone. And that’s a good thing. You pride yourself on your niceness, just like your mother. Everyone says you two are practically twins. So, come on. Put the gun down so we can talk. We can figure this out together.”

The gun didn’t waiver an inch. “Yeah, I’m like my mom, but I’m also like my dad. And if you knew him, you’d know you are exactly one blink from death.”

Deberha grunted, “Scary. You know that if you shoot then I will as well. It’ll be bye-bye mom and it’ll be your fault. That’s what people will say. Emily screwed up and killed her mom. Is that what you want? Because I don’t. So, like I said, put up the gun and we’ll figure this out.”

Emily pulled the gun back just long enough for Deberha to think she had a chance, then Emily dug it into Deberha’s ear. Emily dug it in deep, saying, “No. You have exactly one chance to live and that is to drop your gun and hope I won’t kill an unarmed woman. I’m not playing games.”

Deanna was amazed at her daughter. This wasn’t the same little girl in pigtails who could break her heart with a tear. Just then she was somewhat frighteningly, like her father had been. She exuded cold anger and it was clear that she wasn’t going to back down in the face of a threat. Deberha seemed to understand this as well.

“Okay, hold on. Just relax, okay? I have information. Radio codes, names of other agents, the Captain’s plans, but I need a guarantee that I won’t be harmed.”

“All that’s great,” Emily said, digging the barrel of the gun deeper, “but you’re still pointing a gun at my mom. That’s all I care about right this second.”

Deberha breathed out a long, put-upon sigh, dropped the gun, and slowly lifted her hands. Emily grabbed Deberha’s collar and used the gun that was still digging into her reddening ear to shove her against the wall. Oddly, Emily hadn’t been scared before, now it felt like she had just grabbed an adder by the tail. “How’s Uncle Neil?”

“Uncle…” Neil said, spitting up blood as he did, “is f-fine. Whoa. Is that a lot of blood? It seems like a lot of blood to me.” Every word brought up at least a mouthful. He looked down at himself in dismay. “This was my second best vest and now there are holes in it!”

Deanna held him down as he tried to get up. “No. Just relax for a moment. I have to think.” Her mind was in a whirl and her body was jacked-up on adrenaline. Now was not the time to make a mistake. “First. Kick over that gun, Deberha. Now get on your knees and face the wall.” Once that was done, Emily stepped back and started to shake. The cold of her swim was finally hitting her. It felt like her bones had frozen. They ached like a bad tooth.

As a mom, Deanna wanted to comfort her. As a governor, she didn’t have the time. She needed information right that second. “The radio codes, what are they?”

A new sigh escaped, Deberha. “I don’t know them. I mean I don’t have them memorized. I have them back at my house. If we can come to some sort of public agreement in which I’m given safe passage off the island, I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

Deanna didn’t have time for this either. “Put your hands flat on the wall,” she instructed. Deberha thought she was going to be frisked, instead Deanna shot her through the back of left hand. The bullet shattered the bird-like bones and blasted out through her palm. Deberha screamed and Emily stepped back in shock.

Neil laughed up more blood. His chin was awash in red. “Nice one,” he said, chortling. “Are you going to shoot her every time she answers like that? If so, could you shoot off a foot or something. This is making me hungry.”

Deanna didn’t think he was joking, and just then that was okay because Deberha was staring at him in horror. “Deanna, p-please don’t. I s-said I would t-tell you everything. ”

“Then start talking,” Deanna answered, aiming the gun at Deberha’s left knee with every intention of pulling the trigger. “Who are these other agents?”

Deberha couldn’t stop staring at the gun. “Mary P-Page and Rod McCade. They were mostly just on the hook. They weren’t doing anything more than dropping off intel reports on a monthly basis. They’re both with the army right now but they don’t have any way to make contact, so they’re basically harmless.”

“And the Captain’s plans?” Deanna demanded.

“Hey, look, the truth is I just said that I knew them so you wouldn’t shoot me. I really don’t know what he’s planning on doing. Honest to God. Okay? That’s the truth.”

Deanna didn’t like the answer and was contemplating shooting her when, Neil asked, “What’s that thing they’re setting up across the water? The guys in the lighthouse said it looked like some sort of cannon.”

“I swear I don’t know.” She raised wet red hands to Deanna. “But I might be able to find out. And I might be able to help you guys. You can use me. I lied before. I really know the radio frequencies they use and I-I can feed them false information.”

Emily was hugging herself and her grin was hard. “You already did. My da…I mean Gunner smoked out the trap. He set up a trap within a trap, and we gave your friends a real beating. We killed hundreds of them.” Although this was true, it was not a completely accurate description of the fight. Gunner had sensed the trap and had planned his trap within a trap so perfectly that the Corsairs should have been crushed.

They even made the ridiculous error of advancing in two compact and amateurish lines that harkened back to the seventeenth century. It should have been a turkey shoot as half the Bainbridge army sat behind prepared defenses while the other half rushed up from behind and fell on their rear. The battle couldn’t be scripted any better. Unfortunately, his soldiers were not equal to his generalship.

Most of the attacking portion of the army didn’t fire their weapon at all, making the hammer portion of the attack a feeble pinprick, and leaving the tactical anvil alone to take on the brunt of the Corsair onslaught. Even with a perfectly defensible hill and with painstakingly prepared fields of fire, many of the defenders panicked at the first shot. Those that remained were outnumbered seven to one and yet managed to inflict somewhere close to four-hundred casualties before Gunner allowed them to make a fighting withdrawal.

When Gunner regrouped, he discovered that half of his army had disappeared. Those that had fought declared the battle a victory. Gunner had laughed in the terrible way of his and said, “One more victory like that and we’re done for.”

Her mom didn’t need to know all of the details of the fight, but she did need to know that Deberha’s usefulness as a double agent was questionable. It was about all the time Emily had left anyway. Gunner needed her. Running an army, even a small one, was exhausting on every level and Gunner had been looking gray and used-up when she had left, and he didn’t have zombie blood like Neil to keep him going.

As far as she could tell, the only thing still keeping him alive was the fact that he still loved her mom, and Emily feared that wouldn’t be enough.

“I have to get back, Mom. Kill her if you have to, just don’t let her play you. And Neil, don’t you dare die. My Da…I mean Gunner will win the day and I’ll be back, maybe tomorrow. You can hold out until then, right?”

“This is nothing,” he assured her. This was a monumental lie. It was like his lungs were filled with seaweed, making each breath something of a struggle. And his heart had developed an unsettling hitch, where it would sometimes stall completely one second and then rev-up the next. He had some sort of nerve or brain damage as well. Parts of his body were completely without feeling and might as well have been made of wood.

That dead feeling came and went, striking him here and there, affecting him pretty much randomly everywhere except for his stomach. Seeing Deberha’s blood being wasted as it dribbled onto the floor was driving him to distraction. He was trying to decide the etiquette involved: was it bad manners to lick blood off the floor when no one else was eating? If he had been standing there with a doughnut in hand, no one would say a thing if he took a bite, and wasn’t this practically the same thing?

His stomach let out an embarrassing growl and he had to force his eyes away from the wonderfully red puddle. “Yeah, I’m good,” he said, getting to his feet. “Don’t worry about me, I’m fit as a uh, one of those things. One of those little brown things. Huh? What’s the word? Tuba?”

“Fiddle,” Deanna suggested.

“That’s it. I’m fiddley-fit and ready to go. I should even go with you, Emily. I can fight, and me and Grey always made a good team. We were like the Captain and Tennille. Oh, wait, Tennille was a girl. Then I guess we were like Batman and Robin. But I never did like Robin so much. Yellow tights? Please. I’d never wear yellow tights, unless it was cold, I guess.”

As he wondered where he would even get yellow tights at this time of the year and on such short notice, he was unaware that everyone was staring at him. Deberha stared in revulsion as he coughed up something large and chunky and began to chew on it, Emily in fear that he had just given away her dad’s secret, and Deanna in concern that her oldest friend was falling to pieces. Had he forgotten that his best friend had died a decade ago?

Deanna was torn three ways: mother-friend-governor. The mother in her won out. Keeping the gun pointed at Deberha, she asked Emily, “You don’t really have to go, do you? Have you eaten? What about a change of clothes? You look cold. You should dry off and warm up before you do anything.”

“I have to go, Mom.”

“No. The only thing you have to do is listen to your mom. Your lips are practically blue and, my God your skin is freezing. Gunner will have to figure something else out. Now that we know who the spies are, he can trust someone else. It doesn’t have to be you.”

Then who? Emily thought. Wayne French? Hardly. Big, dumb Paul Daniels? The old set of camouflage Paul had been wearing looked suspiciously clean, making Emily think that he hadn’t done much fighting during the hour-long battle. And could he trust meek Jonathan Dunnam with his perfectly parted hair and his sweaty upper lip? Or what about stern Rosanna Landeros with her bad back?

“I’m sorry, but it has to be me,” Emily said. “Now’s not the time to falter or go weak in the knees.”

Deanna feared she was right. The heroes of the past were all dead or broken, and what remained behind couldn’t compare. In its sad way, cowardice was a survival mechanism that worked better than courage.

“You sounded like your father just then,” she told her daughter.

In truth, Emily had been channeling Jillybean, but she thanked her mom for the compliment, nonetheless. “Are you going to be okay, mom? With her, I mean.”

Deberha had sat back on her heels. She hung her head as if beaten down, a look that no one trusted. “I’m fine. If she tries anything, I’ll have Neil eat her.” He looked quite pleased at the idea and showed ghastly red teeth. The shudder that ran up Deberha’s back couldn’t be faked.

Deanna wanted to say more. She wanted to wheedle and cajole her daughter into staying, and if that didn’t work, she was prepared to lay down some serious guilt—at the same time, she was immensely proud of her daughter. “Take one of the canoes at least. And change your clothes. Your shoes, too.”

The pre-teen in Emily was very close to rolling her eyes. The child and daughter in her were stronger. She grabbed her mom in a hug, grinned when Deanna planted a warm kiss on her lips and then left with a final wave to Neil.

Stepping out into the cold night air, the fatigue hit her like a ton of bricks, causing her shoulders to slump. They did so for only a second. Her father’s toughness was legendary and she had seen his amazing endurance firsthand. All of that was in her somewhere, she just had to find it. Taking a deep breath, she set off again, this time for home. It was close and she knew she’d need dry clothes if she wasn’t going to die from exposure. Her house was also close to the harbor.

In twenty-three minutes, she was sitting in one of the island’s four canoes, dry and warm, thrusting out with her paddle.

The second she was past the harbor gate, the dangers around her began to multiply. Great leviathans with long arms and unending appetites dotted the Sound; black ships could be seen like immense shadows sliding silently across the water going back and forth from Seattle; and of course there was the Corsair army.

They had been given a sharp beating and had eventually retreated, but they hadn’t been defeated. There were still so many of them. The question was, where were they? Was she paddling right at them and didn’t know it? And what about the thing Neil had spoken about. Was it a rocket or a cannon, or maybe some sort of laser? Did it kill people or were they planning on battering down the walls with it?

Did Gunner know about it?

Because of where she was, she felt that she had an obligation to scout out this mystery device. Slinking as low as she could, she gently paddled through the dark water, heading towards the mainland where dozens of fires were burning. Against the dark background they looked like stars. Most were flung outwards to attract the stray zombies left in the area, but one set of fires was arrayed in a tight ring and as she drew closer she saw that something odd had been erected in the center of it.

It was a metal contraption of sorts with a long, narrow platform jutting from the front. There was a mob of people around it; she could hear their laughter from a hundred yards away. It was as close as she wanted to get. If she was seen she would be a sitting duck. As is she looked more or less like a floating log. After the platform was checked and rechecked, a long cylinder was brought out and placed on the platform.

Emily knew a rocket when she saw one. Jillybean had shot off a dozen at least and from those experiences, Emily knew they didn’t always fly as straight as one wished. She began paddling out of the way and had only made it fifty yards when the rocket’s engine roared into life. The scream of the engine was as loud as a jet, and the great fiery tail behind it was like a small sun as it shot over Emily’s head.

Its initial trajectory was angled upwards slightly and thus the rocket continued to climb as it zoomed over the wall, missing it by only a few feet and leaving scorched concrete behind. It detonated three seconds later in a great mushrooming fireball.

“Oh, God, no,” Emily whispered. What had the rocket hit? A house? A school? The governor’s mansion? “I gotta go back,” she whispered and started to turn the canoe, only to stop halfway. “No. Mom can handle this. I have to warn Gun…I mean, I have to warn my dad.” He would know how to stop this. If he couldn’t then nobody could.

Chapter 29

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco

The new winter wind brought with it the acrid smell of burning ships. To Queen Jenn Lockhart, standing on the roof of the prison, the smell was finer than roses.

It was the smell of victory, revenge and, for her only, love.

That there were fires at all was proof of that love. Only her Mike could have rallied the few remaining troops to fight to the death. Everyone who had fought on the Headlands knew that if they survived long enough to climb beneath the structure lifting the great ruddy bridge aloft, they would never climb back down again. There was only one way off of it—a long terrible fall.

Mike outlined his plan in such a way that the best possible outcome was described in glowing, courageous terms, and the likely death of everyone involved was brushed past with barely a mention. Jenn had worried that no one in their right mind would ever go under the bridge to begin with, and if they did, they wouldn’t cut the anchors loose and expose themselves.

“If one person does it, the rest will have no choice,” Mike had told her as they stood on that very spot a week before.

But who would be that one person? The call went out and, as Jenn had known would happen, no one had volunteered until Mike did, and she had known that it would be the same on the bridge. If Mike didn’t start the fight, the anchors would never be cut and the Corsairs would race into the bay like famished wolves.

A part of her heart had died when he raised his hand to volunteer to lead the defense. Another part had died when he had sailed away the day before. And when the Headlands had been overrun, the remaining chunk of her heart had turned to bitter ash inside of her.

Impossibly, he had lived. She absolutely knew it. Her heart bounded into life and, instead of dying once again as the gunfire slackened she knew he had somehow escaped the bridge as well. In her mind, it was an unalterable fact. She had given him up for dead once and she wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

Across from her, bent over a second telescope in such a way that a third chin had been added to his second, was Bishop Wojdan. He had asked for a sign and the sudden way in which the battle beneath the bridge had begun made him think that God had listened and had given him one. This was not a new occurrence for him. Whereas Jenn saw signs everywhere, he saw the hand of God in so many things.

It had been God who had called the Guardians to the Pacific years before, and it had been God who had kept them safe all that time. The fact that everything they would need to build their wall had been provided for was part of God’s plan, just as it was God who had made the zombies bypass Highton during its construction. As far as Bishop Wojdan was concerned, everything good on earth came from God and everything bad came from man.

It was a belief that had been easily defended right up until the old Queen had shown up with her Corsair armada and her insane eyes. After that, everything had been turned on its head. She wanted war to end war. She wanted to use Corsairs to fight the Corsairs. She wanted to protect her people by sacrificing her people in battle. She wanted to rule with all the power of a slave master so she could free the world from slavery.

Like most people, she was both good and evil. Unlike so many, the extremes of both existed within her. It was this that had made Wojdan fear her, and that had been a mistake. He saw that now. God had moved Knights Sergeant Troy Holt to accompany her north, and he had come back with tales of sacrifice and love that had changed him. He believed wholeheartedly that not joining the Queen’s crusade against the Corsairs had been a grave error, and although he didn’t come right out and say it, he suggested strongly that the war had come south because one man, Bishop Wojdan, had given in to fear.

Wojdan was beginning to think he was right.

Not all was lost, however. Wojdan peered through the telescope and saw the hand of God in the fires, the explosions, and the sinking ships. They represented a glimmer of hope and perhaps a shot at redemption.

But at what price? he thought, sighing and stepping back from the telescope. Whatever the price, it would have to be paid. The only question he had was could he trust this new queen to lead? She was even younger than the last one, and perhaps because of that, she lacked the strangely beguiling presence of Jillian.

Still, there was something about her that made him stare as the torch light flickered in her blue eyes and across her rosy cheeks. Even though sixty of her people were now dead, her expression was one of complete serenity. Wojdan didn’t know what to think about that, especially as he didn’t know what the right expression should be.

Sixty had died, but they had died for a reason. They had died so that their fellow men could live. Should they be mourned or celebrated? Should she be crying for them and their families, or smiling because of their victory.

He was turning this over in his head when Commander Walker broke in on his thoughts by saying, “They say you practice witchcraft, your Highness. They say you see the future.” It was more of an accusation than a question. And a strange one coming from him. With his spear shining gold in the firelight and the shadows pooling in the hollow of his eyes, he appeared to Wojdan like something not quite human.

Behind him, Donna Polston dropped her chin, wishing she was someplace else. She had been the last leader of the Coven and although they had never claimed to be actual witches, they had never discouraged the rumors that had been spread far and wide about the extent of their “witchy” powers.

Jenn glanced briefly at her before addressing the comment. “The old Queen, Jillian didn’t believe in second sight or even signs. She said that the only gift I possess is insight based on experience, intellect and perception. I honestly don’t know what the truth is. Sometimes I know things that I shouldn’t know. Or I know things that come true later. That’s all. I don’t, like, sacrifice animals or drink blood under a full moon.”

Walker grunted and Jenn couldn’t tell whether he believed her or not. “I don’t care if you believe me about any of that. All I care about is that you believe me when I say we will be destroyed if we stay divided. That is a fact.”

“The Bishop has always agreed that we have to unify,” Walker said. “But then you insisted that you lead us, without ever giving us a reason why. Why should we trust you of all people?”

Despite the pugnacity of the questions, Walker was secretly impressed by the young queen. Her attitude was I am Queen until someone proves otherwise, and so far, no had been able to. He also approved of the tenacity of the bridge defenders, as well as the overall conception of its defense. Had the Islanders staked everything on defending the Headlands, they would have lost everything in that one roll of the dice. By seeming to offer only a token resistance, they had lured the ships in, and now at least twenty had gone down. He could honestly say the bold idea was something he hadn’t considered.

Jenn wanted to laugh at the question. As far as she was concerned, there was no reason that anyone should trust her as a leader. She wanted to answer: You shouldn’t. I’m just a kid! Only a fool would trust me.

She would have said this if it were entirely true, but it wasn’t.

“There’s only one reason I should lead and it’s not because of a sign or any special witchy powers. It’s because Jillybean chose me. She has met all of us and has seen us in our roles. Bishop Wojdan as religious leader, Commander Walker as military leader, Donna as leader of the Hilltop, Gerry the Greek as leader of the Islanders. She’s met ship captains, pirates, Knights Sergeants and strange backwoods creatures who were generals at one time. Out of all of them, she chose me.”

She hesitated, her serene smile dimming for just a second before she admitted, “And I honestly don’t know why.”

None of them knew either. Walker shrugged and Donna looked back at the ground. Bishop Wojdan looked like he wanted to say something nice about Jenn, but he didn’t know her well enough to make the attempt.

The only person who said anything was Shaina Hale, who was standing practically at the Bishop’s elbow as if she were an advisor or even his equal. “It’s because you’re great,” the wobbly woman said. Her smile was aglow with giddy happiness; it was as bright as her eyes were dim. “Yeah, you’re great. You and the old Queen are. You’re both nice to people like me. You know, people who aren’t…you know.”

Her smile dipped a bit, but only for a second before it burst out anew. “And you’re smart, and you heal people, and you’re really brave. Yeah, you even stood up to the old Queen when she was not right in the head. Nobody ever did that ‘cept for you. And everyone knows you came back from the dead. Only really great people can be dead and come back again. That was sad you know, when you died, I mean.”

The last few sentences had Wojdan staring at Jenn as if looking for any hint of witchcraft. Her rosy cheeks went red. “I drank poison that only made it look like I was dead.”

“No,” Shaina insisted. “She really was dead. I felt her. She was cold and stiff. And we put her on a sinking boat, and it sunk and everything. Either way, I like you even more than the old Queen. She was great too and all, but she could be scary and I sometimes didn’t understand her. You, I always understand. You make sure I understand and that makes me feel good.”

“Thank you, Shaina,” Jenn said, embarrassed and feeling the need to downplay all the nice things she had said.

Before she could, Donna spoke up, saying, “I think you’re great, too. Greater than I ever gave you credit for.” Donna’s smile was sad and there were sudden tears in her eyes. “I kinda mistreated you and I’m sorry.” The words: That’s okay were forming on Jenn’s lips when Donna seemed to grow angry. “You know what? She is great, your Excellency. It was Jenn who made the journey to find the ‘Girl Doctor.’ And it was Jenn who won the first battle of the Hilltop.”

“No, it was all of…”

“It was you,” Donna insisted. “You were the only one brave enough to go outside the fence-line. The zombies attacked the Corsairs only because of you. And you were the one who kept us together and saved us when Jillybean blew up the Sea King. You were a real queen then, just as good as Jillybean. That’s why I’m following you. That’s why we’re all following you. I can go get fifty more people who’ll say the same thing.”

Bishop Wojdan shook his head, letting his jowls swing. “That won’t be necessary. Sixty people already paid her the ultimate compliment.” He gestured to the bridge. “They were willing to die for their queen.”

Jenn did not like the sound of that. “They died for us.”

His delicate hands went to their customary spot behind his back. “Yes, but they would not have done it on their own. A leader has to be able to instill the concept of ‘Us’ in her people. It’s a rare ability, especially when the people are as disparate as the ones you lead.” He paused and sighed, shooting Commander Walker a quick look. The commander gave a noncommittal shrug, leaving everything in the Bishop’s hands.

Wojdan’s next sigh was a long one that morphed into a grunt as he went down on his knees. The Guardians couldn’t win without help and this was the price to save his people. Jenn put out her bare hand, which he kissed, his lips soft as a woman’s. “You are now my queen and I am your faithful servant.”

Humbled, she could only nod once. He refused help up. When he was on his feet, he stepped back for Commander Walker.

“Do you promise not to waste the lives of my men?” the knight demanded, eyeing her closely.

She knew the correct answer, because it was the same that Jillybean had given once. “They are my men now, and I would never waste the life of any of them. Besides, I don’t know enough about the military or war to fling men about on a whim. It’s why I need a general. Will you be that general?”

He knelt and kissed her hand. The kiss was rougher than expected, the light stubble of his day-old beard was like sandpaper. After he stood, the rest of the Bishop’s entourage followed his example, starting with Troy Holt. While still on his knees, he asked, “May I take the Queen’s Revenge to gather the rest of our fleet from the Pacific side? We’re going to need every boat we can get if we are to have any chance. And if we move right now before the Corsairs consolidate a really good hold on the bridge, we might be able to slip past.”

It was something Mike would have asked, and if he had asked it, she wouldn’t have been able to say no. But Mike was a genius with boats and Troy was merely an excellent seaman.

“No. I’m sorry. No boat can make it through while the Corsairs hold the bridge.”

“Then may I have permission to retake the bridge? We have nearly three hundred knights in Half Moon Bay. If we hurry, we can take the bridge before morning.”

Commander Walker glared at Holt, not happy that the Knights Sergeant was blatantly bypassing the chain of command. “You’ll just be hurrying to your death, Holt. They attacked with over a thousand men. They’re not going to give up the bridge without a fight, and it’ll be a fight you can’t win. They control the sea; they’ll land men behind you and cut you to pieces.”

“Not if we move like lightening,” Holt countered. “You know as well as I do that we can’t sit on the defensive reacting to their moves. If our men at Half Moon Bay won’t fight, they might as well wrap themselves in chains now and give up.”

Walker began to swell in anger, while Troy’s face turned hard as stone. Before the two men could say something they might regret, Bishop Wojdan intervened. “Maybe we should find out what the Queen has planned.”

It was a struggle for Jenn to remain calm with these important men towering over her and a crowd of onlookers nearby, waiting for her to set out some sort of amazing Jillybean-like strategy. “Sadly, we do not have much,” she admitted. “Mike has placed traps around the bay for their ships to fall into, but we don’t know how to lure the Corsairs into them. Defensively, we have so few true fighters that our only hope is that they come straight at us and try to take Alcatraz head on.”

“Which they won’t,” Walker said. He was at something of a loss. Counting the Floating Fortress, they had four islands to defend and only enough men to adequately hold one of them at a time. Logic suggested that everyone be moved to Treasure Island. The Floating Fortress was no fortress at all. It was little more than a waterborne redoubt. Alcatraz was too small for so many people, and Angel Island didn’t have enough fresh water to support the people already there, let alone another two thousand people.

This left flat, easily attacked Treasure Island. It would be no haven for nearly four-thousand people, most of whom were women and children. With no orchards or farms, and only a small cove to fish in, they’d be starved into submission in a matter of weeks.

Troy had known this which was why he’d been pushing for an attack. Even an insane one would give the defenders a little more time to prepare some sort of trick or trap. The fight beneath the bridge had won them a single night to come up with something. Thinking out loud, the young knight said, “The Corsairs will wait until morning to be completely sure that the area beneath the bridge is completely clear. Only then will they bring the rest of their fleet through.”

“By then they’ll have completely fortified both sides of the bridge,” Walker added. “For now, it’ll be sandbags and cars, but eventually there’ll be walls on both sides.”

Troy agreed. “Yes, but that won’t be for weeks. We have to worry about tomorrow. Once they have free access to the bay, they’ll probe here and there, looking to see where we are strong and where we are weak.”

Walker stared out over the dark bay. Angel Island was lit up and to a lesser extent so was Treasure Island. The Floating Fortress was nothing but a black husk sitting out in the middle of the bay. “They’ll go for that barge first. A handful of torpedoes fired at extreme range should do it. Next, they’ll cut right between us and Angel Island. If we fire, it’ll be from three-quarters of a mile.”

“That’s far even for a marksman,” Troy said. There were precious few of those left in the world since practice used up rounds people didn’t have. “Once past us, they’ll use smoke to test our defenses on Treasure Island.”

“In the day?” Walker shook his large head. “I doubt it. No, they’ll come at night when their ships will blend in with the dark hills. But you’re right about the first attack. It’ll only be a test. They’ll want to judge our reaction. Will we panic? Will we send in our small fleet to throw more troops into the fight? Will we fire a few shots and try to make a swim for safety?”

The little crowd leaned in, waiting to hear the answers to the questions and when Walker didn’t elaborate, Wojdan asked, “What will we do?”

Troy met Walker’s eyes and they both shrugged. “There’s no right answer,” Troy replied for both of them. “If the Black Captain has spies among us, then he knows we don’t have a lot of ammo, which means he knows we can’t afford days of battle. He knows we can only win in a toe-to-toe slugging match, and that’s not something he’s going to give us.”

“If our greatest military minds cannot find the answer, then maybe, like I said, we should look to our new queen for guidance,” Wojdan said. “Your Highness, if you have any insight, second sight or even third sight, now is the time we need it. We’ve banded together and yet we seem just as lost.”

“I wish it were that easy, but I can’t just turn it off and on whenever I want. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Of course, you can’t turn it off,” Wojdan replied. “That’s because it’s always on. You just have to open your eyes and your mind.” He took her by the hand and gently turned her in a slow circle. “The answer is in front of you.”

How did he expect her to pull some strategy out of thin air when she had everyone staring at her? Shaina was beaming in complete trust, while Donna was nodding encouragement. This was countered by Walker’s hard look. Past them was Faith Checkamian’s dour skepticism and the Guardian’s nurse Denise Woodruff, who seemed pleasantly hopeful. In front of her, and going from foot to foot as if she had to pee was little Lindy Smith. With her stood Commander Walker’s daughter Ryanne; she didn’t have to pee but thought Lindy’s dance was neat and was doing it too.

Behind this first group were dozens and dozens of others, forming a faceless, judging mob. They were Hill People, Santas, Guardians and Islanders. Above all, they were her people and they were counting on her to save them, to come up with some fantastic plan that could be pulled off at the last minute with little in the way of men or ships.

She was just about to tell Wojdan that she couldn’t come up with anything under these conditions when suddenly someone in the crowd turned and spat. It was Deaf Mick. Was he still a Corsair at heart? Was he a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Was he a friend?

Can I use him? she wondered. Can I send him in among his old friends and use him as a spy of her own?

He spat again, louder this time, and it was as if a switch was thrown inside of her. The answer was no. He couldn’t be trusted. He might have been in among her people, and he might have thrown away his usual black attire and made nice with everyone, but he wasn’t one them. On the outside, he was a friend, but on the inside, he was rotten to the core.

“What I need is the opposite,” she whispered, as the beginning of a plan began to form.

Chapter 30

San Francisco, California

It was two in the morning, and men were dying left and right. So far, eight knights had been pulled apart as easily as someone pulling the wings off a chicken that had been slow-roasting all day long. The men died with their rifles still strapped to their backs.

They also died soundlessly. The lives of a hundred men and perhaps the fate of everyone in the bay area depended on complete surprise.

The dead were stripped and left among the giant corpses of the zombies. So far on the slow trip through the crowded and mostly destroyed streets of San Francisco, the company had encountered nearly two dozen of the beasts. Some had been towering giants that had torn their way through the knights despite their hastily assembled phalanxes.

One great creature had taken a hundred spear wounds before it finally fell. In places the broken streets ran with blood, and still the company plodded forward, pushing their immense burden on and on.

They were not exactly happy and it wasn’t because of their fallen comrades. This was war and deaths were expected. Not only that, none of the fallen had disgraced themselves. Theirs constituted “good deaths.” They weren’t even unhappy at suddenly being subjects of the new queen. If she was good enough for the bishop, then she was good enough for them—and it didn’t hurt that she was reputed to be even more beautiful than the last queen.

No, what chapped their hides was who had been put in charge of the mission. It wasn’t the man who had made the dangerous crossing of the bay not once, but twice. Troy Holt had been considered too injured to lead a fight that was certainly going to be desperate.

And neither was Knights Lieutenant Chuck Hoerig given the opportunity, as was due his rank and experience. No, it was the traitor who led them.

Mike Gunter had fulfilled his promise hours earlier. When he and Rebecca Haigh had stumbled into their perimeter at Half Moon Bay, he had completely overstepped his boundaries and immediately demanded that the stranded fleet try to make it past the bridge so they could join forces with the rest of the Guardians in the bay.

As much as Knights Lieutenant Hoerig wanted to, he was bound by orders not to make the attempt.

“I’m going to give you one chance,” Mike had warned him. Hoerig had laughed him off. So, while Rebecca was getting her dislocated arm set, Mike went to the highest hill overlooking the harbor and set an old cottonwood on fire. It had burned like a beacon, and it wasn’t long before a Corsair scout ship had slipped up the bay and saw the white Guardian ships, and shot away again.

Mike was arrested on the spot, but in his mind he had done the right thing. Already a good portion of the Corsair fleet was converging on the bay. There were twenty black-sailed ships bottling up the fifteen white Guardian ships and the midnight black Harbinger. It was twenty ships fewer for Jenn to have to worry about.

“It won’t be for long,” Lieutenant Hoerig griped. “Unless they forgot to bring their torpedoes, we’re sitting ducks as soon as the surf calms down.”

“Just put out nets,” Mike shot back. “Their torps ride on top of the water.” As easy as that sounded, the Guardians had come to fight, not to fish, and their nets were back in Highton with a great deal of other gear. Having been around Jillybean for so long, simple solutions just seemed to jump to Mike’s mind. “Then set out logs. Anchor them about fifty yards out and make a series of walls out of them. Three should keep you safe.”

That they followed his suggestions didn’t absolve him and he was guarded for the next few hours until Troy Holt showed up, reeling with exhaustion. He had been rowed across to the east side of San Francisco safely enough, but once on land he had to dodge zombies for seven miles until every breath had been like sucking in razors. “Mike will lead the attack,” Troy had told the Guardians. “It was Commander Walker who made the decision.”

“I don’t need to lead,” Mike said, when he heard the Queen’s idea. What she had proposed was insanely dangerous and the casualty rate could very well hit a hundred percent if anything went wrong. But that wasn’t the reason he wanted Troy to take charge. “I’ll go and I’ll fight, but I don’t have to lead. These are your men, not mine.”

“It was the Queen’s idea,” Troy said, leaning in close. “You’re the only one of us who knows these streets, and the ins and outs of the bay. It makes sense.” He hardly knew the slim young man with the golden hair and the light, boyish whiskers. They had been together on the Queen’s Revenge for just over an hour. Troy knew his reputation better than he did the man, and some of his sailing feats were the stuff that legends were made out of.

“Her idea? How did she know I even lived? We both knew that there wasn’t any real chance anyone would make it off the bridge.”

That was the question when it came to the Queen. She was just a kid, even younger than Mike, and yet she had known he was alive and had stated it with such conviction that Troy had honestly believed it as well. Troy could only shrug as he answered Mike. “She just did.”

“I hate to burst everyone’s bubble,” Lieutenant Hoerig said. “Because of this guy, no one’s going anywhere. He called half their fleet down on us and now we’re trapped.” Troy and Mike shared a look and then both pointed at a rusted old boat trailer that was just down the beach.

That had been a few hours before, and although they were only going two miles down the coast, it had been a dreadful two hours. Ever since the battle on the bridge, the zombies were stirred up and the streets were flooded with them. The fastest of the Guardians led many of them away, but not all and those men who weren’t actively pushing the weighted-down trailer along were busy fighting the beasts.

Mike’s biggest fear was that there would be too few of them left once they put out to sea. The plan Jenn had cooked up was to pit the Harbinger against the dozen ships that had first cut through the chains and ropes beneath the bridge. When the anchors started to fall, the ships had fled south a mile and had taken refuge in the burned-out remains of a marina at the very northern tip of San Francisco.

Although it would be twelve ships against one, Jenn guessed that they were sparsely manned. Maybe only four or five crew members per ship. The rest of the room would have been taken up by supplies as well as the soldiers who had disembarked earlier.

The Harbinger could hold exactly eighty-seven men and that was with her lower deck packed like it was a tin of sardines.

They had started with a hundred men and they still had a quarter of a mile to literally grind out. The trailer’s rubber wheels had been flat to begin with, and as they had progressed, the rubber had peeled away until now the boat rolled along on bent rims.

“It’s not far,” Mike whispered to the men. Along with eight others, he had a rope over one shoulder and was leaning into it, pulling the trailer from the front, while ten more were pushing from the stern. Around them were Guardians, their long, bright spears pointed outward. They were tall and slim, and bright-eyed. They held themselves fearlessly and although many of them sniffed at Mike personally, they never complained about his leadership.

Another zombie came crashing out from a house that had been made lopsided by the great earthquake that had hit years before. Like so many, it was bigger than the doorway from which it emerged and smashed its head through the top of the frame. It charged without noticing that it had scalped itself and was bleeding in great torrents.

Without a word of command, seven men lowered their spears and attacked from the front, while two more came at it from the sides. In a blind rage, the beast threw itself on those seven spears. It was heedless of the gaping wounds they caused. All that mattered to it was that the spears were between it and its dinner. With a swipe of an arm the size of a tree trunk, three of the spears were bent in half.

Just as it went to swipe at the others, a long blade erupted from the side of its neck. Tommy Conrad had always been a touch more nimble than the average Guardian. It was this quickness that had allowed him to survive as long as he had.

He had darted in to attack from the side, got in a near killing stroke and now began to pull back, however, his spear tip had ground along the edge of the zombie’s vertebra and for a split second had gotten stuck. It was just long enough for the creature to smash down on the spear with one tremendous blow. Tommy’s spear was bent in half and before he knew it, he was yanked close. Far too close. He was close enough to see the maggots squirming in an old festering wound across the thing’s naked chest.

Dropping the spear, he danced back just a hair too slow and the claws of the creature raked downward, practically pulling his face off. From his hairline to his jawline were five nasty gouges. One cut his nose in two and the other nearly ripped his lower lip clean off. It swung like a bloody worm from the ruin of his face.

“Tommy!” one of the soldiers cried, and jabbed at the zombie’s eyes, puncturing one. Another soldier threw himself between Tommy and the beast. His spear had been bent seconds before and was awkward in his hands. On the other hand, it was short enough for him to get up under the creature and slam it through the bottom of its chin, up through the soft palate, and into its black brain. The creature fell on him when it died.

Men rushed to help.

Two more attacks in quick succession gave them four more casualties with horrible wounds. “At least we’ll have more room in the boat,” Mike told himself.

In this he was wrong. The Guardians were different compared to so many others. Tommy Conrad’s wounds did not stop him from carrying on with his mission. One of his friends wrapped his face like he was a mummy from an old-time movie and before the Harbinger had progressed another three blocks, he was back with the group. The same was true with the others. They all came back.

When they finally got the Harbinger to a little known boat ramp, Tommy came up to Mike. His bandages were soaked through and sticking to his face. Only his dark eyes were visible. As he could only grunt, he used a series of signs to ask if he could lead the attack.

Mike, who felt extra young and small around the Guardians, had planned on being the first to fight. He put his ego aside. “Yes, of course. Stay on deck with me. The same is true with any of the wounded.”

Including Tommy Conrad, there were seven who sat along the railing at the bow. Altogether, eighty-nine men were stuffed into the fifty-foot boat, leaving only four of the older men to push her out into the surf where she bucked and rocked, sluggishly picking up speed.

She was so heavy that even the smallest waves broke over her sides and Mike was forced to shut the hold tight. He couldn’t imagine the claustrophobic conditions down in the dark hold.

“We’ll make the passage as quick as we can,” he told Ren Finnemore, the only female on board. Supposedly, the pale red-head was the best mariner among the Guardians, which was saying something.

Ren turned out to be an excellent sailor and a perfect second-in-command. She jumped at his every order without once questioning him. Her sail angles were excellent and she could steer nearer to the wind than anyone he had ever met. It helped that the sagging Harbinger didn’t need even an ounce of counter-weight. The one thing Ren wasn’t, was a soldier.

“Oh, God please help us,” she whispered in prayer as Mike set a course between the main fleet of the Corsairs and the twenty ships bottling up the Guardians in Half Moon Bay.

“It’ll be alright,” he assured her. At least for now. The Corsair ships were mere shadows, each a mile off on either side. It was a long way on a dark night especially when few, if anyone, would be looking for a Corsair ship streaming in from the southwest. Mike was gambling that the blockading ships would have their eyes focused on the bay, while he guessed that the main fleet wouldn’t be looking for anyone at all.

The men on watch at this late hour would be fighting sleep and would be more worried about accidentally drifting into another ship.

What had Mike’s guts twisting were the men high up on the bridge. If they caught wind that something was out of kilter with the Harbinger, all eighty-nine people on board would be sitting ducks.

When the ship was three hundred yards from the looming bridge, Ren asked, “Do you want me to drop the jib?” They were currently plowing through the water at an unimpressive five knots, her red hair barely lifting in the breeze. It was a snail-like pace for the open sea, but would seem dangerously fast while trying to cut through a forty-yard gap with the waves trying to heave the ship toward a huge cement bastion on one side, and the broken remains of a boat slung over a buoy on the other. A stray gust could doom them.

“Not yet. Get the lantern ready.” At the mention of the light, the mood on board soured. Surprise was their one hope and Mike’s idea of announcing themselves seemed like complete folly. A very dangerous folly. Without a light, they figured that they could slip on by completely unnoticed, or at worse, be hailed just as they were passing beneath the great structure—too late for the Corsairs to really do anything.

“And if they have radios?” Mike countered. “You know that if those ships are warned that something isn’t right, we’re screwed six ways from Sunday. To win we’re going to have to take some chances. I think this is our best one.”

The lantern was lit down in the companionway and at eighty yards, Ren began to blink the light in a random manner. At fifty yards, she asked about the jib again, the fear loud in her voice. “Let go the jib,” Mike called to one of the Guardians near the front.

Their speed dropped and the boat took on a bucking motion that was probably hell on the men packed below deck. Hell or not, the Guardians remained utterly silent as eighty-eight men and one woman held their breaths. The bridge was practically right over head when someone called down in something like a shouted whisper.

“Where do you guys think you’re going?”

Ren froze with the lantern lighting up the freckles that dotted her pale face. Mike quickly stepped over to her and turned the light away. He cleared his throat and called out in a perfectly realistic Corsair manner, “Mind your business.”

“This is my business, dink-wad. No one’s supposed to come through till morning. You didn’t get the memo?”

Mike didn’t know what a memo was. “I got orders is what I got. Secret orders that aren’t supposed to be spat out over the radio. Could be its people listening in that’s got the boss-man nervous.” By then they were passing under and beyond the bridge. That didn’t mean they were out of danger. Bullets could travel a long way.

“Jib up,” Mike ordered. “You, secure that boom vang. And you over there, you see the leech beginning to twist, don’t you?” He was trying to wring every ounce of speed out of her. Was the Corsair radioing the fleet? If so, how long would it take to get someone high enough up the chain of command to sound the alarm? Five minutes? Ten? If it was anything less than seven, they would be in trouble.

Through his binoculars, he could see the marina and a strange dark clump next to it. A minute passed, and then a second one, and still everything was quiet. He called for the hatch to be opened and by then he saw that the Corsairs ships were tied up alongside the dock in two neat rows. All but two of the ships, that is. For some reason, two of the ships were anchored thirty yards from the dock.

Once the fighting began, the only way to get to them would be to swim, something he wasn’t going to allow his men to do. With their armor and weapons, it would take ten minutes to swim that far and they’d be shredded to pieces by then.

He crouched on the stairs and whispered the positions of the ships to the men. “The first ones up will follow me down the dock. I’m going to be heading for the very last boat in line. The rest of you fill in as you go. No more than five men per boat and remember to count off. I don’t want ten of you attacking one boat while leaving another free to rip into us. We’re going to be lined up on a dock and very vulnerable, so if you can get onto one of the boats, do it. Also, the last ten men up will need to engage the two outlying ships.”

“Keep them pinned down,” Lieutenant Hoerig added. “And whatever you do, don’t let them escape. It’s probably better to sink a boat than let it rejoin their fleet. Remember men, this is our chance to even the odds. Every boat we take out or capture is one less our friends will have to face later.”

Mike thought that had a dark ring to it, as if Hoerig didn’t think he would make it through the fight. “One less boat we will have to face later,” he corrected.

“Yeah,” Hoerig answered with little enthusiasm, tugging at the collar of his armor. He was nervous, which was expected. Mike was well past nervous, and was lucky to have the ship to sail. It took his mind off the immediate prospect of dying, which seemed more and more likely with every passing minute.

Six minutes after they cleared the bridge, someone came out on deck of one of the separated boats. Mike saw the person as nothing more than a black human form, holding what looked like a pair of binoculars. The man probably saw the same thing in Mike.

“Ren? Could you blink the lantern at that first boat? Just five or six blinks.” Ren did and for whatever reason the man went back below deck. “Three minutes everyone,” Mike hissed down the companion way. To those on deck, he warned, “We’re going to hit kinda hard. If she gets her paint scraped that’s okay, just try to fend her off so we don’t split her open. At the same time, don’t let her move away from the dock.”

Bouncing off was the worst thing that could happen, though there wasn’t much chance of it in Mike’s view. With eighty-nine people on board, the Harbinger was hauling an extra eighteen thousand pounds. As sailboats didn’t come with brakes, stopping the ship would take some ingenious maneuvering, which would steal precious minutes Mike could only hope they had.

As long as the man in the other boat remained below…no sooner had the thought crossed his mind, when the man came out on deck again—a hundred yards separated them. Mike raised his binoculars just as the man flicked on a spotlight.

“Jeeze!” he cried, trying to blink away the strange white blobs filling his vision. The light swept back and forth over the boat, picking out the wounded soldiers at the front and nearly catching Ren gaping. Just before her long red hair gave them away, she ducked down the stairs.

Fifty yards.

“Who are you guys?” the man demanded, his voice carrying easily in the quiet night.

“Who’s asking?” Mike countered. The light transfixed Mike, pinning him in place at the wheel, his blond hair glinting beautiful gold. More quietly, he whispered, “One minute.”

Thirty-five yards.

“Captain Robert Hutton. Now tell me who the hell you guys are and who sent you? It sure wasn’t Grimes so don’t try to feed me any bull. Hey! Why are you riding so low?”

They were close enough now that Mike could see there were two other men on deck and both were armed. “I was told our orders came from Grimes. Was I supposed to question them? He would have my balls if I did. Let me dock and we’ll figure it out.”

Twenty yards and although there was still time for maneuvering, Mike wasn’t about to try it with three overly suspicious Corsairs beaming a light across his deck. It was a wonder they didn’t see the shining spear someone had lashed to the boom for good luck as the Guardian’s usually did. No maneuvering meant they were going to hit hard.

“You got played, boy.” This from a man with the deepest baritone. He chuckled, however the laugh stopped quickly. “Hey! Luff up, damn it. You’re gonna hit. Beam on! Beam on, you moron!”

Hutton was going just as crazy. He was jumping up and down, pointing. “The boom!” he cried in a strangled voice. “Jesus! The boom…turn…Jesus!” He went silent as the Harbinger ate up the distance quickly.

Mike had the bow aimed at the very small gap between the stern of the last boat, a forty-four footer called The Biter, and the floating dock. Nearly fifty-thousand pounds plowed into the little gap, with a long hellish, grinding crash that seemed to go on and on. The line securing The Biter held fast, however the stanchion snapped off as if it were made of plastic.

Attached only at the bow, The Biter swung outward, tipping so precariously that a hundred gallons of briny bay water flooded down the open hatch before it righted itself.

The Harbinger slowly came to a stop and as it did, it dispersed its momentum into the water in the form of waves that lifted the dock four feet into the air only to drop it again a moment later.

“Tie us off!” Mike cried to Ren as he leapt over the rail and ran, sprinting, needing to get to that last ship in the line. Someone had to cover it before the shooting started. He would have made it if the dock wasn’t twisting as it rose and fell. His foot caught one of the boards and down he went, almost sliding right into the water that rushed up to pull him under.

Without pause, he scrambled for his gun, and leapt up just as someone lit off half a dozen rounds. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the three Corsairs either falling or diving into the water. That one second of distraction was enough and once more he tripped on the rolling dock. This time he lost the rifle. It went right off the edge of the dock and sank before Mike could even make a stab for it.

Not knowing what to do, he started to turn back just as three of the wounded Guardians came flying by. The first was a man who’d had his left hand and wrist bitten off by a zombie. The next was Tommy Conrad who’d had his face ripped off—how he was still on his feet, Mike had no idea. Embarrassed to be left behind, Mike jumped to his feet and raced after them.

Now more shots were being fired from all over the place; they were so loud that it seemed as if they were being shot only inches from his head. The battle was quickly becoming so loud that it was drowning out the angry cries and the confused screams. Even the hissing bullets that sizzled past within inches of Mike went unheard. It made it seem like no one was shooting at him at all, which was a great relief.

The illusion was shattered seconds later as the three Guardians in front of him suddenly stopped and began to jerk and jitter. At the same time, Mike was hit by what felt like a wall of blood and gore. It drenched him as he dove to the side.

The three fell and Mike scrambled forward in a low crawl until he reached the first warm corpse and took the rifle from its clawed hands. Pulling himself into a crouch, he scanned for a target, but there was no one in sight.

TAAANNNG! Something smashed into the side of his gun, turning his hands instantly numb. He knew the trigger was still there which meant he could still shoot. Turning to his right, he saw brilliant flashes not ten feet away. Behind the flashes were two shadows that were so close together that it looked as if they were either hugging or wrestling.

Another flash showed that it was a Guardian and a Corsair in a death embrace, fighting over a gun. He couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the wrong man, so he started to race on again, only to see more flashes from the side. His reactions were pure instinct— the shots were coming from the last boat on the left, streaking diagonally at him, but just passing in his wake—he dove right, uncaring whether he went into the bay or not.

He hit the stern rail of a boat, and like an out of control acrobat, he spun over the top and smashed on deck. Immediately, someone started shooting from below him, punching holes through the fiberglass.

For a few seconds, he was bracketed by burning lead while black fiberglass snowed down on him. Mike rolled, came up firing and then dove back over the railing. Splinters sprayed up into his face without affecting his aim; he was locked on, and three shots dropped two men. Spinning, he fired off the remaining rounds in his magazine, aiming into the galley of the boat he’d just been on where at least three people were still shooting holes up through the deck.

They were still working their guns like mad when his bolt went back. Dropping to a knee, he replaced his magazine and went on, now directing his fire at the last two boats. He shot three into the boat on his right, then three into the one on his left. Back and forth he fired even though no real targets presented themselves, he kept firing until he again went dry. A second later, his empty magazine clinked on the dock, and as it did, a Corsair appeared on the stairs of the boat to the right. He saw Mike, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then dashed for the stern of the boat, firing as he ran.

As Mike was crouching and the man was a poor shot, the first four bullets missed high and to the right. The next four stitched across the dock getting nearer and nearer—and for some reason that he couldn’t name, Mike froze, watching the holes as they appeared.

The man screamed as he fired, “Holden, Wait!”

Mike only had time to think: Who’s Holden? before the boat behind the man exploded in a blinding fireball. The next thing he knew, he was on his back looking at black sky. It was as if the explosion had snuffed out every star in the galaxy. Then one winked back into existence. Then another and another.

Slowly, Mike sat up, blinking like an owl, his head ringing and his ears feeling as though they were stuffed with cotton. The explosion seemed to have ended the battle. Corpses were everywhere. At least three dozen bodies were strewn along the dock. A like number were floating in the bay or were draped over railings and scattered about ship decks. For a few moments, Mike wondered if he was the only one left alive. Then, one by one, the Guardians began to pick themselves up or emerge from the shadows. A few swam up out of the depths of the bay.

“I think we won,” Mike muttered.

No one cheered, and for good reason. Half of the Guardians were dead or wounded, the Harbinger had a terrible gaping hole just above the water line; two ships were on fire, and two more were even then sinking.

“It could be worse,” he said.

“You’re bleeding,” Ren said. She had not stayed behind with the Harbinger as she was supposed to. She wasn’t a knight, but she was still a Guardian, and when half a dozen of her friends were gunned down right in front of her, she had grabbed a gun and charged into the fight. She had killed people and now felt different. She felt ugly.

Mike heard her words as if they were an old memory. “Huh? I’m what? Bleeding?” He looked down at himself and saw that he was covered in red gore and dusted in fiberglass and splinters. “That’s not my…” He stopped as he felt something wet trickle down his left arm, and heard a drip, drip, drip striking the dock.

Flexing it, he decided the arm wasn’t so bad. “Could be worse,” he said again, this time under his breath. He was fast learning that things could always get worse.

Chapter 31

Puget Sound, Washington

With the Black Captain standing on a hill wearing a frown on his face that could be felt from a hundred yards, Kent painstakingly aimed each of the rockets just as he’d been taught. His stomach was beginning to ache, because for some damned reason he had failed to hit the wall with his first four attempts. Two had gone high, shooting across the sky trailing a brilliant golden fire. He had adjusted downward and the next had plopped into the Sound with barely a splash. The last one had skipped across the water like a stone thrown by a little boy.

It hadn’t even exploded.

Now sweat glistened on his rat-face like he was a glazed ham. He was all alone as he aimed the fifth. His friends, who had been fighting each other over the chance to fire a least one of the rockets, had disappeared into the small crowd. They knew Kent was one miss away from getting the skin lashed from his back and didn’t want any part of that.

“Come on, baby,” he whispered as he checked the angle of the nose for the final time. The damn Queen had made it look so easy, with her elevations and her launch angles. “I shoulda wrote all that crap down,” he groused under his breath. He also should have been more careful with the fins on the rockets. A fin on the third one he’d fired had been bent, and one on the fourth had fallen off and he hadn’t noticed it until it was too late.

With number five he checked every little thing and then double checked it all once again.

“Just do it. Just press the button. 1-2-3 and go.” He was about to when a breeze swept his greasy hair to the side. He almost crapped himself. A breeze could mean a gust and a gust could ruin everything. “Oh God! Just do it. 1-2-3 and go.” This time he pressed the button.

The engine roared into fiery life, letting off an immense scream. The rocket hesitated a second and then leapt from the launcher. At first, it looked as though it was going to fly right over the wall, but then it rolled in flight and leveled out, going faster and faster until it was only a blur and then:

BOOOOM!

It had hit the wall three quarters of the way to the top with a terrific blast of sound and light that was impossible to look at. Kent was the only one who didn’t turn away. He forced his watering eyes to stare into the fire until it died. He fully expected the wall to have been half destroyed by the one missile. Instead there was only an ugly, blackened crater with a ragged hole in its center the size of a television set.

Kent might have been disappointed, but the rest of the Corsairs were going crazy cheering and laughing as if the war had been won by the single missile.

Five hundred yards away, the Islanders were as glum as the Corsairs were happy. They knew that each missile would do that much more damage and that eventually the wall would come down section by section.

“Gather the captains,” Gunner said in his rasping growl. He had been half-heartedly berating Emily for leaving camp against orders while mixing in praise for saving the woman he loved and uncovering the spies at the same time.

Emily had felt neither the sting of his criticism nor the warmth of his praise. Her stomach was in knots over the rockets. She knew they had to be destroyed at all costs, and with the Corsair army huddled across a narrow peninsula, the costs were going to be staggering.

Gunner saw it the same way. “I’ve got good and bad news,” he told the assembled group, minutes later. “We have to attack and it’ll have to be straight on. As our objective is very obvious, maneuvers, feints and dodges will have limited value.”

As Gunner paused to hack up blood from his lung, Paul Daniels asked, “Was that the good news or the bad news?”

Gunner drew in a long, wet breath. “In a manner of speaking, it’s both. Six of you will have the very simple task of winning this war. You will lead your men from the front. You will drive an opening through whatever defensive line the Corsairs possess and you will destroy those rockets. The rest of you will open the attack on the left and right flanks with the hope of disguising our true intentions.”

Another pause as he coughed blood out and sucked air in. “The question is, who will go first?”

There were twenty captains present, each leading a company of a hundred men. None could meet his eye and none raised their hand.

“Alright,” Gunner said as if he had expected the lack of response. “Who’s going lead the next two companies?” Again no one raised a hand. “This is not a trick. I will lead the first company. I will go first, but I need to know who is going to back me up.”

After a sigh, Paul Daniels raised a hand as did Emily’s next door neighbor, Mr. Mahaney. “I’ll come along but I don’t know how many of my men will.”

Gunner grunted in what might have been a laugh. “They all will. Their homes and families are being attacked. They’ll fight. Just like you, all they need is someone to go first.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Emily said in a half-whisper. “I’ll go in my…” She had almost said In my father’s place. “In Gunner’s place. He’s too weak. He won’t make it. And I love my people enough to go first.”

“We have our leaders, Emily. You’ll stay behind and let the adults fight. And that’s an order. The rest of you, we kick off in an hour. Any longer and the dawn will reveal us and make us easy targets. I need three more captains to make up the main attack. The rest will decide left or right. I don’t really care which you choose as long as you make a good show with the feints.”

The captains worked out their positions quickly enough, but that final hour flew by even faster. Emily spent half the time doing everything she could to get Gunner physically ready to go, and the other half begging him to stay behind. If he led the attack, he wasn’t going to live. It was a fact that could not be avoided. The truth crushed Emily to the point she couldn’t breathe, and it also made her so proud that she puffed up her chest, and it made her so angry that she wanted to scream at the world.

She held in the scream, afraid that it would be misconstrued by her own people. They were stepping up, the way they should have from the very beginning. None were hiding or making excuses. They were standing tall and were ready to fight. Three hundred people—it was still hard to call any of them soldiers—had come forward from companies not slated for the attack. They were scared. Despite how little light there was filtering down through the branches from the stars above, she could see the sweat gleaming from their shadowed faces.

Even in the clearings, where the stars seemed tired by the late hour, one face looked like another. Maybe because of this, Gunner finally fit in and finally seemed to be accepted by the people he’d been keeping safe for years.

“It’s time,” he said as the sound of the rocket’s explosion rolled over them. “We can’t wait any longer. Tell the company commanders. When the next rocket is launched we attack, and we don’t stop until we destroy that launcher. Wayne?”

“Right here,” he answered in a hesitating whisper. The front line of the Corsairs was so close that their belches could be heard and their rank odor smelled.

“Stay with Emily and keep her out of the fight,” Gunner ordered. “Chain her to a tree if you have to.”

Emily couldn’t believe her ears. “No. I have a right to be with you. And, and, and you need me.”

“I need you to be safe,” he told her. “No more running off. I can’t think straight when you’re in danger, and right now I need to focus. Got it? Good, now help me up. Lean me against that tree.” It took both her and Wayne to get him standing. Even with the tree propping him up, she thought he would fall over again and thought that it would be for the best. “More pills,” he asked. “Five of them. Don’t give me that look, Em. I know what I’m doing.”

He dry-swallowed them and then looked as though he was about to fall over. She tried to hold him up only to realize that he wasn’t falling, he was hugging her, but trying to disguise it. “We go at the sound of the next rocket. Tell them, then stay put, got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Wayne dragged her away and she went willingly. Together, they went to each company, letting them know the signal and that they had to be ready any second. In her own words, they had to be on a hair-trigger. No one was more ready for the signal than Emily. It blinked into being as a pale amber light that screamed with the fury of a dragon. In its glow, Emily saw Wayne French flinch back and throw an arm over his face.

A second later, the light lifted, going higher at first and then zipped away to the west where it suddenly blossomed, its scream changing to a deafening roar. By then, Emily was gone, slipping among the shadows and the soldiers among them. “Up! Everyone up!” she hissed as she went.

Almost all of them did. Emily darted to one that didn’t and was shocked to realize it was her fourth-grade teacher, Debbie Meredith. Her eyes were inches wide and although she hadn’t budged, she was panting like a dog that had just chased a rabbit down a hole.

“Get up, Miss Meredith. Come on! We need you.” She hauled Debbie to her feet and then pulled her along, racing for the front where the gunfire was suddenly exploding louder than the rocket. Somewhere along the way, she lost her grip on Debbie’s sweaty hand. She did not look back for the teacher. The gunfire was now urgent and growing in volume.

There was no need to be quiet and she raced through the woods, passing the soldiers slowly trudging forward, bowed at the waist as if they were moving against a heavy wind. Then she came to the lead companies who were pressing forward, firing as they went. One man fell directly in front of Emily. She tripped over him and went down hard in the dirt as bullets ripped the air where she’d been.

“Oh God! My leg!” the man cried as he rolled in pain.

He was oblivious to the fact that he was drawing more fire. Emily crawled to him and slapped a hand over his mouth. “Hush up, darn it!” she hissed into his ear. The moment he quieted, he heard the bullets smacking into the tree a few feet away. “Kick with your good leg,” Emily told him and began pulling him back behind the tree.

Once they were behind cover, she looked him over. “Is it just the one bullet hole?”

“Just one?” he griped. “You make it sound like it’s nothing.”

“It is,” she answered, pulling out one of the lengths of cloth that had been cut to act as a bandage. Compared to her father’s wounds, this was a scratch. She quickly bound the leg, dropped a knee down on the wound and cinched a knot tight over it. “You’re good to go.”

“Good? I can’t feel my leg from the knee…”

She didn’t have time to hear him complain. The attack had surged forward and she was not going to be left behind. She gave the man a quick goodbye and darted forward again, coming on more wounded, some of whom she helped in the same brusque manner. Others were too far gone or barely scratched.

The closer to the fight she got, the more fearful the Islanders became. Emily saw three different groups clumped oddly together, scampering from tree to tree as if they were one being with six legs. Some crawled like inchworms even though no one was shooting anywhere near them. Some were frozen in place.

Emily came upon one lady clinging to a tree with both hands, her rifle forgotten in the high grass. It was Debbie Meredith again. Somehow, she had found the strength to get this far, but didn’t have the guts to go any further. The people around her had the same look, making Emily wonder if fear was contagious. If so, the attack was going to get bogged down; her father would be killed for nothing and her people defeated.

She wasn’t going to let that happen. “Miss Meredith? Hi. We can’t stay here. Pick up your gun. It’s only a little further.”

“No please. I can’t.”

“Yes. We’re all going…” Emily was interrupted as a shadow loomed suddenly over her. It was Wayne French. He grabbed her by the wrist and started pulling her back. “No! Stop it!” She dug in her heels, but he was stronger and she left skid marks through the grass. When she realized she was losing, she changed tactics and launched herself at him, tackling him around the knees.

He tried to gently pry her off of him without success, forcing him to use more force. This in turn forced her to escalate and she pulled out the same pistol she had threatened Deberha Perkins with not even two hours before.

When she stuck it in his face, he rolled his eyes. “Will you stop that? You’re being a child.” He wasn’t afraid of her at all and with good reason. She couldn’t shoot him. She couldn’t shoot the man who had given her birthday presents every year for as long as she could remember, and who had always brought her favorite candied yams to the annual Christmas feast. This was the man who threw a Way Back Party each summer and stuffed her silly with venison ribs, and then never said a word when she barfed all over his rug.

“We can’t go back,” she told him. “If we go back so will they.” Around them were frightened Islanders, looking for an excuse to stop. “If we don’t go on, there’ll be nothing to go back to.”

He sucked in a long breath, held it and then let it out in defeat, his shoulders slumping. “You’re right.” Getting to his feet, he went to Debbie. “Come on, Miss Meredith. We can’t stay here. We have to go on, no matter what. Pick up your gun. There you go. Everyone, let’s go.” He sounded like a fourth grade teacher on a field trip.

Around them were thirty or so people. They stood when Wayne stood and moved forward only when he did. For the length of half a football field they remained in a strange bubble of safety where no one shot at them and the enemy seemed to have disappeared. The bubble popped with a single rifle shot.

No one knew who had shot or at what, and it didn’t seem to matter a second later when all hell suddenly broke loose. Emily dove to the ground as the space she’d been standing in was filled with flying lead that sizzled the damp night air as it passed. It was a sinister sound that somehow could be heard despite the ear-splitting explosion of guns. Mixed in it all was a strange knocking noise that was like the sound a woodsman made when chopping a tree, only this time it was a thousand woodsmen swinging their axes as fast as they could into a thousand trees.

Emily found herself behind a tree that vibrated and shook and dropped the very last of its leaves down on her. A normal girl might have stayed behind that tree; she was not a normal girl. She was just beginning to grasp the fundamental essence of leadership: someone had to go first.

“Everyone up!” Her voice was not that of a fearless hero ready to charge into battle. It was high and shrill—the perfect octave to be heard over the thunder, the knocking, and the evil hissing. It cut through the storm, and when she cried, “Follow me!” her people followed, some even letting out their own versions of war cries.

Emily’s charge was not an epic one that carried her through the Corsairs and left her face to face with the Black Captain.

No, her charge went in fits and starts. She sent a platoon of Corsairs running; then made it thirty yards only to encounter another group which had been trying to flank Paul Daniels company. The big man had taken a bullet in the side and promptly sat down, thinking he had done his part. Emily came rushing up, spraying bullets like a hose and sending the flanking platoon flying before her.

“Get up Mr. Daniels!” she screamed as she dropped one magazine and fed a second into the weapon. “No one as big as you is allowed to be a coward.”

“I’m not a coward! I was shot and it hurts.” In reply, she ran up to him and kicked him in the side. “Hey!” he cried. “Stop that.”

She kicked at him again, missing this time as he swatted her leg away. She yelled, “It’s only a scratch, Mr. Daniels. Get up or I’ll kick you again. And I won’t stop. Do you hear me?”

“I’m going to tell your mom when we get back,” he snapped, peevishly. “See if I don’t.”

“Go ahead, see if I care. Just get up and follow me. Come on everyone!” Everyone now consisted of eighteen men and women who went forward in a huddled mass. They would’ve been an easy target if they had come on an enemy. Luckily for them they found another group of Islanders who joined in. They followed Emily as she went on and found a row of dead Corsairs, their innards splashed about. After that they found more bodies, some of whom were Corsairs, some Islanders, and some were unidentifiable.

Then it seemed as if they marched smack dab into the middle of a huge fire fight being waged by shadow-people. Who was the enemy and who wasn’t? No one could tell. Bullets were coming at them from every direction.

Emily felt that they were in something of a temporary “zone” and if they could push straight on through things would get better. It was a naive thought brought on by a lack of understanding of the tactical situation. The Black Captain had anticipated the attack and had set up a secondary line of defense that was stronger than the first.

Although it seemed impossible that the soft, indulgent weaklings of Bainbridge could break either line, he had been stung too often not to take precautions. A third line had been prepared and two quick reaction teams formed for support or to attack the flanks of any force that could manage to get to the third line. Gunner’s company had swatted aside the first line and then had smashed through the second. Emily had managed to drag the better part of three companies square into the fight against the third line just as the Corsair quick reaction teams had arrived on either flank.

It was mayhem. There were bodies strewn about everywhere. She kept tripping over them and sliding in oozing pools of blood.

“Keep going!” she screamed, shooting at anyone dressed in black. She had no idea if she hit anything and she didn’t stop to find out. Her father was somewhere up ahead and he needed her.

Somehow she and about thirty others made it straight through the middle of the battle to where Corsairs and Islanders were slogging it out, trading shots at insanely close distances. In at least one instance, enemies were using the same tree to hide behind and shooting with their arms crooked around the trunk.

She was amazed that these were the same people who had been as docile as whipped dogs not long before. What was more amazing was how close they were to winning. The rocket launcher was right there, not more than a hundred yards away. Not much further beyond it sat half the Corsair fleet tied up alongside a series of rickety old docks. Victory was so close she could taste it.

There was only one thing keeping them from smashing through once and for all. “Where’s my dad?” she yelled to the closest Islander.

It was Matthew McElderry. He was missing an ear and his entire side was splashed with blood. His eyes were spinning and his jaw hung open so wide that his back teeth were showing. He didn’t look like he knew where he was. He turned his remaining ear toward Emily and said, “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear…lots.”

“Where’s my dad?” she screamed into his face.

“He’s dead,” he answered.

Stunned, she sat back. Her mind was reeling. She knew it was going to happen. Even if he didn’t get shot, she knew that his wounds…

“He’s been dead for ten years,” Matthew was saying. “I was there when your mom brought you to the island. She was like glass because she had just lost…”

Emily realized his mistake. “No, where’s Gunner?”

He pointed off at a diagonal. Emily was already scrambling off the ground. People were firing at her. She knew it on an unconscious level and reacted on that same level. Without thinking, she dropped into a crouch and crabbed as fast as she could from tree to tree. Once she and a Corsair surprised each other, coming face to face through a stand of high weeds. He reacted faster than she did and had his gun up in a blink. A quarter-second later he was shot in the back of the head by another Corsair who had jerked a shot off at Emily and missed low. She dodged to the side, rolled, and went on.

Then she was in a strange bubble of calm where the air was still and the trees didn’t knock and the explosions were distant. In it the air was lit by the golden light of dawn infusing the sky. It seemed peaceful, except for the bodies that is. They were strewn across the forest floor like garbage. They warned her that not everything was right.

She dropped just as something snapped past her left ear.

“Sniper!” she cried, rolling to the right and crawling through the grass. There were people with her still; people who had been borne along in her wake, carried by her spirit.

One of these was Talica Sears, a woman who at one time had both babysat Emily and guarded her mother while she was in prison. She had been running in a daze, firing at everything. Faith had carried her this far and no further. A heavy slug smashed into her chest and stopped her heart. She fell back and died with the sunrise in her dark eyes.

Eleven others fled into the brush as Emily had. One caught sight of the shooter was. “That willow to the left,” he yelled right before his head rocked back, a hole between his eyes. He was dead where he stood, his arm outstretched and his finger pointed. He stood that way long enough for seven guns to track to the exact position of his murderer and avenge him.

When he crumpled and the sniper fell, Emily was up again, pulled along by a desperate need to find her father. It wasn’t hard. She followed the bodies.

He had been the tip of the spear that had shorn through the three defensive lines and now Emily was only a long stone’s throw away from the launcher. The price for this chance had been high. She had passed at least a hundred Islanders who would never see the new sun as it cracked the sky over the eastern mountains. Even more were bleeding, pierced by evil hunks of burning lead.

Their pain faded into the background of her consciousness. In front of her was a man who had been broken before she ever met him. Broken and long maimed. Now, he was truly dying. She saw this in a glance. He was a bloody, gory mess and quite beyond her meager medical talents. There would be no chance to save him. She knew that in her heart, but she would still try.

“Dad!” she cried, rushing to him, her wet eyes going from one gaping wound in his flesh to the next. “It’s gonna be okay. Do you hear me? Hey! Look at me. We’re going to bind you up good and tight. And, and, and we’ll get some more blood…”

His huge hand clamped down on her wrist with more strength than she could have guessed possible. “Em-il-lee,” he said in a wet gurgling gasp. The word came out slow and ugly, sounding as if it had come from beyond the grave. She leaned in close so he wouldn’t have to fight so hard to be heard. He had enough breath in his lungs to whisper, “Keep going.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I won’t. Someone else can do it.”

“You’re as stub…” He was wracked by a wet cough and something obscene dribbled down his chin. “You’re as stubborn as your mom.”

“Yeah well, I need you to be even more stubborn, okay? Hold on. I can help you.” In the gathering light, she decided that a hole high up on his stunted left arm was his most urgent wound. It was pulsing a red fountain. She shook off his hand, and with nimble fingers she snatched another of her homemade bandages from her pocket and crushed it down on the wound before wrapping it even tighter than she dared. She would worry about the circulation to the arm at another time.

As she worked, he whispered a fractured sentence, “The rocket. Kill it. Now. Please. Hurry.”

He was asking too much. She was only eleven. She was a bone-tired, frightened little girl who had only come as far as she had because of a new love that had sprung up aggressively inside her. When she looked at Gunner, she no longer saw a gruesome creature, she saw Captain James Grey. She saw a hero; a man who had been cruelly maimed but who had never for a second stopped defending those he loved.

For a decade the world had turned its back to him and she wasn’t going to do the same in what could be his last few minutes. Someone else would have to lead.

She took a quick look around and saw only a handful of fighters had made it through. Surprisingly Wayne French and Debbie Meredith were among them. They were crouched down behind a tree a few feet away, gulping down air.

“Mr. French!” Emily yelled, making him jump. “Go, quick! Go to the launcher and the rockets and…and set it on fire or something.” She didn’t know much about rockets, she just knew that fire killed just about everything.

“I don’t think I can.” He was looking down at himself and seeing the blood for the first time. “My leg.” He tried to move it, but it wouldn’t answer. This was very strange since he’d been shot low down in the belly. He was also worried about how he was going to pee. His bladder had been near to bursting when the battle had started and now the pressure was gone. Had it popped?

The thought was too much and he vomited all over himself. “Sorry,” he whispered.

“That’s okay, Mr. French. What about you, Miss Meredith? Can you lead? The rockets are just right there.”

She straightened her neck just high enough to see the rockets and the Corsair ships before shrinking back down. “I can’t. Wayne needs me.” She knew nothing about first aid. It was a sad excuse that Emily didn’t know how to reply to. There was no logic to it.

“What about you?” she asked another man who was nearby. In the early morning light, his face was only a featureless glow. He shook his head, while the man next to him dropped down so low that he disappeared. “Any of you?” she demanded. “It’s right there.” As she pointed, the launcher began to throw off silver shards of light as the sun hit it.

Yes, the launcher was very close. But so were the Corsairs. They were already reforming. The Black Captain was screaming them back into position and soon they would be ready to attack. And then there was the rest of the Corsair fleet. Their sails were filling and water was foaming white along their keels as they charged towards the defenseless launcher. Whoever went out there wouldn’t be coming back.

“It has to be you,” her father whispered.

The child in Emily pictured walking out of the forest, gun in hand, while the adults cringed behind her. The child in her was frightened. The daughter in her was not. But she was conflicted. She had just found her father and if she left him then, he would certainly die. She would come back to a corpse. After all the years of dreaming about him, he had become something of a God-hero in her mind. In reality, he was even greater than she had imagined and she didn’t think she could leave him.

“No. My place is with you, Dad. Um, can I call you that now?”

He had been summoning the energy to order her to advance, but now deflated. “Yes. I guess so.” Sometime during the battle, his mask had been torn away and when he smiled it was hideous and ghastly and wonderful. “I love you, Emily. I’m so sorry that I’m…”

She put a finger to what was left of his lips. “I love you too, Dad.”

Thirty seconds later, twenty Corsairs broke from cover and ran for the launcher. Half were killed. The other half dropped down and took up defensive positions. They would make any attempt to attack impossible. The battle had been lost.

Chapter 32

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay

The battle on the dock, although brief, had been so intensely violent that it had left both the winners and losers stunned.

The few Corsairs left alive crept up out of the holds of their ships as if they were just emerging from fallout shelters ten years after a nuclear war. Mike and the Guardians were not much better off, and in their dazed confusion, they let one boat sink and another catch fire.

Fire onboard a ship, even one moored at a dock, was enough to get anyone moving, and the Corsairs streaming down from the Golden Gate Bridge got them rushing about with proper urgency. The fire was put out and the wounded were rushed aboard the ships that were still afloat.

Some of the ships were so riddled by bullets that the Guardians had to bail furiously just to keep them afloat. On one ship, two men stripped to the waist, tied ropes around their bellies and swam under the moving ship to come at the holes from the proper angle. This was dangerous enough in cold choppy waters when a boat was at a standstill. Doing it while they were underway took fantastic courage. If they slid out of their makeshift harnesses, they’d be left behind, and if they happened to come across a zombie, they’d have no chance at all.

With the ships weighted down by sea water and their sails in tatters, it was a dreadfully slow getaway.

The one ship that could have gotten clean away was the Harbinger. The terrible gash she had taken when running into the dock was now little more than an eyesore. When she had been carting a hundred soldiers about, the wound had been terrifying to the Guardians trapped below deck, waiting their turn to get out. The water had been coming in as if shot from a high-pressure hose. Once the men had disembarked, the ship had popped right up and the gash was now three feet above the waterline.

She had gone from being a pig of a boat to a quick sailor with plenty of potential. Mike piled on the canvas and wanted to fly home to Alcatraz—but he couldn’t leave his newly won fleet.

He set every sail he could and she blossomed like a black rose. He then wasted her potential by holding steady at the rear of the formation, providing what cover he could. A thin bit of polyester and an inch of fiberglass was only a tiny bit better than no cover at all.

While they edged away, Mike bustled about, setting two men to watch over the prisoners, two more to check for holes, and three to start repairing the gash. This left only Ren Finnemore and another man to sail the ship.

When a series of shots rang out from the shore, only she flinched. Although no one said anything, she glared at anyone who looked in her direction, and wouldn’t speak until more bullets kicked up little fountains of white foam next to the boat. She stood rock steady this time.

“Sir? You’re bleeding on my deck,” she said to Mike. “If you could do that somewhere else, that would be great.”

He had been hoping the problem would go away on its own. “Can you take a look at it?”

“I guess. I’m not really an expert you know.” She helped him out of his coat and then squinted in at his wounded arm. “Hmmmm,” she said.

“What? What’s ‘hmmmm’ supposed to mean?” His arm had been hurting for some time and he was a little worried. It came out in his over-casual tone.

She squeezed and prodded before answering. “I think it missed the bone, so you have that going for you. But it’s a nasty wound. Lots of muscle damage. I bet Denise will pack it for you when we get in.”

“Denise? We’re not going to Angel Island, we’re going to Alcatraz.”

Ren snuck a quick look up at Mike. “To see the Queen I suppose? What’s she like? Is she like the last one?”

He wanted to answer that they were as different as night and day, except that wasn’t entirely true. “In some ways she is. They both have a certain something that normal people don’t have. I don’t know the right word for it, she just carries herself bigger or like…ow!”

She had slipped a field dressing around his arm and had pulled it painfully tight. “Don’t be a baby,” she chided, tying it like she thought it was going to try to get away if she didn’t. “Are you saying she has a greater presence? If she’s like the last queen, I’d believe it. I saw her once. After she tore down our walls and sent those zombies against us. The next morning she walked down the street as if she owned the place. It was like she was daring someone to try something, and knew with a hundred percent certainty that no one would.”

A bullet gouged a finger-length of wood out of the deck next to Mike’s foot. He pretended not to notice. “Jillybean is like that in real life. She acts like she’s better than everyone else and in many ways she is. Jenn’s not like that at all. She’s great but she doesn’t see it. She’s kind and beautiful and…”

“And you love her.” Although it was still too dark to see him blush, she could feel it. She laughed at him and not just because she knew how embarrassed he was—she was also giddy with relief. The shooting had finally stopped and now the terrible stress of battle was draining out of her. “It’s okay. We all know it. I heard the story about the beautiful queen and her dashing captain from Faith Checkamian so I know it’s true. She claims there’s no rule in the Bible about gossiping, so she’s it’s number one practitioner.”

“Faith got some things wrong. I’m not dashing or anything like that. I’m just me. Jenn though, she’s a real queen.” First and foremost, she was his queen and he couldn’t stand being away from her for longer than necessary. Now that the shooting was over, he ordered Ren to take a proper course for Alcatraz. She raced to the head of the fleet, while he set the bow and stern kettles alight. Under their glow, he saw the blood and the bullet holes.

“Let’s get all this cleaned up,” he told her. It felt bizarre to have the reputation for being dashing, and yet he wasn’t going to lose it on account of slovenliness.

As it frequently did, the wind died to a whisper just before dawn and their mad dash home became a stately procession. It gave both Mike and Jenn plenty of time to prepare.

She had watched him through her telescope. Even before dawn broke across the bay, she had known he was alive and leading the ships back. Maybe it was the way he set his sails or the precise way he cut across the wind, or maybe it was just desperate hope on her part, but either way, she knew it. Yet she hadn’t budged from her scope until she saw his golden hair streaming back in the first rays of the sun.

The moment she did, she hurried to her quarters. Well, she hurried as fast as a queen was allowed to hurry, which wasn’t nearly fast enough in her opinion. Once behind closed doors, she splashed cold water on her face and brushed out the wind-blown tangles from her long hair. She applied the lightest amount of blush, decided she didn’t need anything more, and then headed down to the dock with Shaina Hale marching along next to her.

Sitting squarely in the palm of the lumpy-headed girl’s hand was a muffin. In her anxiety, Shaina had forgotten about it. “Are those Corsair boats? Are we being invaded? Everyone says Captain Mike is coming back, but those are Corsair boats, I know it.”

“They were Corsair boats. Mike took them from the Corsairs. That was the plan, remember?”

“Yeah, ‘cept those are black boats, and our ships are white. And they don’t have none of your flags.”

Jenn patted the girl’s bony shoulder. “Trust me, those are the Queen’s ships. Now eat your muffin.” Shaina liked it when things were labeled as “The Queen’s.” It made her feel safe.

A lane was made for the two of them and they arrived just as Mike eased the Harbinger up to the dock. He tried to concentrate on the mooring of his ship, while she did her best not to grow impatient. She had been hoping that he would bound over the rail and present himself with a quick knee and a long kiss. He wanted this as well, however there were wounded among the men who had to be helped off the ship.

Most were only nicked up like Mike. Six were critically wounded and needed immediate care. Seeing them killed part of Jenn’s joy. There were too many for Denise Woodruff to handle on her own. The Queen’s Revenge had been sent for her hours before, and now an operating room of sorts had been set up in the prison.

Jenn only had time to give Mike a quick kiss. “I knew you would make it,” she whispered, wishing she could cling to him and give up this crazy “queen” business. “I saw…” she started to say when a sudden burst of gunfire from the bridge cut her off. Three or four guns chattered away for just shy of a minute before falling silent.

“That was one of mine,” Mike said, feeling a deeper pain than his throbbing arm. One of the people who had tried to defend the bridge must have been sitting under it for all these hours. He or she had probably been hiding, slowly freezing to death, hoping and praying not to be seen when the sun came up.

Jenn felt the same pain as Mike. Another person who had pledged their life for her had fulfilled that oath to the highest degree.

The Queen and her captain stared into each other’s eyes, and neither felt particularly beautiful or dashing. They both felt tired from the long night and anxious over what the day was promising to bring. “I have work to do,” she told him. “Rest while you can.” She went up on tip-toe to kiss him a last time before following the last of the stretcher bearers up to the prison.

Outside the door to the hospital, there were a number of little fires going. Three had water in pots over them. Two were boiling and the third was merely scalding. Denise was already using the last to wash her hands. They were as red as her face was white.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she confided in Jenn. “Two were chest wounds and another a belly wound. Did you see? I’ve never had a patient with a chest wound live. Never. And a belly?” She shuddered. “Can you take them? I’ll try that neck. That’s more my speed.”

“We’ll tackle them together,” Jenn told her with far more confidence than she felt. “We’ll do our best. It’s all we can do.”

Denise jumped at the chance of shared responsibility, just as Mike would have if he could.

There were no actual captains among the Guardians. There were sailors certainly and there were pilots, and each of them could trim a sail in the middle of the blackest storm. But as for actual fighting sea captains, there were none. The Guardians had always looked on their boats as a combination of fishing vessel and military transport. Fighting them ship to ship was not something that had ever crossed their minds, mainly because it seemed insane. As one of their sailors made abundantly clear: “These are not warships. They’re not even made of wood. They’re sailboats. Back before, they were toys for the rich and famous.”

“They’re warships if we use them to fight with,” Mike answered. “And we don’t have any choice but to do that.” He sighed, stretched and grimaced, forgetting that any movement sent a bolt of pain down his arm. There was no rest for Mike. His fleet—and he counted every ship in the bay as his—had grown to thirty vessels.

The Guardian ships were in perfect order. The Corsair ships were ridiculous in every way. Some had sails that were so weatherworn that they could practically be seen through. Others had lines and ropes on the verge of disintegrating. And all had barnacles and seaweed hanging like great green beards from their hulls.

Mike set teams working on each boat. Sails were stitched or replaced, lines were reworked, holes were filled, and the ships careened so their bottoms could be scraped. Nothing could be done about the smell that shimmered from the holds.

While the men and women worked, Mike helped where he could. With his one arm he was usually in the way, and was told politely that he should go get it checked. Compared to some of the wounds he’d seen, it was nothing but a scratch and was embarrassed at the idea of trying to push to the head of the line. Instead, he perched himself on a terrace overlooking the bay. It was a place of refuge that he had come to for the past ten years.

Now he looked out over the water and saw it in a different light. A battle was coming and, win or lose, it was going to be decisive. Whoever won control of the water would control the land.

He studied the water, picking out the landmarks, the shoals, the areas where the current was weak and where it could suck a boat right onto the rocks. He noted where the wind came howling off the southern slope of Angel Island and where it died not a hundred yards to the east. He tried to picture a battle being fought on the bay, but could not. He was too tired and even as he rolled ideas around in his head, he fell asleep.

Hours later, a great thrummmm echoed across the water, waking him. “Huh?” he asked, his eyes blurry and his head filled with cotton. It took him a few seconds to realize that the Corsairs were finally daring the bridge. Seeing the ships streaming in woke him quickly and in seconds he had run to the top of the prison where he found Deaf Mick bent over the Queen’s telescope.

“They’re being extra cautious,” the man muttered. “Not that I blame them after the beatings we’ve given them.”

We? Mike couldn’t remember Mick being a part of any fight. “May I?” he asked. Mick stepped aside and Mike settled in behind the scope. Ten ships led the way, dashing forward under full sails. They expected a trap and Mike wished with all his heart that he had been in the position to spring one.

“Will they come right for us, do you suppose?” It wasn’t Deaf Mick, who had melted into the crowd. In his place stood Bishop Wojdan, wearing a blue parka over his black vestments. With his belly looking even larger beneath the coat, he looked like a pregnant bald man. At his side was Commander Walker. He was in command of the land forces, meaning his skills would be called on when it was too late to win.

Mike answered with a quick, “No.” He was no seer and he didn’t need to be one to see something so obvious. “They won’t risk it, not after so many losses. They’ll probably send out a few of their smallest ships to scout things out. When they know it’s safe, they’ll come all at once in overwhelming force.” And there’ll be no way to stop them, he didn’t add.

The Bishop seemed to read his mind. “And we’ll be destroyed.” He went up on his toes, glancing at his commander as he did.

“We could keep our ships in close to the island,” Walker suggested. “The added fire power would tip the scales in our favor.”

Mike pictured this and saw the glaring error. “Only at first. If we don’t challenge them right away, they’ll attack Angel Island, then Treasure Island, then the Floating Fortress. They must know our weakness. They know we can’t defend everything at once. If we try, we’ll get destroyed piecemeal. We can only really defend Alcatraz.”

“But if we do? If we put all our eggs in one basket?” Walker drew in a long breath and then let it out without going on. They all knew the answer: they’d be cornered and faced with slow starvation. There was no good option left to them.

“They’ll gather their strength today and then they’ll come tonight,” Mike said. “Our only hope is that they’ll make a mistake. We have to be ready to jump on them when they do.”

The Corsairs did not make any mistakes. Over the next few hours, they brought in their entire fleet and massed out in the middle of the bay. Seeing them there sent an electric charge throughout the island. From the Queen, with blood up to her elbows, to the smallest boy playing hide and seek in the black bowels of the prison, everyone felt the same heavy dread come over them. It was the dread of waiting helplessly as their doom slowly approached.

At midday, five ships broke off from the main fleet and fanned out, darting between the wide waterways between the islands.

For the most part, they kept to the very middle of the channel, making sure that any shot was taken from an extreme distance. The Queen’s men looked to Mike for an order to shoot, which he refused to grant. It would be a waste of ammo.

The five ships then came together south of Alcatraz where the bay opened up wide. With the wind out of the northeast, they were sitting ducks. Mike could take his entire fleet and swoop down on them. Outgunned, their only chance would be to flee further south where, eventually, they would run out of room to run. As enticing as it was to nibble the Corsairs down bit by bit, Mike held back.

“What are we waiting for?” one of the sailors demanded loudly. They were all ready to kick off from the dock. “It’s not going to get any easier than this.”

“That’s because it’s a trap,” Mike answered without taking his eyes from the binoculars he held one-handed. He saw how the ships lingered just out of range of their guns, how they were poised, ready to cut southeast, leading any ship that came after them straight downwind. To get back to the safety of the island, they would have to beat back with that same wind right in their teeth.

Then they would be the sitting ducks.

He refused to come out and after a few minutes, the five labored back to their main fleet. The same trick was tried an hour later, this time by twelve ships. They came by twos, and this time they strayed even closer, testing the defenses of the various islands.

One ship got too close and was so riddled with bullets that it lost most of its mainsail. It flapped like an old shower curtain as it pulled slowly away. The other eleven ships raced over and huddled about it, protecting it as its crew ran about on deck in confusion. The repairs took so long that Commander Walker came back down to the docks. “His Excellency would like to know if you ever plan on using your navy? We have them almost three-to one.”

Before answering, Mike glanced at the windsock at the end of the dock; it pointed southeast and didn’t waiver. “It’s a trap. They want us to commit. Once we do, they’ll turn and fight while the rest of their fleet comes up from behind. Trust me, this is all for show. They’ll have a new sail up in ten minutes.”

It took fifteen, but only because they kept making the same glaring errors. They were practically begging Mike to attack.

He barked his men back to work and watched the windsock more than he did the Corsairs. If the wind slackened he would pounce, knowing how to play the tide and currents better than his opponents. But the wind blew on and on.

The Corsairs eventually gave up the ruse and went back to exploring the bay. By three o’clock, the repairs had been completed on the new ships. Their crews were chosen and their holds stocked for battle. Then they too were forced to wait as their young commander did nothing but sit and watch.

“Mike?” It was Shaina Hale, looking like a stork as she picked her way carefully down the slope. “I mean Captain Mike? The Queen would like to see you.”

He expected to find her being harangued by Commander Walker, and he was indeed with her in a nearly empty operating room. There were no patients, only the commander, Bishop Wojdan and a tired-looking Denise Woodruff, were with the Queen. “Where is everyone?” he asked. “I thought you’d be going at it all night.”

“And look weak in front of their commander?” Jenn asked, with a raised eyebrow. “You’re their leader and they follow your example. Let’s have a look at that arm.”

He flexed the arm. “This? It’s nothing.”

“Is that so?”

He was thinking up a nonchalant answer when she punched him in the shoulder. The pain made him gag and his arm dropped to hang limply. He couldn’t resist as Jenn and Denise pulled his coat off and began cleaning out his wound. The Bishop watched, going up and down on the balls of his feet.

“They’ll attack tonight? Where?”

“Angel Island,” Mike answered at once. The Corsairs had been ferrying men to the fleet all afternoon. They were stripping men from their defensive positions on the bridge to prepare for the attack.

“And to think we just abandoned it.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Mike said through gritted teeth.

Commander Walker smirked at the answer; it was the same one he would have given. “So, when do we fight?”

“That depends on the wind. Until it changes, we can only react to what they do. They’ll go for Angel Island first. Once they unload their men, their ships will be free to go after their secondary target: the Floating Fortress. If they can sink it, then we’ll be completely divided.”

“And will they be able to sink it?” Jenn asked.

Mike tried to shrug. “Ow, jeeze. Possibly. Maybe. One way or the other, they’ll pay a hefty price for even trying.” He quickly outlined a simple plan that would take advantage of the Corsair’s desire to fight at night.

Walker grinned, liking the idea. The Bishop wondered if it was right to pray for half the Corsair fleet to be destroyed. And Jenn wanted very badly to forbid Mike from leading the defense.

It tore her heart to shreds every time he left the safety of the island. She couldn’t, however. It would undermine him both as a leader and as a man. Not only was the Fortress a naval asset and thus fell under his command, he was also the best man to defend it.

He saw the worry in her eyes. “Don’t worry. It’s a fortress. It’s bullet proof. I’ll be perfectly safe.”

But was it torpedo proof? She didn’t think so.

Chapter 33

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay

The wind decided to stay neutral and blew steadily from the northwest even through what was an amazingly long sunset. Even the twilight lingered to the point that the Guardians actually prayed for the night to come.

Once it did, the Queen turned to Mike, sucked in a long breath and sighed out reluctantly, “You can begin.”

During the long twilight, the Corsairs had hauled their wind and set sail for Angel Island. It really hadn’t been a secret. While they were occupied, Mike was going to put his plan into effect—his secret plan. No one outside Jenn’s office knew the details.

The two, Captain and Queen, stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, both wishing to say more, wishing they could kiss one last time. Mike would have settled for a hug, but that was out of the question. She would’ve felt the thrum of his muscles. He was somewhere between nervous and scared. The plan he had concocted was far from foolproof and the risk was very high.

“Your Highness,” he said, with a dip of his head.

“My…Captain,” Jenn answered, faltering. A crow had taken that moment to let out a harsh caw in the darkness. Hearing a crow at night was as bad an omen as there ever was. Her smile went wooden. It’s not for Mike, she told herself. He always lives. He lives every time no matter what the signs say. It was just a bird.

To be on the safe side, she turned to the Bishop. “Could you bless them or something? You know, to keep them safe.”

Wojdan was neither blind nor deaf. He had heard the crow and had seen the Queen’s response. He didn’t like the idea of competing: faith versus the malleable “supernatural” but in this case he made an exception. “Lord heavenly Father, please bless this man and his men. Guide them and protect them body and soul so that they may deliver us from our enemies. Amen.”

“Amen,” Jenn said, looking relieved.

“Amen,” agreed Mike. Having God on his side couldn’t hurt, though he would’ve rather had Jillybean there instead. God was love, while she embodied destruction.

When Mike left Jenn’s office, he shrugged out of the sling she had demanded he wear and marched down to the dock with Commander Walker at his side.

“Are you sure it won’t be Treasure Island?” Walker asked. As much as Mike loved the waterborne side of warfare, Walker hated it. Nothing was straight forward. Everything depended on the wind, and even then half the time they were tacking away from their enemy instead of going right at them. He had hoped to defend Treasure Island. It was wide and flat, good for maneuver. In his mind, a good place to lure the enemy in and destroy them while they were still off-loading from their boats.

“It’ll be the Fortress first. Maybe tomorrow they’ll go for Treasure Island.” Mike wondered about that. If he was the Corsair captain, he’d wait for the Queen to make a mistake before committing any more land forces. Anything could happen while shuttling men back and forth or during supply runs. A treacherous wind could separate the small fleet, leaving it completely vulnerable. A storm could blow it down to the end of the bay. A winter fog could spring up, leaving the ships blind and isolated.

“You can wait here if you wish,” Mike told him. “Trust me, we’ll still have plenty of enemies when morning comes.”

Walker blew out, angrily. “No, I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines. The men need to know their commander is willing to risk his skin as well as theirs. Remember that. Men don’t follow a man who keeps them safe. They follow a man who knows how to win. We are going to win, aren’t we?”

“We won’t win the war tonight, but I’m hoping to sting them again. Ah, look at this. Hopefully, they haven’t been out here too long.” In the street in front of the crowded docks was a formation of men standing at attention, their shining spears pointed at the stars above. “They’re going to need to leave the spears behind. They’ll just get in the way out on the Fortress.”

When all hundred spears were set aside, the men clambered over the rail of the last two ships on the dock. They had both been Corsair ships and neither was very large. To make things more crowded for the poor soldiers, the decks and holds of the ships were piled with huge coils of rope thick as a man’s arm. All told, there was sixteen-hundred feet, enough to reach from Alcatraz to the Floating Fortress.

Once the men were crammed down below deck, and the great web of torpedo netting opened up, the two ships sailed slowly out onto the bay. The moment they did, a green light began to blink on the highest point of the Fortress. It could be seen across the bay. The Fortress was no longer just a black shadow on the water. Its position could be pinpointed exactly.

Mike wanted, no, he needed the Corsairs to come right at them.

With teams spilling the rope over the side, one length at a time, it took an hour to cover the distance and during that time, the Corsair army was making an unopposed landing on Angel Island. Hundreds of black-garbed men struggled ashore and then hurried to secure a toehold against an enemy that wasn’t there.

The ships were quickly off-loaded and once they were, their kettle fires were extinguished one by one. Then a horn blatted, brassy and loud. It was taken up by dozens more. There was nothing musical about the sound. It was an angry noise—the Corsairs were coming.

“We have a trumpet on board,” one of the Guardians remarked. “Should we blow it?”

The soldier was punched in the arm by Ren Finnemore. Once again, she had managed to find her way onboard Mike’s ship. “And give away our position? Don’t be stupid, Morty.” The trumpet had already been found and had been passed up from the galley; it was quickly set aside again.

“Full sail?” Ren asked Mike.

They were a hundred yards out and had one more link to go. If they screwed up the last connection and lost the rope, Mike’s plan would be ruined. It was better to make sure. “No, we have time, but you can tell ’16 to go on.” The 316 had made the last connection and her deck was finally clear. She shot forward to unload her men.

Seven minutes later, the Floating Fortress loomed up out of the dark. Its appearance was far less impressive than its name. It was nothing more than a hundred-foot long barge on which twenty or so steel cargo containers were arranged like a low pyramid. The entire structure was soot-black from a fire attack leveled against it by the Corsairs during the last battle of the bay. The attack had done little besides scorch the paint.

Although the men were eager to disembark, Mike cried for the last of the ropes to be passed over first. Once it was tied off, the green light that had been shining atop the highest container was changed to red. Seconds later, the rope was pulled tight.

“Slip the anchor!” Mike called out in a hushed voice. “Boats away. Wish us luck, Ren.”

Next to Mike, Commander Walker stared around dubiously. “Is it working? I would have thought we would have felt something.”

“It should be working,” Mike answered. “It’ll just take a little time to notice. It is a big boat.” It was indeed big. Including the steel cargo containers, the weight of the Fortress was 260 tons or just over half a million pounds. Back on Alcatraz, every available person was heaving on their end of the rope.

While they did, Mike’s Guardians were trying their best to add another layer of netting. They weren’t after fish with the nets, they were hoping to catch torpedoes. For the last week, Mike had teams running all over the city collecting the rope that was being used to haul them along, foot by foot, and also fishing nets, poles and foam buoys.

Now all they had to do was put together a second layer of netting in the dark on a gently rolling bay. It wasn’t easy, not even close. It could have been done during the day in a third of the time, however Mike had wanted to lure the Corsairs in with an apparently weak defense.

Unfortunately, the first thing the new string of nets caught was a zombie. It was a great aquatic leviathan that had grown immense on a diet of seaweed and seal pups. It came up out of the darkness and tried to catch a Knight by the name of Billy Barfield by the arm as he leaned far out away from the barge with a long pole in hand.

Billy was too fast and pulled back, however the netting got caught up in his armored forearm and before he knew it, he and another man were pulled overboard. Walker and two others jumped in to try to rescue them and were nearly pulled in as well. The beast was as strong as ten men and anyone on the netting was swept over the side. There were shouts and coarse bellowing. The stout wooden poles snapped like twigs.

Their entire defense was in danger of being destroyed when Mike raced up. “Get some light! Cut away the netting! Cut it!” he yelled. It was mayhem. Men were running into each other trying to find a lantern. Others were cutting perfectly fine nets and ropes that didn’t go anywhere near the beast. Still more were playing tug of war with Billy, who was being pulled in half.

There was a scream and a roar that could be heard across the waters. A sudden, near-blinding light showed Billy being torn limb from limb as the other soldier who’d been caught up in the net was trying to stab the thing in the face with a shard of wood. Mike spun his rifle from his back and fired at the creature. Eight other soldiers joined in. Twenty seconds was all it took to turn the zombie into a featureless horror. It was no more than a grey ooze in a black soup.

It was only when the echoes of the guns died away that they realized that the other soldier was still screaming. Physically he was unhurt, mentally he had become unwound. His eyes were great circles of unblinking whiteness and his mouth was stretched open in a silent scream.

His friends tried to quiet him as they cut him loose. He wouldn’t shut up. Not that it mattered. The light from the lantern was equal to a thousand screams. “Finish in the dark,” Mike ordered. “And everyone else, get back to your battle stations.”

When the light was turned off and the darkness rushed in to take its place, they saw a blinking light low on the water a few hundred yards away. Someone yelled, “Torpedo!” A dozen rifles were pointed at the light.

Even Mike was fooled for a few seconds before he realized it was one of their own buoys that he had moved out of its original position a few days before. “Don’t shoot. It’s just a buoy. Get back to your stations.” This was easier said than done. Even though the Guardians were disciplined men, the barge was unfamiliar and in the dark one blackened side looked like the rest.

By the time Mike pushed the last of the soldiers into position, a soft cry went up on the east side of the barge: dark shapes were passing in front of the buoy.

“Here they come,” Walker called out from the east wall.

“Too soon, damn it,” Mike muttered. The nets on the north side were still in complete disarray. “Just shove it all out as far as possible,” he told them. As he handed over one of the poles, he caught a whiff of a familiar acrid smell. “Smoke,” he whispered. The Corsairs were using the smoke bombs Jillybean had made before leaving ages ago.

Where there was smoke, there was fire. “Everyone get down! We have incoming.” The smoke rolled over the barge from the north and in a blink, visibility was down to inches.

“Are they going to try to board us?” someone asked. “No one can use torpedoes in the dark, can they?”

“They can if they have thermal scopes,” Mike told them.

This silenced the soldiers and in the quiet that followed, a gurgling sound could be heard. It was the first of the torpedoes running at them, powered by compressed air from scuba tanks. It came in from the east and when it struck the nets, its gurgling went into high gear, but only for a second, then it exploded with a flash and a tremendous thundering boom.

Shrapnel sparked off the containers and the side of the barge as water rained down on the cringing soldiers. The echo from the explosion masked the sound of the next two torpedoes. One was set off prematurely and knocked the second off at an angle. It still did damage to the netting and a piece of its tank cut a groove in the scalp of one of the Guardians who had poked his head up at the wrong time.

After that the torpedoes came in waves, lighting up the smoke like thunderbolts. Mike had no idea how long his netting was going to last. He waited until the third wave had exploded before leaping up and crying, “More nets on the north and east!”

Once again the smoke played havoc. Some of the soldiers were turned around and flung their nets sideways, covering other soldiers, some threw their netting on top of other netting that hadn’t been touched. Others were hit with a barrage of metal from a delayed blast.

Even though the netting was imperfectly placed, it stopped the next twelve or so torpedoes from reaching the edge of the barge. With each explosion the torpedoes got closer and closer, sending up great fountains of water and sending shockwaves running through the deck. Eventually one got through and detonated against the side of the barge with a tremendous DOOOOM! Those who were closest felt a stinging shock run up through the metal. They flinched back, hesitating, afraid that the barge would sink beneath them in a matter of seconds.

“More nets!” Mike bellowed as he felt his way forward through the smoke. “North side! More…” A second torpedo exploded, jarring him off his feet. Pain raced up his injured arm but he shrugged it off and climbed to his feet. “More nets!”

“That’s all we…” DOOOOM! A third blast. “That’s all we have,” a soldier with a high, strangled voice answered.

“No. We had at least twenty.” Mike scrambled around on top of the container and discovered the soldier was right. “Okay, there are more on the south side.”

One of the guardians ran to get them and promptly fell off the edge of the container and thudded onto the deck below. “Aw, jeeze! Someone find out if he’s okay and someone else get those…”

Ting! Ting! Ting! Bullets began to whine and sing off the metal all around them. Mike threw himself down and nearly tumbled off the edge of the container himself. Others started shooting back, uselessly punching holes in the smoke. One man began demanding “Are they close! Where are they? Which way?”

No one knew.

Mike yelled for the men to stop firing and for a few seconds, there was an eerie silence. Then seven explosions went off on the northeast side of the barge. They were accompanied by a shout of pain. The next wave struck the corner and the eastern edge. Mike began think his plan wasn’t going to work. Keeping low so he wouldn’t be thrown overboard, he hurried to the west side of the barge where he found the rope was as taut as ever.

They were still being pulled along and even as he watched, someone yelled and pointed. “A fire!”

It was a little raft with a barrel lashed to it. The barrel emitted great torrents of black smoke. The soldiers closest to it used poles to tip it over. The barrel hissed like a dragon as it sank. Just like that, half the barge was free from the smoke. Bullseye lanterns were lit and in their weak light, they could see a swarm of torpedoes head in at them.

The Guardians began to shoot at them. “No!” Mike yelled over the roar of guns and the rippling explosions. “The ships! Go for the ships!”

A squadron of Corsairs had finally stumbled into Mike’s trap and had put themselves squarely between the guns of Alcatraz and the Floating Fortress, each much closer than they had been expecting. The sixteen hundred feet between them had shrunk down to twelve hundred.

For the moment, the torpedoes were ignored and the dark ships were raked mercilessly. Twenty-three ships were caught in the crossfire. A few burst into flame; others crashed into each other, and some were abandoned altogether. The captains that kept their heads decided to make a run out of the kill zone, letting the wind carry them away as fast as possible.

These ran directly into the heavy rope and came to an abrupt standstill. Mike could hear the captains screaming orders even as they were caught in a withering crossfire. Decks were cleared of the living in seconds and blood ran down the sides of the boats like rain.

The torpedoes from the other boats gave them a slight respite. They ate up the last shreds of netting on the east side and struck the barge like a series of hammer blows. Compared to the 600-pound warheads of modern torpedoes, the thirty-pound homemade explosives were not powerful, but striking like they did in quick succession, cracked the hull of the barge like an eggshell, causing a fifty-foot long seam to open up. Black bay water rushed in and the Fortress began to list violently in that direction.

“Don’t let up!” Commander Walker bellowed over the sound of the fight. “Fire low!”

The soldiers redoubled their efforts to destroy the ships caught in Mike’s trap. Any boat that managed to turn itself around was shredded to pieces.

To save the ships caught along the line, the Corsairs sent in forty ships, each releasing a torpedo and a hail of bullets. With the bay lit up by the burning boats, they could see their target perfectly. Ten torpedoes cleared away the last of the nets and the rest of the torpedoes came in unimpeded.

More nets were called for, but anyone who stood to throw them were hit by a dozen rounds at once. Their armor stopped most of the bullets, but one or two always managed to find a crease or a neck or a face.

As the torpedoes struck, the barge began to rock and shimmy. Those who were standing were thrown off their feet. Mike found himself flat on his face and felt as well as heard as the barge let out an immense moan as if she were in pain. The metal shuddered beneath him.

The Fortress was dying and so too were her defenders. The list had become so pronounced that the Corsair bullets were no longer hitting flat surfaces and bouncing away. The ricocheting bullets were now angled downward, and they bounced back and forth from one container to another until they hit something softer than metal. Casualties began to mount.

Undaunted, the Guardians fought back with Walker screaming, “Send these demons back to hell, boys! Fire low!” He directed them to fire as a unit, targeting one ship at a time until it was nothing but a shredded hulk. Ship after ship was destroyed before he was killed. A heavy round pierced his armor and he died choking on blood with Mike uselessly trying to stick a bandage down into his chest.

His XO tried to rally the troops but was killed only seconds later by a perfect headshot.

The men fought on as the barge’s list started the steel containers sliding to the east side of the barge. Mike was on one that toppled over and for three terrifying minutes, he was pinned between a pair of the containers. Water began to swirl around his ankles and calves and then his knees before there was a crash of metal.

Starlight flooded over him. He leapt for the edge of the container and climbed up to a world that had changed dramatically in those three minutes. Smoke continued to roil across the surface of the bay, but it was less than it had been and he was able to see that the bay was littered with burning ships and floating carcasses. The barge was half under water by then and there was no saving it.

“Abandon ship!” he cried. “Everyone off, now!”

Even though the barge wasn’t going to last much longer, there wasn’t a great rush to leap into the bay. Most of the men were dead or seriously wounded. Those left alive did not relish a leap into freezing water while fully clothed and wearing thirty pounds of armor. A handful dove in and struggled toward the nearest hulk of a Corsair ship that was slowly sinking fifty yards off the northern edge of the barge.

The rest of the Corsair fleet had sailed off to the east. They’d had their fill of the Guardians and would wait until the barge had slipped beneath the water to come back and kill off the survivors.

After a few minutes, Mike was alone on the barge. An escape hadn’t been planned for. Everyone who had volunteered had known they would either defend the Floating Fortress or die trying. Still Mike could barely breathe. Once again, he had led men into battle and once again they had died by the dozens. And those that had lived wouldn’t last much longer.

If they didn’t drown or get shot, the cold would kill them quickly enough. Mike knew the same fate awaited him. With his torn-up arm, swimming was out of the question and he had already made up his mind that he would go down with the ship. It was what losing captains did. It was both a punishment and an honor.

“Sorry Jenn,” he whispered.

As if invoking her name was the final straw, the center of gravity suddenly shifted on the barge, Mike was flung off the top edge of the highest container and fell forty feet into the icy black water.

Chapter 34

San Francisco Bay

The great black hunk of twisted metal that had once been the Floating Fortress bobbed in the water, looking like a giant tombstone rather than a barge. All around it were the remnants of a lost battle: corpses, bits of people, torn and burnt sails, and blood like an oil slick collecting on the top of the swells.

There were even a couple of cargo containers, slowly settling as the air in them bubbled out and water rushed in.

Clinging to one of them was Mike Gunter. He had lost his gun in the fall and was now struggling to get out of his coat. It was a chore since he only had the use of one crippled arm. He was so feeble that the zipper seemed to be welded into position and it took all his strength to move it an inch.

He kept trying. Going down with the ship had a certain heroic sadness to it. Drowning because his coat was too heavy was just stupid. Finally, he got it off. Looking around at the debris, he called out, “Is anyone there?” The only answer was the gurgling bubbles as a wave washed over his container and nearly pulled him from it.

Mike was not alone, however. A quarter mile away, swarming like a cloud of angry bees, was the Corsair fleet. Things had clearly not gone their way and once the barge sank, they’d be back to pick through the wreckage and woe to anyone they found alive.

Even with two good arms, there’d be no out-swimming them. “Still gotta try,” Mike said, kicking off his shoes. He took a breath and pushed off from the container, deciding to go with a back stroke that was more of a back float than anything else. It was the only way to stay above water without attracting too much attention.

On his third sad little stroke, his hand hit something and when he glanced over at it and saw what it was, he actually moaned, not in physical pain, but in spiritual pain. His hand had hit the rope that was still attached to the barge. Mike stared at it in misery, realizing that here was a way to escape. He had let seven or eight men drown because he had been too stupid to see what was right in front of his face.

He wanted to scream in rage. He wanted to kick himself. He wanted to let go of the rope and drown. But he did none of these things. His was still a life that he could dedicate to killing Corsairs. In his mind, he hadn’t been saved because of his love for Jenn or her love for him. No, all of that was drowned in black despair. The only reason he could think of that he was alive was to exact revenge. He was alive so he could atone for his short-sightedness.

Apathetic to everything, he hooked his legs around the rope and heaved his injured arm over it before breaking out his knife. The rope vibrated beneath his hand as the barge took on more and more water. As it sank, so did the rope. Mike had trouble caring. He sawed away at the rope and had only his head above the surface when it jerked twice beneath him and then snapped.

He was dragged for thirty yards as if the rope was attached to a speed boat, then it slipped from his grip and he rolled in the water.

The end of the rope was not far away, lying in the swell like an endless snake. Mike swam for it and grabbed the end just as the Islanders began pulling again. He was hauled through the remains of the Corsair ships that had fallen into his trap. It was a floating graveyard of half-sunken ships. Among the corpses were a few survivors clinging to anything that hadn’t yet sunk. Most were bleeding and all of them were in a state of blue-lipped shock.

They stared at Mike and he stared back. Then he was through and slipping across the water towards the island. The closer he got to it, the more his shame built up and it was all he could do to hold on. Would they think he had hidden like a frightened child while the real men fought and died? Would they call him a coward? Would Jenn look at him the same?

When he was finally dragged to the rock wall ringing the island, he couldn’t raise his head and didn’t see the look of surprise on the faces of those who had been hauling on the rope. They had no idea a person was attached to the end.

They immediately pummeled him with questions:

“Where’s everyone else?”

“What happened?”

“How many did you get?”

“Did we win?”

When he was hauled up over the fence, he could only answer, “I don’t know,” over and over. It was a lie to some of the questions and the truth to others, but he didn’t care.

The Queen had watched the battle from her customary spot on the roof. When the Floating Fortress began to sink and the firing stopped, she realized that the night crow had not been wrong. It had spoken of death, and death had come.

Stunned, she left the roof and went down to stand with the crowd by the docks. She was broken inside, hurting beyond anything she could express and yet she was still queen. As much as she wanted to go down into the darkest part of the prison and cry her eyes out, she thought it was important that she be seen.

Hearing the commotion, which was part anguish and part strange excitement, she went to see for herself. It was dark and the person in the center of the crowd was sopping wet but despite all that she thought she was looking at Mike. The only feeling she had was that of nausea. She was sure that her mind was torturing her.

The two stared at each other in a way they had never done before. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else but there, while she kept trying to tell herself that this wasn’t her Mike.

“Sorry,” he finally said.

It was his voice, but filled with such pain! “Sorry about what?”

He struggled to answer this. For being so stupid! was the first answer, but it wasn’t enough. That didn’t cover it in the slightest. “For everything.” He was fighting sudden tears. “I couldn’t save them.”

“And the Commander?” Bishop Wojdan had accompanied the Queen down to the dock and now he stood looking stricken.

“They’re all dead. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The tears came then and he looked for a gap in the ring of people to escape through, but they had him surrounded three deep. Jenn tried to grab him and accidentally grabbed his wounded arm. The pain felt deserved. “I think I need to be alone.”

He pushed past. His feet were a blur until he found himself in the little room he had used ages ago, back when he was just a nobody and Jenn Lockhart was just a Hill girl he would dream about sometimes. The bed was no longer his. It belonged to a dead man—one of the men he had failed to save.

Mike didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but he was out in seconds and slept straight through to morning. He took only a single peaceful breath before the pain of failure struck him as strongly as it had the night before. A groan escaped him as he sat up. The moment he did, Shaina Hale knocked on the door.

“Are you awake? Hello?” she said from the other side. “I’m supposed to get you as soon as you wake up. So, are you? Awake, I mean.”

Reluctantly, he answered, “Yeah.”

“Oh good. I have some clothes for you. The Queen picked them out so they should be perfect.” She opened the door a crack and threw in a pair of jeans and a rough grey sweater. There were socks but no shoes. Mike didn’t care. He went without, and trudged silently up to the prison, pausing once to glance back at where the Floating Fortress had once been anchored. It was gone but the bodies were still there, floating on the tide, a thousand seagulls winging circles over head.

The weight of despair he’d been carrying doubled, and his back bent, and his shoulders drooped.

He also stole a quick look at the Corsair fleet. There were fifty of them. Still a distinct advantage. Nothing had changed. A hundred men had died and they were still behind the eight ball.

The Queen’s office was crowded, though without Commander Walker’s burly presence everyone seemed small. The Bishop had two priests with him as well as his assistant Faith Checkamian, who wore a shapeless grey dress. To the side and standing rigidly erect was Knights Reserve Commander Jennifer Edgerton and three other knights. Behind the desk was Jenn, looking beautiful in her black leathers; beautiful but full of worry for Mike. Next to her was Donna Polston. The advisor was also in black, a color she rarely wore. It was common knowledge that she’d been sweet on Walker and now she looked ten years older. Mike wanted to apologize all over again.

Compared to the Bishop in his purple robe and the soldiers in their uniforms and the Queen in all her elegance, Mike felt like a ragged kid. And that was okay, he was a kid. The sooner everyone started thinking that, the better.

“How are you feeling?” Jenn asked as soon as he had bowed from the shoulders. She quickly changed the question to, “How’s the arm feeling?”

“Good as new.” He had lost the bandage somewhere in the night and the stitches were red and swollen.

She didn’t believe him for a second and arched an eyebrow at him. It said: I’ll deal with that little lie later. “First off, I’d like to congratulate you on your victory. Under the circumstances, it could not have been easy.”

Mike swallowed hard at the word “victory” and started to shake his head. Jenn spoke right over the movement. “Yes, victory. We all agree that no one could have done half as well. The plan was solid and the results were greater than any of us could have expected.”

“Twenty-one ships is a lot,” Commander Edgerton said, somewhat breathlessly. “From where we were, we didn’t think you got half as many. And it’s a miracle that you survived. It was like the Fourth of July out there.”

“It was luck,” Mike muttered without looking up. “Dumb luck.”

The Queen drummed her fingers on her desk in agitation. “Don’t discount luck, Mike. Luck is a very important attribute in a commander.” Now he glanced up and stared at her with a growing dread. She nodded. “Yes, I said commander. We have decided that you should be the new Knights Commander.”

The room went silent as everyone watched Mike’s reaction. It was one of horror. “I…no. I can’t. It’s been disaster after disaster. Isn’t there someone else? What about Troy. We can send for him. I’ll go myself.”

“We considered Troy,” the Bishop said. “We also considered that he might be in dire straits where he is currently. Those people are out on a limb. They need decisive leadership. He’s needed there and you’re needed here.”

“I’m needed here to do what? Watch more men die?” Before anyone could say anything, Mike stormed out of the room, his eyes hot and his face apple red. He went straight down into the lower cells where the air was cool and the concrete cold.

Jenn found him in less than a minute. She came down with a small lantern, taking an unerring path like she was drawn to him. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want you to go on the bridge and I didn’t want you to try to take that boat, and last night,” she paused, her chest trembling. “Last night, I let you go even with a death omen on you. It was clear as a bell, Mike. You were supposed to die but I asked the Bishop to pray for you and…and here you are. You keep coming back. You keep winning.”

“That was no win, Jenn. That was a massacre. We lost a hundred good men. A hundred!”

“And they lost more. And they lost ships, Mike a lot of them. You keep whacking their numbers down, over and over. We could be one more win from driving them away for good. Think about it. And think about this: there’s no one else, Mike. If you don’t do it, the Guardians will choose Edgerton to lead and I don’t think she’s ready.”

Mike didn’t think so either, but that was beside the point. “I’m not ready. A leader should be more than brave, and they have to have more going for them than just the ability to live when everyone else dies. They should have a plan or ideas, or something. I don’t know what to do.”

“Do you know what they will do?”

In his mind’s eye he pictured the Corsair ships out by the bridge. Were they bringing men back after the invasion of Angel Island or were they taking more men away for another attack somewhere else? “I don’t know and I’m not the man to ask. I’m not a military genius or anything. I really don’t know what their army will do.”

“I don’t think anyone does. But you know the bay better than anyone and you know ships and sailors. Only you can lead us. Only you can win.”

There was that word again. The night before didn’t feel like a win to Mike. Every time he pictured it, all he saw were bodies and explosions. His head still rang with the thunder of those explosions.

A violent shiver wracked him and she took his hand and squeezed gently. “Let’s get out of here, Mike. I don’t like the dark right now.” She was afraid of seeing another death omen. And she didn’t like seeing how pale he was. Under the weak light of the lantern, he had a corpse-like quality.

They wound their way to the roof of the prison, where they were blinded by sunlight. Mike went to the telescope and studied the Corsairs. Men were swarming all over the ships. Many were being repaired, while some were being loaded with torpedoes and smoke drums. Seeing them made Mike’s stomach ache. They weren’t cowed or scared. They weren’t on the verge of a mutiny. If anything, they looked angry. They looked like they wanted revenge.

“What do you see?” Jenn asked. “What will they do?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a Corsair. You should be asking Deaf Mick.”

Jenn’s face froze. “We can’t. Last night when you came back everyone was so focused on you that no one saw him take one of the boats.”

Anger flared hot in Mike for a second, and then died away to nothing. “Then they know how weak we really are.” He hung his head. “They know about my traps. Jeeze! What a waste of time.” He had spent the last week shifting buoys to mask shoals, setting up underwater obstacles that could gut a boat in seconds, and preparing tripwire bombs across the southern approaches to Treasure Island. “All for nothing.”

He wandered away from the telescope and saw that the crowd from Jenn’s office had followed them to the roof.

“You want to know what they’re going to do?” he growled. “They’re going to keep coming at us, on and on. They’re going to draw the noose around us. They’ll put men in Oakland and along the remains of the Bay Bridge. They’ll have men in San Francisco and along the middle harbor. And they’ll take their time because they can afford to wait. They can strike Treasure Island anytime they want. Or not. They could starve us out now if they wanted. And God help us when the rest of their fleet arrives.”

“And our plan to counter this?” Bishop Wojdan asked.

Mike scoffed, “What plan? Deaf Mick killed our last chance. No ‘plan’ will fix this.”

“Hmm,” Wojdan hummed. “Maybe we have the wrong leader after all.” He nodded at Commander Edgerton, who nodded back, gravely. She was as tall as Mike and in her uniform and with her shining spear, she looked the part of a leader. All except for her eyes.

In them Jenn saw the slightest bit of doubt. With Mike, it was the opposite. He was almost completely filled with doubt, and yet the part that wasn’t, was hard and extremely capable. It was unbending. That part of him refused to lose.

“No, it’ll be Mike,” she said. “And he’s right. No plan or gimmick will fix this. The war will be won or lost on the bay, and the only way to win it will be to fight man to man and ship to ship.”

Mike gaped at her wondering if she understood the carnage and the death she was ordering. Then a thought hit him: Had she seen a sign? If so, she wouldn’t be deterred. She would insist that some flower meant he would be victorious, and there was a time he would have believed it wholeheartedly. Now, he knew he would be part of just another bloodbath.

But would it be as leader or as follower? He glanced over at Edgerton. Her lips were a tight line and her body was tense beneath her armor. Mike could tell she knew about ships—all Guardians knew at least the basics of sailing—but he didn’t think she knew enough to command a fleet during battle.

Do I know that much? he wondered. That was the question, and he didn’t know the answer. The one thing he did know was that other than Troy Holt, the Guardians were merely “good” sailors. None stood out. None seemed more at home on the water than on land. The Corsairs, despite their intense laziness and sloppy techniques, at least loved their ships with a passion. And they would fight them with equal passion.

“I’ll do it,” he said, speaking in a whisper without looking up. “I really don’t want to, but I will. And what’s more, I make no promises at all. When we leave, I don’t know if anyone’s coming back.”

Chapter 35

San Francisco Bay

The Guardians were all for launching the ships right away. They prided themselves on always being both physically and mentally prepared for battle, and each felt that the sooner they got to the fighting the better it would go for them.

Mike was of another mind altogether. He gave a series of orders before going to Jenn’s telescope and studying his opponents. They were loading men onto their ships, which meant they were going to attack somewhere. The fact that they were only loading ten per boat suggested they were going to land men along the Oakland waterfront. Ten per boat was too few a number to attack either Treasure Island or Alcatraz.

He called the captains and first mates of each boat up to the roof of the prison for a briefing. They discussed the various sound, light and flag signals they would use. They talked tactics to reduce casualties, and strategies to bring more of the Queen’s ships against a fewer number of the Corsairs. Mike then pointed out the features of the bay.

He told them where the currents ran fast, where the air would suddenly die, and where the tides were like magnets that could suck a boat onto the rocks.

When the briefing was over, he still withheld the order to launch. Only when the Corsairs slipped their moorings did he give the okay. As the Guardian captains ran down to the docks, Mike went to Jenn and pulled her aside. He wanted to kiss her goodbye without the Bishop looming over them.

Her lips were cold and the kiss was mechanical. She was afraid for him and couldn’t hide it. “Come back to me,” she pleaded, her fingers gripping the heavy parka he wore.

“I’ll try. I-I don’t want to die.” It was an odd thing to say and it left them standing in an uneasy silence. Below them chains began to rattle as the curtains of torpedo netting were pulled back from the dock. It was Mike’s cue to leave. “I love you, my Queen.”

There were tears in her eyes now and her cheeks were bright with cold and sadness. She seemed on the verge of asking him to stay. Instead she took a deep breath, forced a smile through her misery and said, “My Captain.”

Mike feared that if he stayed a second longer he might not be able to leave her side. He kissed her hand fiercely and then jogged away, down through the prison and out to the dock where the Queen’s Revenge awaited him. Her magnificent, snowy sails billowed out the moment he stepped foot on her deck.

She was the fastest ship on the bay, and in half a minute she was in front of the twenty-nine ship fleet and tacking north to cut off the Corsairs. The sight of the fleet threw the Corsairs into confusion. Some ships charged forward thinking now was the time for payback, while others turned back, not wanting to fight with their holds crammed with soldiers. At least a third of them milled around a single large catamaran, which began running flags up and down its backstay just as fast as it could.

There were a few minutes when Mike could have turned northeast and gone toe-to-toe with the first group. They had the numbers but not the weather gauge. The other Corsair ships could have been on them in minutes, and any advantage in ships sunk would have been flipped as soon Mike ordered a retreat.

The chance passed and the Corsairs regrouped as Mike continued angling northward against a breeze that ran south-southeast. He went north along the east side of Angel Island, while his opponent went to the northwest where half his fleet landed on the island and the other half across the straight in the once swanky neighborhood of Belvedere, California. Mike watched with satisfaction as the ships disgorged their soldiers. At the very least, Mike had spoiled the Corsair commander’s plans for those men.

On the prison rooftop, Bishop Wojdan watched with far less satisfaction. “Why didn’t he attack when he had the advantage?” Jenn could only shrug. “And look. Their fleet is splitting up; half to the north and half to the south. And Mike just sits there.”

Mike saw the trap with perfect clarity. Both forces were keeping too close to the island to be attacked. At the same time, if he just sat there, he would be attacked from two sides at once.

“I’m sure he has a plan,” Jenn said, even as Mike went north of the island, in essence, cutting himself off from his base on Alcatraz.

Whatever his plan was, the Corsairs weren’t falling for it. To the north was San Pablo Bay, a huge area that was perfect for maneuvering. Mike tried to entice them into the bay, but the Corsair commander wanted no part of a campaign based on skill. He was satisfied with his advantages and would not be drawn north no matter what Mike tried.

The cat and mouse game continued throughout the day with pretty much everyone in a ten-mile radius irritated with Mike’s delaying tactics. His fleet race tracked around and around, sometimes clockwise, and sometimes he’d suddenly reverse order and go counterclockwise to keep his men on their toes. Sometimes he would send his fleet speeding downwind towards the Corsairs and there would be a flurry of excitement, but he would always turn away and go back to his endless circles.

As the day wore on, people grew bored and drifted from the rooftop of the prison and away from the docks. Bishop Wojdan called for a chair and a blanket. Then he asked for sandwiches and wine. “He did hear you about fighting ship to ship, didn’t he?” the Bishop wondered aloud. He said this sort of thing often.

Jenn always answered: “I’m sure he has a plan.”

Whatever the plan was, she hoped to God that it did not include Angel Island. Through the lens of her telescope she could see men lined up along the shore behind makeshift barriers. They were hoping Mike would stray too close so they could shred his ships to pieces. The Corsairs even tried to bait Mike in that direction by leaving only seven ships near the island.

It was practically an invitation to attack, one that Mike ignored.

Jenn began pacing. She felt useless, but couldn’t think of anything she should be doing. After every turn, she came back to the telescope and rechecked the position of the fleets and she rechecked Mike, himself, looking for any sign that he actually did have a plan as she kept insisting. She saw none.

Mike paced as well, back and forth along the length of the Queen’s Revenge. Jenn had never known him to have this much patience. Ever. It was as if he had ceased being a boy during the raging fight the night before and was now a man. Standing on the deck, with his blonde hair thrown back and the stubble flashing gold on the hard planes of his cheeks, he looked like a man.

This realization made her nervous. Real men had a bad habit of dying around her. Stu Currans had become a man in front of her and had been gunned down by the Black Captain. One Shot had been murdered. Commander Walker was resting in a watery grave. Even her own father had been killed demonstrating the finest qualities of being a man.

“And so many others.”

“Other whats?” Shaina asked. She had been following Jenn back and forth all afternoon.

“Men. So many real men die.”

Shaina considered this. “Bad men?”

Jenn was about to agree when her dark auburn hair swirled suddenly in front of her face. The sun was finally dropping on the long day and the wind had changed. It was now coming out of the north. “Yes. Bad men die, too.”

“Smoke!” The high piercing cry of Lindy Smith made Jenn jump. The seven-year-old had been playing hopscotch perilously close to the edge of the building and now she was pointing north. Mike had set off a score of smokers which were generating a growing black cloud. It blew down on the Corsairs, covering them.

Soon nothing could be seen of both fleets except the tip of the Revenge’s mast. It took on a blood-red glow from the setting sun as it circled in the smoke.

“He’s still not going to come out and fight?” Bishop Wojdan asked. “I really don’t like this, or understand it for that matter. I think I relied on Commander Walker too much and now that he’s gone, all this military stuff seems wrong somehow.” The front he’d been keeping up all day suddenly fell away and he looked grey and old. Most of all, he looked lost.

Jenn thought he was going to cry and didn’t know how to handle it. “Commander Walker was a great man and he died doing his duty and protecting others. He should be properly mourned, and he will be as soon as we win.” If we win. She kept that to herself. She too felt a little lost.

If Mike had a plan, it wasn’t obvious. The smoke was fine, but also useless since no special scope was needed to keep track of the Revenge as it went round and round. Halfway through his third circle, Jenn went back to pacing. Smoke or no smoke, there was nothing to see—or so everyone thought.

Mike knew his mast was a beacon and he knew people thought it represented his fleet. The entire fleet had gone around on their wide racetrack twice, but on the third, as the Queen’s Revenge sailed on, they broke out of formation and charged down on the seven ships barring their path to the west.

Because of the smoke, the guns from Angel Island were useless and the first indication that Mike had changed tactics was the rattle of automatic weapons fire. Caught by four to one odds, the seven ships were ridden down and destroyed in minutes.

The moment he heard the gunfire, Mike swung the Queen’s Revenge south into the smoke and into the battle under full sail.

Across the bay, the gunfire was a soft patter that gave no hint of the real earsplitting noise that assaulted the sailors. The guns thundered and the torpedoes were maddeningly loud. When they went off, there was a flash of orange and black light and even those not close to the explosion were hit by walls of blistering hot air.

The sea turned angry and the boats heaved up and down violently. To Mike it was like every other battle he had been in: a confusion of smoke and fire; ships and men and bullets going in every direction. In only one way was it different: Mike wasn’t scared at all. He wasn’t even a tiny bit nervous. He was too busy to be afraid.

His mind was spinning in a blur as he tried to process the data coming at him. Where was his ship in relation to the coast, to the rest of his fleet and to the Corsairs? How were his sailors reacting to the stress of battle? Were they calm? Were they hiding down in the hold? And how was the wind? Heavy? Shifting? Steady? How much longer until the tide changed? When would they hit the cross-channel current? And how were the Corsairs reacting? Were they fleeing? Attacking? Holding station?

All of this kept him far too occupied to leave room for fear.

The Queen’s Revenge was the last ship to enter the battle. She was the biggest boat and the biggest target on the bay, and even with the smoke she could be seen as a ghostly, somewhat alien form, gliding through the water. Two of her masts were bare, while the middle one strained under the weight of overlapping double sails. Already they were riddled with holes, something that couldn’t have pleased Mike more.

Sails could be repaired and replaced compared to a shredded hull. And the sailors on board could never be replaced. Twenty men and women had volunteered for the Revenge, though currently only two could be seen with any distinction. Most of the others were down in the galley where they were below the waterline and somewhat protected.

The rest were lying flat on the deck—against their will. They were proud knights who feared appearing weak more than they feared death. They were envious of Mike, who stood tall by the stern mast.

“Torpedo off the port beam!” a burly Knights Sergeant called out. He was squinting into the clouds of smoke that parted periodically to show a burning ship or a scattering of bodies. “I’d put it at fifty yards, Captain.”

Mike leapt across to the port side and saw the buzzing contraption through the smoke. It was not particularly impressive; two foam boat fenders supported a scuba tank that was fizzing compressed air from a hose. At the back of the tank was a remote controlled truck with fins glued to its wheels to guide the torpedo, while sitting on top was the thirty-pound warhead. Unimpressive or not, Mike knew that it was deadly.

“Helm hard over to starboard,” he ordered without raising his voice. “Call for two gunners on deck.”

The boat swung to the right as two soldiers rushed up from below. One was immediately hit in the neck by rifle fire. He lurched to the rail, blood pouring from beneath his hand. Two others rushed to take his place, while others dragged him below.

Mike’s eyes were drawn to the smeared trail of blood, even as one of the gunners cried, “I don’t see it! Where’s the torpedo?”

A hand grabbed Mike, jerking him back. It was Ren Finnemore. As he was the fleet commander, she was technically the captain of the Revenge. “Mike! The torpedo! Where is it?”

“It’ll be at our seven o’clock. We may need nets as well.”

All eyes were fixed backward, searching the smoke for the coming torpedo. Too many eyes in fact. When the crash came, it came from an unexpected direction: in front. Everyone jumped as the Queen’s Revenge sheared through the burning remains of a Corsair ship.

“Focus, damn it!” Mike roared as wood scraped over wood, making a terrible screech. “Everyone to their stations.”

Not a minute later, one of the gunners said, “There it is. Right on our seven.” The torpedo was struggling through the choppy waters, but was still gaining on the ship. Four guns went off and rounds were off target, some by as much as fifteen feet. With the smoke and the waves lifting and dropping both the ship and the torpedo, it was not an easy target.

Twenty more bullets were wasted before Mike called for a net. The net was a more certain method of stopping a torpedo. It only had to be thrown into the weapon’s path to work. The extra weight slowed the torpedo and when it got caught in one of the fins, the torpedo slewed off to the left. Seconds later, it exploded like a depth charge, sending up a fountain of white water.

The men let out a roaring cheer, which died quickly as two more torpedoes were spotted through the smoke heading in at them.

More bullets were fired and with a greater urgency. One scored, hitting the front of the scuba tank square on. Instead of exploding as everyone expected, the tank leapt up into the air as if it were alive. It spun in a blur and then shot down into the water, where it writhed and leapt about before exploding in a fireball thirty feet from the ship. A dozen hunks of metal embedded themselves in the hull of the ship and the double sail was beginning to tear.

No one even blinked. They were too busy trying to take out the next torpedo. Not wanting a repeat of the last explosion happening even closer to the Revenge, Mike called for another net. Then, as he noticed their speed dropping, he ordered the forward mainsail raised.

The sailors worked with one eye on the torpedo and one eye on their job. Mike pretended that it wasn’t even there, streaking through the water at them. He refused to even acknowledge it and calmly ordered a turn back to port. The fish was netted and spun off at a sharp angle, and was left in their wake.

“Clear the deck!” Mike commanded as a fresh wave of bullets sizzled through the air, passing between the boom and the rail. “Everyone to your stations and get down.” Bullets began lashing the deck, drumming across it like heavy rain. They were being targeted and Mike ordered a further shift to port and there in the smoke he saw the big catamaran, streaking along. It ranged up and ran parallel to the Revenge, its near rail lined with Corsairs, each rattling off bullets.

They hadn’t yet figured out not to fire on the up-roll and most of their rounds were whipping over head.

The Guardians got the better of the ship to ship duel. They were armored and disciplined, and firing from a prone position meant they were smaller targets. They’d also had some practice on the small torpedoes, and were able to time their shots. They fired unflinchingly and when one was hit, another rushed up from the galley to take his place.

Mike stared across the short distance at his counterpart, who was almost his exact physical opposite. The Corsair captain was a big-bellied creature with a wild thicket of black hair hiding his features from the nose on down. His eyes were just as dark. They did not hold an ounce of mercy within them. Ten years of murder, rape, torture and unabashed cruelty had burned all the humanity out of this beast of a man. Mike realized that he would never stop. He was evil and lived to unleash his evil on the world.

“Helm hard to port,” he said, deciding that he needed to stop this man personally. Capturing him could very well end the battle.

The boat should have heeled over to the left at his command and when it didn’t, Mike turned to see Ren on her back, choking on blood. Forgetting his command, he dashed to her and saw she had been shot just below the notch in her throat.

“Ren! Ren, hold on.”

She pushed him away just as a bullet blasted off one of the spokes of the wheel. He looked over and saw the Corsair captain holding a scoped rifle. Grinning, the man ejected a huge brass shell casing and rammed home a new round.

He’s going to kill me, Mike realized. And maybe I deserve it. Maybe this is my punishment for screwing up and getting everyone killed last night.

Instead of cowering, Mike stood up straight as the man aimed and fired. Mike was knocked off his feet, and the world spun above him as he lay flat on his back. Oddly the only pain he felt was to the back of his head. Slowly he sat up and looked around, noting that the Queen’s Revenge was charging hard to starboard away from the Cat.

From her back, Ren had kicked the wheel over, turning the Revenge so violently that it had thrown everyone. Now the ship was shooting out of the protection of the smoke. Mike scrambled to the wheel and heaved in neutral. “Kill that man!” he cried, pointing at the Corsair captain. Six guns opened up on the man; all missed. Behind him, his helmsman was shot through the eye and when he fell over the wheel, the Cat made its own hard turn, coming within feet of crashing into another Corsair ship and nearly causing both to broach.

Smoke rolled over both a second later and Mike found himself on his hands and knees leaning over Ren. Above the mass of red, she was perfectly white. “Ren? Ren?” She was beyond answering. Instead of calling for her to be removed, he slid her to the side.

“She hated going below for anything,” Mike said to one of the knights. “Her place is here.”

“Sure. I just wanted to say we’re through the smoke. You didn’t seem to notice.”

Mike hadn’t noticed. He patted Ren’s cold hand and stood. His fleet was gathering half a mile distant. He counted twenty-seven. One was missing. An entire crew was dead and probably a lot more besides. And for what? What had been gained?

“Does anyone know how many we got?” he asked, wondering if even fifty ships would be worth it.

The sailor who had been in the bow called out over the wind. “I saw eight that won’t ever sail again.”

The crew cheered while Mike whispered, “Just eight? And maybe one of those is our missing ship.” Seven to one was a minor victory, but it didn’t seem worth it. “Maybe that’s the best I can hope for.”

“Now what?” one of the knights asked.

“We go back in.”

Chapter 36

West of Puget Sound, Washington

The attack ended when Gunner fell just ninety yards short of the rocket launcher. It was tantalizingly close for Emily and the dozen or so Islanders who had carried the fight as far as they had. They might have gone further, but Emily Grey wouldn’t leave her father to die alone, and none of the others had the courage to venture through the tall grass and expose themselves. They knew what would happen if they did. Gunner’s bleeding body was proof that death awaited anyone who left the forest.

During those crucial minutes when the war could have been won by a handful of daring people, Emily had been busy trying to plug the many holes in Gunner’s body. As she worked, she tried to urge the others forward; none moved and the moment and the opportunity passed.

Hundreds had been slain or lay bleeding, and all for nothing.

Emily would have cursed them and called them cowards, but in her heart she knew they had given everything they had just to get this far. And now it was over. Soon, the Black Captain would launch his counterattack, which would easily split the Islanders in two. Those that didn’t immediately surrender would be driven, screaming out into the desolate mountains of western Washington.

They’d be hunted by man and beast, and Bainbridge would be left undefended. The rockets would open a hole in the wall and her mother would be forced to surrender.

It was all very much a foregone conclusion. The Islanders were already defeated. She could see in their eyes that they had given up, which was something that was beyond her understanding. Didn’t they realize what would happen if they refused to fight? Their women would be raped until they couldn’t walk. Their children would be sold off to the highest bidding pedophile to live out their lives in a living hell. The men would suffer days of cruelty and torture. Any that lived would be used for sport. Some would be used as live targets for the Corsairs to practice on. Some would be sent to the arena, where they would be forced to fight each other to the death. Some would be chained up outside the walls and eaten by zombies while the Corsairs laughed and made bets on which of them would live the longest.

Even Emily, a sheltered eleven-year-old girl, knew what was coming. It would start with her father if she wasn’t there to protect him. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Dad,” she whispered to him as she cinched another bandage down as tight as she could.

“Go. Leave.” His voice was soft and wet. He had blood in his lungs but lacked the strength to cough it up.

Emily glanced up over the height of the grass. The Corsairs and their mountain bandit allies were rushing in to fill the void between her and the launcher. They were gathering in numbers. It wouldn’t be long. She swept hair from her father’s brow. “They won’t hurt me. Joslyn said I was valuable because I’m the Governor’s daughter. It’s why she kidnapped me in the first place. So, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Wrong. He should worry about you,” a voice spoke from behind her. It was a jittery, confused voice. “Whatever cache you had is gone. All gone.”

Behind Emily, were four people crouched in the grass. Their eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and the mismatched rags they wore were filthy and smelled of bog mud. The smallest was a grubby child with a gold collar around her throat; she looked like she was on the verge of passing out and kept jerking awake every few seconds. The next woman had matted black hair and a heart-shaped face and might have been pretty if one could look beyond the caked-on dirt and the exhaustion. The third was young and old at the same time. She might have been in her twenties and she might have been sixty.

The last person was a cripple, who groaned as she set aside her crutches. Emily wasn’t even sure she was a girl at first. She had been shaved bald and it seemed as though every inch of her was covered in green-yellow bruises, partially healed lacerations, and crusty blood. There was something familiar about her. It was her eyes. With the new morning light shining into them, they shone like brilliant sapphires.

“Jillybean?” Emily asked, her voice both horrified and amazed.

“Who? Jillybean?” the cripple asked. “Is that me?”

The black-haired young woman rolled her eyes and sighed, wearily. “Yes. You’re still Jillybean and I’m Colleen. Why did you bring us here for God’s sake? You said you were taking us somewhere safe and this ain’t safe.”

Jillybean nodded, remembering. “There’s only safety in victory.”

“But I’m so tired,” the little girl said in a sleepy whisper.

“Me too, Leah.” Jillybean took a huge breath and tried to force her eyes open wider. “Emily, it’s you. What are you doing here? Where’s Gunner? Did he make it? And where’s…” She stopped as she realized who the bloody heap in front of Emily was. “Oh, Grey look at you,” she said, dropping to her aching knees. Her shins and knees had been bad forty hours before when she had escaped from Hoquiam Now, after the unending trek across the state, she could barely walk.

Gunner laid a hand on her knee. “Get her out of here.”

“I don’t want you to worry about her. I’m here. I’m back.” She crushed the heel of her hands into her bleary eyes for a second, trying to force herself awake. “He is right. We need to pull back. This assault has failed. Emily, I’m going to need some men to help move your father. Hurry and find me at least four.” As Emily dashed away at top speed, Jillybean looked around at the few people who had stayed. She saw Debbie Meredith hovering uselessly over Wayne French. “Miss Meredith, let’s move Wayne back to where you kicked off the attack. Kerry, Colleen you two can help.”

“Oh great,” Colleen muttered. “I’m so lucky.” Despite her whining, she helped to half-drag and half-carry Wayne French to the rear. Leah walked away with them, her pointy chin touching her chest and her eyes mostly closed.

Jillybean did not wait for them to leave before she turned back to Gunner. Her old friend was losing blood at a scary rate. Grunting in pain, she pulled the pack from her shoulders and found the rudimentary first aid kit she had put together. Inside were scalpels, bandages, iodine, a suture kit, IV tubing, two bags of normal saline, and a small bundle of surgical tools.

She immediately removed the improperly placed chest tube, put her lips to it and blew it out, and set it in a better position.

As the fluids drained from the pleural space around his lungs, the effect on Gunner was immediate; he could almost take a full breath. “Take Emily and go,” he whispered. “Leave me. I’ll cover you.” When she shook her head, he grabbed her hands. His were large but weak and she could have pulled away easily. “Please. We both know I won’t make it this time. There’s still a chance for you to retreat.”

Jillybean pushed his hands back onto his chest and pulled out the IV. “Retreat? I didn’t come all this way just to retreat. Hold still. Ah, there we go, IV started, now let’s see what’s under this bandage. Oh, boy. Your brachial’s been severed…again. I swear I’ve sown this up for you twice already.” It was indeed an ugly twisted root-like artery. Just like the rest of him, it refused to die.

“Have to retreat, Bad ground,” Gunner hissed, his battered face squinched in pain. She had just laid aside the flesh so she could get at the bullet wound. The hiss became a groan as she dug forceps into the meat of his arm to clamp the ruptured vessel. “Too flat. Soldiers have lost fighting spirit. Have to make…run for it.” The last few words came out quieter and quieter and then he slipped into unconsciousness.

The flatness of the land wasn’t a problem for Jillybean. With all the underbrush, she could maneuver deceptively if she wished. The problem with their position was that the peninsula was too long. She wouldn’t be able to fight in front and hold her flanks against an amphibious attack at the same time.

Even Ipes saw the possibility, which meant it was glaringly obvious. Listen to him, Jillybean. He knows what he’s talking about.

I’m with Ipes, Eve said as Jillybean fished out a needle and thread from her kit. We chose Captain Grey to lead our soldiers for a reason. He’s the expert in all this. You, Jillybean have gotten by on luck for too long.

Wearing a black look to go with her black attire, Sadie suddenly dropped down next to Jillybean. Since when are you on Captain Grey’s side, Eve? You said he was, and I quote: ‘He’s as stupid as he is ugly.’ I’m with Jillybean.

So, you’re saying you’re still a suck-up, Eve remarked. There’s nothing new about that. What is new is that Grey has finally come up with a sound idea. So, it’s a tie. Two against two. I say we ask Emily.

The girl had just come rushing up with two men who kept so low to the ground they reminded Eve of monkeys. She bit back the obvious insult and instead tried to shape Jillybean’s bruised lips into a smile. “Hey Chica. I see you brought the help. Good. Good. So, Gunner wanted us to retreat and we think that’s just a peachy idea, right? You’re on board with that, right?”

“Me? I guess so. If that’s the best plan. But what about the rocket launcher? The Captain has been shooting rockets at the wall and he’s on the verge of knocking it down.”

“The what? The rocket…oh right, the rocket launcher. Don’t you worry about that. We have a plan for that, but retreat first, right? Okay, good. We’re all in agreement, so let’s get out of here. You guys grab a hold.”

The two men started forward, but Emily jumped in front of them. “Hold on. What’s going on? You’re just going to leave his arm like that?”

Eve strained to hold onto her smile. “I have it in the inferior triage position. Okay? I think I know what’s best when it comes to this stuff. Now, let’s get moving.”

Emily stood her ground. “Triage position? You never taught me that. What’s it mean? It sounds German.”

“German?” Her sapphire eyes grew confused and cloudy. “It’s not German, it’s…it’s French. It…it comes from the verb trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift or select. And it has nothing to do with this. Damn it, Eve! Stop messing around.” Jillybean was back and immediately dropped down to her knees, grimacing as she did. Her hands went back to work repairing the artery, moving faster than Emily had ever seen her stitch.

“That was Eve, wasn’t it?” Emily asked. “I knew you weren’t you. You would never call me chica.”

“I might in a different setting. Not in this one. Eve’s being a pain in the butt as usual. How’s your mom? Everything good with her? What about Neil? Did he make it back?”

“Yeah, Neil’s back, and my mom is okay, I guess. What’s going on with you? Why was Eve so eager to retreat? What is she afraid of? The rocket launcher?”

Before answering, Jillybean lifted herself up so she could see over the top of the grass. The sun was a hand’s breadth over the horizon and lit up her face perfectly, showing off the brilliant green and yellow bruising. It also showed a deep purple band around her neck. It looked to Emily as if she had been hung.

Jillybean eyed the Corsairs being rushed into a defensive line around the launcher. Further back were their black ships fighting a head wind as they came up to the docks. Beyond them the sky had grown from a shimmering pink to a deeper red.

“Sailors take warning,” she whispered and then smiled. Without looking away from the sunrise, she answered, “As always, Eve’s afraid of doing the right thing.” A sigh drained the smile from her face and she looked back down at Gunner. “Hand me a bandage. Good. Let’s hope that holds.” She gave Gunner another quick once over before she looked up at the two men. “Good morning Herald, Will. Could you use his jacket to pull him along? That artery of his can’t be yanked around.”

Herald and Will didn’t look like they wanted to grab any part of him. At the same time they were Islanders and knew Jillybean’s unstable reputation. Besides that, they were eager to get as far away from the Corsairs as they could. They tugged the unconscious man along with Emily hurrying in their wake. Jillybean took much longer, crutching over the broken ground and the dead Islanders.

Emily was sickened by the corpses. She knew each and every one of them. Colin Mills was a fisherman; he wrote cowboy poetry. Vida Lenore was the equivalent of a post-apocalyptic housewife. She had two kids and yet, she had fought like a she-bear for the last two days. Aaron Sindt was in the ninth grade and had perfect teeth, strangely thick mustache and a honking big nose. He had tried to ask Emily out once, but had botched it so badly she had felt compelled to turn him down—and now she wished she had said yes to him.

There were so many dead.

She was in a state of shock when she got back to their original line. And she was not the only one. The attack had been a failure on more than one level. Not only had they failed to destroy the rocket launcher, the attack had drained the will to fight out of them. Retreat seemed to be their only option and yet, Emily knew that retreat meant defeat.

“We have to make another try for the rocket launcher,” she said when the talk of running away came up.

“What?” Debbie Meredith cried. “Are you insane? Forget the launcher, we have to get out of here before they attack. That is our only option.”

Almost everyone agreed with her, most angrily so, as if their defeat was Emily’s fault. They glared at her and a few cursed her under their breath.

“And where would you go?” Jillybean asked, her voice just as clear as the morning light streaming in through the trees. Despite her bald head, she hadn’t been noticed by most of them. Now they stared at her in astonishment.

“Would you go back to Bainbridge?” she asked, leaning on her crutches. “It will be a long swim and you can bet the farm that the Corsairs will take more than a few potshots at you. Oh yeah, it’ll be a turkey shoot for them. That’s how they get their kicks. And what if you make do it back to the island? You know you’ll only be trapped there…until the walls come down, that is.”

“We don’t have to go back to the island,” Joe Collins said, piping up from somewhere in the crowd. “We could go north. Everyone talks about Alaska. They say they don’t have zombies up there on account of the snow.”

Jillybean shook her head and snorted. “Has the snow ever stopped them here? I crossed the Rockies and there were zombies at 20,000 feet. They were trudging through the snow like it was nothing. And when you leave on this journey, do you plan on leaving all of your wounded friends behind?” She squatted down next to Wayne French and squinted in at his wound.

His lips were pulled back in a frightened grimace. “Don’t let them leave me. I can’t feel my legs, but…but I can get better. Don’t leave me, okay?”

She gave him a wink. “I won’t and neither will they because they’re going to see that they don’t stand a chance unless they take a stand right here and right now.” When she looked up at them, no one would look at her. In their hearts, they knew she was right.

Debbie Meredith was on the verge of tears. “But they’ll be ready for us this time. And…and we’re out-numbered; two to one at least. And think what’ll happen if they turn that rocket on us. Jillybean, we can’t.”

Paul Daniels had two holes in him now and was more subdued than Emily had ever seen him. “I think Debbie’s right. Who’s going to lead this attack? You can’t, Jillybean. I can’t. I can barely walk. Without Gunner or someone else stepping up, any attack will falter and we’ll end up in even worse shape than we are now.”

Emily knew he was right. She cast a guilty look at her unconscious father. He had never been one to retreat. He had always found a way. Except this time. This time he had lost. His body and his soldiers had failed him. Maybe she had as well. Taking a deep breath, she pushed forward until she was in the center of the clearing. “You all heard Jillybean. We can’t leave the wounded behind and there’s nowhere to go. That being said, we can’t attack unless we have a better plan.” She turned to the bald-headed girl. “Do you have one? Is there some way out of this?”

“Maybe.” Jillybean turned her hard gaze on the crowd and added: “If you actually fight.” There was an uproar of indignation. She let it go on for half a minute before she raised her hands. “Really? You say you fought as hard as you could? All of you? I sincerely doubt that.” She pointed at her own face. “This is what fighting as hard as you can looks like. And look at Gunner. Look at what he did for you. Look at his pain!”

This shocked them into silence.

“But I’m not asking any of you to go that far,” she said. “I’m asking that you fight hard, trust me, and obey my orders without a moment’s hesitation. If you can do that, we can win.”

“How are we supposed to trust a crazy woman,” someone in the crowd asked. “You got like, seventy personalities. I bet one is working for the Corsairs.”

Jillybean actually smiled at this. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe one of them is. The other sixty-nine of us want to see them dead.”

“What about the rocket launcher?” Debbie asked again. “They could be targeting us right now.” Everyone turned to look at the launcher which had a missile sitting on it.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about those rockets. I didn’t build them to be used against personnel.” This caused a new uproar and new accusations of insanity and treason. She laughed at it all, looking crazier in the process. “Yes, I admit I made the bombs. I did so because I knew there was a chance I’d be standing right here under these exact circumstances.”

When considering the possibility, she’d put it at less than ten percent. The likelier options involved coming back to Emily and Gunner dead or captured, Deanna assassinated or in prison, and the Bainbridge “army” trapped on the island. The rockets had always been for show. They would’ve needed expert aiming to strike at the base of the wall, the only place they could really do the right damage. Hitting the base could take down the wall, hitting the top only made a mess.

Emily was the only one excited by the admission. “You made them, so you know their weakness, right?”

“They don’t have a weakness,” Jillybean said, a thin smile spreading across her battered features. “On the other hand, the Black Captain has many. To start with, he doesn’t trust his own captains, and that’s why he made me put in a master override code for all of the rockets.”

“What’s that mean?” Emily asked.

Jillybean slid a little black device that looked like a radio from her coat pocket. “It means he’s about to have a bad morning.” She thumbed the switch.

Chapter 37

San Francisco Bay

Jenn had been wrong about Mike and his plans. He’d sailed from Alcatraz without an overall strategy for victory. He was not a great thinker and when he did come up with brilliant ideas they generally struck him out of the blue and he was as surprised as anyone. That morning, he had sailed north with two goals: stop whatever invasion the Corsairs were planning next, and gain the weather gauge so that when the time came to do something, he would be able to strike first.

Having slashed through the Corsairs, he had given up the weather gauge and now the only edge he had over his enemies was that they had been thrown into wild confusion by the sudden onslaught. Many of the Corsairs were groping blindly in the smoke, while others were using it to hide in. There were even minor clashes in the smoke and the growing dark as the Corsairs had trouble identifying each other.

Mike hoped to add to the confusion by doing the one thing the Corsairs probably did not expect, and that was to attack a second time.

The men on board the gleaming white Queen’s Revenge exchanged looks after the signals had been run up the forward mast. On one hand, they didn’t like being left out of the attack, and on the other, they were secretly relieved not to be part of a suicide mission. Mike wasn’t going in full force, which would be dangerous enough since the Corsairs still held a commanding advantage in numbers. No, he was only calling for his fourteen black ships to attack.

“Before you rejoin the rest of the fleet, get as close as you dare to the smoke,” Mike instructed the nearest sailor, “and lay out three more barrels as fast as you can.” Although the sailor nodded quick enough, his eyes were large and wet. It surprised Mike to think that the man was afraid. If the Guardians ever felt fear, they kept it hidden as a point of pride. “What’s wrong?”

“Are you making me captain?” the Guardian asked in a low voice.

So, that’s it, Mike thought. The Guardian had probably faced death on a daily basis for the last ten years and it was something he could handle because of the strength of his faith. But now he was being asked to be responsible for the lives of so many others and that was another thing altogether. It was terrifying.

Mike understood the fear in the young Guardian better than anyone. The list of people who had died because of his decisions kept growing and growing. And with each death, the weight of responsibility increased. Not three feet away was Ren Finnemore’s cooling corpse. She had been his choice for captain and look where that mistake had gotten her.

That’s how Mike looked upon each death. They were proof that he had made a mistake somewhere along the line. Should he have turned earlier? Should he have committed to attacking the catamaran right off the bat? Was there a better strategy that would have given the Queen a perfectly bloodless victory?

Being captain meant owning every single death. It took a special kind of ego to step forward and want that terrible responsibility. This man didn’t seem cursed with that sort of ego.

“Choose your own captain,” Mike told the men around him. “Whoever it is, I want the Revenge with the other ships in seven minutes. And I want the trap ready to go ASAP. When we come out of the smoke, I want it sprung like that.” He snapped his fingers.

The sailor nodded as Mike stripped off his coat and kicked off his shoes. The cold air hit him like a slap in the face, but he didn’t care. They didn’t have time for niceties. They had been out of the smoke for all of two minutes and he wanted his fourteen ships back in before anyone could figure out what he was doing.

He paused at the top of the rail and glanced back at the sailor. “Just make sure it’s us before you give the word.”

A second later, Mike dove into the freezing water, turned on his side and began to kick to intercept the fourteen ex-Corsair ships that were heading back. As soon as he got on board, he would trim that number to twelve. Two of the ships had black Corsair hulls, but were sailing under white Guardian silks. They would give away the game and maybe be the ruin of Mike’s little fleet. Their only chance was to get in quick, strike hard and get away as fast as they could.

The water was dreadfully cold, numbingly so, which for Mike and his throbbing arm was a good thing. The pain of his wound quickly faded into the background of his approaching hypothermia and he was able to use the arm just enough to put himself in position to be picked up by the Harbinger as she glided up. Hands lifted him aboard and a blanket was hung from his dripping shoulders.

“I want a smoker and two torpedoes ready to go,” he ordered as soon as he could catch his breath. “And I want those ships with the white sails to go back with the rest of the fleet.”

“Sir?” a young Guardian asked. His cross lay on his armored chest, looking like it was burning from the inside as it reflected the last of the day’s light. “We only have the one torpedo. We didn’t get two.”

Mike had forgotten how low they were on munitions. Only a few ships had been given a second torpedo. “Right. Then just the one, and the smoker. Let’s get that main squared away. Two points to port. You! Off the rail. If you’re part of the second watch I want you down below. Hey, let’s go with that main!” The Harbinger had dropped its mainsail when the ship slowed to pick him up and now he was eager to get moving back into the safety of the smoke.

Safety was a laughable word and yet, if the Corsairs broke free of the cloud just then, Mike could very much lose the war in the next few minutes. His tiny fleet would be trapped against the rocky shores of Angel Island, where they would be caught in a crossfire. Mike was already dangerously close to the island as he pointed the Harbinger northeast, hoping to get as far upwind as he could. They were so close in fact that bullets started winging at the twelve-boat formation.

As if they were only buzzing flies, the flying lead went ignored. “Just stay in there for a little longer,” he whispered, looking back and forth from the line of smoke roiling over the water, and the eleven ships behind him struggling to keep up. They weren’t holding to a perfect line and that was okay with Mike. Speed meant everything.

“Come on, a little longer.” He wasn’t the only one mumbling to himself. As they got closer and closer to the wall of smoke, most of the men could be heard praying.

Knowing that in a minute he would be back in the lion’s den with a bunch of pissed-off lions, Mike was glad for their prayers. He stood in a puddle of bay water and held his breath, watching along the line of smoke for the first sign of a Corsair ship.

Then the smoke swept over the bow and his world shrank around him. “Light the stern lantern,” he ordered in soft whisper. Things were strangely quiet in the smoke. There were sounds—sails rustling, guns being loaded, bodies being thrown into the cold water—but it was all muted and secretive. There was also a sensation that something was about to happen. It almost felt as if the Corsairs knew he was coming and had set their own trap.

I’m being crazy, he thought as he paced to the front of the boat, straining to see any sign of his enemies. They were out there, yes, but there was no way they could’ve formed up in the smoke. There was no way a trap could have been prepared so quickly…or so he told himself. “Eyes open people. I want to hear it the moment anything is seen. Remember, fire on the pause. When we hit the down roll, that’s when you shoot.”

There was one problem, there was nothing to shoot at.

“What the hell?” Mike said, under his breath. Doubt began to flood in. Had he gone too far up wind? Or not far enough? Should he keep to his course or angle south? Was he blundering into a trap? Should he turn around and rethink the entire thing?

He checked the second-hand on his watch and waited until two minutes had passed before ordering the Harbinger to turn up into the wind. The maneuver killed its forward momentum.

“Change to the green light.” It was the signal for the fleet to turn south and begin the attack. Attacking what remained to be seen. The lantern man hesitated after putting on his green filter. Because of the smoke and the radical turn, he was confused as to which way to shine the lantern.

Mike spun him around and pointed him to the southeast. Mike could have been blindfolded and would know which way he was pointed. He knew the shifting current beneath him and the wind out of the north. He knew where Alcatraz was and where Jenn was standing on the roof of the prison fretting about him now that he had ducked back into the smoke. He could feel Angel Island looming off to his front left.

And he knew the Corsairs were somewhere south of him. The attack had left them shocked and perhaps a little shy. They would have trimmed their sails and would be drifting, listening, waiting for the smoke barrels to fizzle out. They wouldn’t be taking chances trying to rip out of there when a five minute wait would clear up the tactical picture.

The light was pointed and all of three seconds later, the newly christened Mary Magdalene, made her turn south. The Nazareth followed so closely that her bowsprit scraped the stern of the Magdalene. All the trailing ships were so close it looked like a train.

Mike waited until the last had passed before letting the wind push the Harbinger’s head around to the south. He ordered full sail, but checked her speed by slewing left and right in a zigzag. It wasn’t long before the first gunshot rang out. It was one shot followed by a storm of explosions that did not let up for a second.

Mike’s helmsman began to turn straight for the sound of battle, but Mike kept him in check, still going back and forth. Even as the gunfire started to recede, Mike held to his odd course. It was not until a huge shadow passed between them and the battle that he change direction—but not towards the fight.

He swung away to the east for a hundred yards and then came flashing across the water at a dangerous speed, considering nothing could be seen fifteen feet ahead of them. The helmsman held the wheel in a white-knuckled grip, ready to spin it as fast as he could in any direction his mad captain ordered. The man could barely see the mast ten feet in front of him and was running on pure faith.

“Hard to port!” Mike cried, moments later. Then, “Back to neutral!” The orders were based on instinct and they did not fail Mike. Out of the smoke came the Corsair boat that had passed them. Fifty-two feet of hate, manned by a dozen hardened sailors, all of who were on the starboard rail as their ship came rushing up to the last ship in Mike’s fleet.

The Corsairs hesitated seeing that it was a black ship on their port side. Mike didn’t. “Fire as she bears,” he said, with cold hate in his heart. The Harbinger dipped low and seven guns roared out, raking across the short distance. The survivors spun and fired high, and as they did the men on Mike’s last boat began firing as well. In seconds, the deck of the Corsair ship ran with blood.

“Now the hull,” Mike said. It was riddled along the waterline and was left sinking. As the men reloaded, Mike again swung out to port and found himself in a swarm of black ships. Some were running from the battle, some were racing towards it, and some were just sitting on the water “making repairs” as they were quick to tell anyone who looked at them cross-eyed.

Mike didn’t slow to ask. In the middle of all that, the smoke was his only ally, and he had to trust that the prayers of his Guardians were being answered as he cut through the mass. Ahead he spied a big, two-masted, fifty-six footer and he sped up, once more coming on it from the left, a direction that wasn’t expected since all the firing was coming from the right. And again, he caught a dozen men hanging on the rail facing the wrong way.

“On the down roll!” Mike called out.

“Hold on,” the helmsmen hissed, pointing to their left where another ship had appeared out of the smoke.

Thankfully, no one fired. “I need seven men to the port rail,” Mike called down into the galley. Two men had been killed and one injured in the earlier fight, and only four men answered the call. Mike grabbed the helmsman’s M4 and ran to the port side rail.

The idea of fighting both sides of the ship simultaneously was enough to make even the Guardians nervous. One of them let out an odd titter and asked, “Are we really going to do this?”

“Yep,” Mike said, and shouldered the rifle. The simple move sent a screech of pain through his left arm, but he ignored it as best he could. Now was not the time to appear weak. He aimed at a rifleman who was squinting through the smoke and looking right at him. Mike saw his eyes go wide right before he fired. After that, the small details fell away and all he saw were black shapes filling his sights.

He fired and fired with an alarming tunnel vision that didn’t even take proximity into account. He was still firing when the two ships crashed into each other. A dead man was piloting the Corsair ship. He had been hit right off the bat in the first hail of bullets and no one had noticed. Now the shooting was point blank. Those Corsairs who were still alive were cowering in the stairwell leading down to the galley and shooting without looking.

“Kick it away!” Mike cried. As men jumped to the rail, Mike darted to where the lantern sat by the wheel. It was an oil lantern and still burning brightly, and when he heaved it across to the Corsair ship, the oil went right up, lighting the gathering night and giving the black smoke a sick yellow hue.

The moment the two ships were separated, the men turned and added their firepower against the first Corsair ship, leaving it a lifeless bloody shell. It sailed on without anyone at the wheel, and Mike kept the Harbinger on its left side, using it to mask them as they came up on another ship. It was already riddled and floating helplessly.

There were two men on board trying to replace the forestay that had been shot away. The entire mast was canted precariously back and the next gust of wind could tear it from the deck. For some unknown reason, the two men were trying to tie the rope with the sail still sheeted home.

“Kill them,” Mike ordered, feeling greasy deep in the pit of his stomach. “Then the ship.” He was ordering the execution of all three. His Guardians didn’t jump at the chance to kill two unsuspecting men; it flew in the face of their code of honor. Mike knew that in this battle, honor was a luxury they couldn’t afford. “Get the boat at least,” he said, bending to pick up his rifle. He would kill the men and hope that after he would find a way to forget that he had.

His hand closed on the grip of the rifle when he felt a searing pain across his back. Looking up, he saw the big catamaran eighty feet off to their left, moving to cut them off. Its captain had his rifle out and was gunning for Mike. “All the way over to starboard! Watch the boom. We’re coming about!” The Harbinger seemed to turn on a dime as it cut under the two boats on their right side.

Almost without losing speed, he then turned back south so that there were four boats racing along. The chance to kill the two men who’d been working on the forestay was gone. They’d fled below as the Corsairs on the Cat shot across their deck to get at Mike’s crew. Two were down and bleeding. There was no need to call for return fire. His men were dishing it out, trading bullet for bullet.

They had better aim and had armor, but these advantages were nullified by the number of Corsairs, and their willingness to expend ammo as if they had an endless supply.

The four-boat formation couldn’t possibly last. They came up on a ship that was burning and belching huge clouds of smoke. It was one of Mike’s and as they streaked past, they could see three men at the stern working at the wheel. They were trying to send the ship off to port to sew more confusion. Their efforts were ruined as the boat with the canted mast struck them at full speed.

When the two struck, there was a scream and an explosion of flame and smoke that left everyone blind. When the Harbinger was past, Mike looked up to see that the Cat had disappeared. “Where is it? Anyone see that catamaran?”

No one could see anything through the smoke, which had grown even more dense.

As Mike was peering through the clouds, one of the Guardians tapped him on the shoulder. “We have to go back. There might be survivors.”

“And there might be twenty Corsair ships waiting for us. No, we stick to the plan. We all knew the dangers involved and…” Just then the Harbinger shuddered as it passed through the debris field of a recent battle. At least two ships had gone down and another was half-submerged. There were bodies, but none of them were moving.

“We keep going,” Mike said. “Let’s get the wounded below.”

The wounded would not go below. One man with an arm dangling by a scrap of bone and skin demanded that it be cut away right there on deck. Including the one-armed man and two others with slightly lesser wounds, there were only eight of them left alive. They were in no shape to go back.

“We need a new lantern up here. It’s time to get out of here while we can.” Mike regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. Compared to the Guardians’ desire to go back for their friends, what Mike had said smacked of cowardice. “What I mean is that we have to be with the rest of the fleet when we break through the smoke. That was the plan.”

But where was the fleet? Other than the one burning ship, they hadn’t seen a single Guardian ship. Had the Harbinger been left behind? It seemed impossible since the smoke couldn’t have been spread over the bay for more than a mile or two.

“Maybe they’re already out. Maybe they turned out early.” Maybe they’re all destroyed. The thought didn’t sit well with Mike and he squinted through the smoke for any sign of the rest of his fleet. There were plenty of signs in the form of bodies and slicks of oil that glinted like rainbows from the newly lit lantern. “Hood that, will you? I don’t want to give away our position.”

But it was too late for that. Glimpses of the light had been seen and now half a dozen ships were angling towards them. Their sails could be heard through the smoke, snapping like whips as if demons were driving them on. “Oh boy,” Mike whispered to himself. He raised his voice only slightly louder to say to one of his men, “I want that torpedo in the water ten seconds after we break free of the smoke.”

As much as Mike hated the feeling of being blind and hunted while in the smoke, leaving it was far worse. He felt naked. They burst out into the open with such suddenness that it was like waking from a dark dream. And what he saw off his starboard bow was something of a nightmare. There were only five of the black Guardian ships ahead of him.

“What the hell?” He rushed to the rail and stood on the second rung, staring back into the smoke, searching for any sign of the rest of his fleet. He stared in vain. They had lost half their number and only God knew how many good men, and for what? A couple of Corsair boats?

Mike was thinking about puking over the side of the ship when one of the Guardians whispered, “Here they come!”

A heavy ponderous drum had begun to beat in the dark cloud. The thrumming sound was soon taken up by dozens more until the smoke pulsed with each hammering blow. The sound built up until even the Guardians looked stricken with fear. Then the entire Corsair fleet emerged from the smoke and the fear took root and delved deep.

Not only did it look like there were more ships than before, they seemed to have grown, as if they fed on darkness and death.

The Harbinger seemed alone on the water. Seventeen white sails were a quarter mile away, while closer were the five black-sailed vessels, fleeing as fast as they could. “Hard to starboard,” Mike ordered. The command was slow to be followed. It sent them to the right, so they were heading due north across the face of the Corsair fleet. The crews of forty black ships stared at them, each wanting to be the crew to sink him.

“This wasn’t a part of any plan,” one of the Guardians remarked, straining to keep his voice calm. He was almost standing on Ren’s cold hand.

Mike pulled him away. “There was no plan. The Queen said to fight them ship to ship and man to man, and that’s what we’re doing.”

“Us against all of them? When you take courage too far, it becomes insanity. And this is what it looks like.”

Laughter welled up in Mike’s chest. “I hope this doesn’t wreck my reputation for being ‘dashing,’ but I’ve been scared for weeks now. Every minute of every day. It gets so bad I can hardly breathe. But I know I have a job to do and we have one right now. So, let’s get our heads on right and get the torpedo away.”

It was almost all they had left to fight the might of the Corsairs with: one slapped together bomb and a handful of bullets. But they didn’t have a choice.

Chapter 38

San Francisco Bay

Thirty seconds after the entire Corsair fleet erupted from the smoke, hellbent on revenge, the Harbinger let its one torpedo go, dropping it overboard on the windward rail so it wouldn’t be seen.

To mask its presence, Mike had his men send up a spinnaker made from their reserve mainsail. It was a great splash of white on a black background and could be seen for miles. It was also a disaster from the start.

Rylan Adams, a Guardian with years of experience on tightly run ships, felt the groan beneath his hand as the ship’s mast began to bow. “Two more knots ain’t worth this,” he muttered.

“It is if it keeps us away from them Corsairs,” his friend Chet answered, pulling down on the neck of his armored vest. Beneath his uniform, he was rail thin and secretly felt like a turtle in a shell. He whispered a prayer, which ended when a metal cleat gave way under the strain.

“What did I tell you?” Rylan snarled. “Main’s ain’t nothing but a main. It ain’t no spinnaker. And crap! It’s all tangled with the jib. Captain! We need to cut her away.”

Mike glanced to where the Corsairs were coming together just beyond the smoke. Were they thinking that he was putting on a show to fool them? He hoped not. He needed them to come on as fast as they could, but not so fast that they caught the Harbinger, which had already slowed to four knots because of the spun-together sails. “Cut away the lower shrouds,” he ordered.

“And our heading?” the man at the wheel asked. They were on a northward course, aiming right for Angel Island where five hundred pissed off Corsairs were ready to shred the ship to pieces.

“Continue on this heading for now. Do we have eyes on our torpedo?”

Before the soldier with the controls could answer, a loud slapping sound had everyone looking up. Embarrassingly, the would-be spinnaker was uselessly flapping at the top of the mast like a sundress on a clothesline in a heavy wind. “Jeeze,” Mike whispered. “What’s next?” He half expected the anchor to suddenly drop.

“I got the torpedo dead on,” one of the wounded men said. He pointed. “You can see the bubbles.”

Mike could, and so could the Corsairs. By then the black fleet was racing through the waters at them. They picked out the torpedo and a hundred bullets ripped into it. There wasn’t enough left over for the soldier to even detonate it for show and the bomb was wasted. It meant their margin of victory had shrunk that much more.

“Damn,” Mike cursed under his breath. Aloud, he ordered, “Light the forward lantern,”

“The sail isn’t obvious enough?” Chet whispered to Rylan.

The light would make them even more of a target for the Corsairs, who were only two hundred yards away and coming on hand over fist. Chet’s whisper was a touch too loud and reached Mike’s ear. “Light it!” he snapped. Then, in a gentler voice, he added, “And make our turn west.” As much as the sailors hated the light that made them the focus of every eye on the water, they were only too happy to make the turn. The relative safety of their own fleet was half a mile away. They were down to twenty-three ships, while the Corsairs had a comfortable advantage with forty.

Mike had hoped to sink more with his last attack, but he wasn’t done. He had prepared a trap that would have made Jillybean proud.

“Torpedoes!” the lookout at the bow hissed in a high voice. Mike hurried to the rail and what he saw in the dark sent goosebumps rising along his arms. Half a dozen torpedoes snaked through the water on either side of his ship, anyone of which could have sent them straight to the bottom of the bay. Instinctively, he leaned back from the rail as his eyes picked out another one slightly further out. There would be more. Four minutes before, his fleet had sent every torpedo they had left buzzing for the smoke, praying that their timing would be right.

If the Corsairs had come out of the smoke too late, the bombs would have been wasted. As it was, they had come out thirty seconds too soon. There was a chance they would be seen. It was why Mike had been cavorting the Harbinger back and forth.

“Ready about!” Mike cried. He had to keep the focus on him and not the bombs.

Rylan pushed Chet aside and ran to the jib, while another went to a rope called the Boom Vang and eased the tension on it. The moment the last torpedo slipped by, Mike ordered the turn. The wheel turned, the boom pivoted and the boat swung up into the wind, paused for just a second and then turned hard around so that they were now heading due south.

Every sailor on board looked from the sail to the Corsairs. They were closer now, and cutting the distance with every second. Mike picked up an M16 and checked the magazine, saying, “We have to keep them focused on us for a little longer. Fire everything we have at that lead ship.”

The Guardians grimly took up their rifles. Eight against four hundred and they didn’t hesitate.

A hundred and fifty yards was an easy shot at a flat range in the daytime with a properly sighted gun and factory manufactured bullets. At night on a rolling deck, with substandard ammo and guns that had been passed around willynilly, Mike figured they’d be lucky to hit the ship.

They were better shots than he gave them credit for and they scored enough hits to get the Corsairs’ attention. The ship heaved to and began returning fire. Three other ships followed suit and soon water was being kicked up all around the Harbinger. Bullets began to thud into her hull and the sail began whistling from the holes sprouting in it.

Mike was at the stern and the first indication that the big catamaran had joined the fight was the yellow streak of light that zipped an inch from his ear, making him jump. It was a tracer round, which were extremely rare. It could only mean one thing: once more he was being personally targeted. The goosebumps were back and along with them came a clammy cold sweat trickling down his back.

As much as he wanted to go diving down onto the deck, he refused to budge. It wasn’t just a point of honor. He knew that the moment the captain began cringing in fear, his authority went out the window. And besides, stray bullets were whipping everywhere. Knowing his luck, he would duck right into one. “Prepare to turn us about,” he told Rylan, the closest Guardian to the wheel. “The second…” Another yellow streak. This one tore a hole in the side of his jacket. He swallowed loudly. “I want us heading straight west as soon as the first torpedo goes off.”

Eighteen seconds later the first explosion rocked the night, hurling flaming debris hundreds of feet into the air. True to his order, Rylan heeled the Harbinger hard over. It was such an abrupt move that Mike lost his footing and sat down hard in the padded captain’s chair.

The bullets stopped flying at them, and in their place came explosion after explosion, lighting up the night like a mad strobe. The booming thunder of their echoes rolled around the bay as the Corsairs began flying wildly in every direction, frantic to get away from the bombs. They juked and spun and turned so hard that men were flung into the water. They changed direction so many times that they frequently passed into the paths of torpedoes they didn’t even see coming. And if one missed, there was always another target.

Soon the bay was on fire and on Alcatraz people were going crazy, jumping up and down, cheering with all their might. A minute before they had been cursing Mike’s name, calling him every sort of fool. From their point of view, the attacks had seemed suicidal, based on desperation instead of planning. Now, they saw that they had been building up to this one terrible trap.

No one had suspected the long-range torpedo attack, least of all the Corsairs. Within minutes, seventeen of their ships were burning out of control or sinking beneath the waves.

On the prison roof, Jenn finally took her eyes from the telescope. She was weak with relief and exhausted from the stress. She sat in the chair that Shaina had brought up for her and smiled softly as the celebration around her went on and on. People were chanting: “We did it! We did it!”

“Has he done it, do you think?” she asked Bishop Wojdan, who was bent over the telescope. “Has he won?”

For a long minute, it seemed so. The Corsair ships that hadn’t been destroyed looked stricken. They were floating in an oily sea, each off by themselves. “Maybe. It’s hard to tell.” He did a quick count. “The two sides are now even in numbers, so that’s a tremendous victory in itself. Perhaps they’ll finally leave.” He straightened and sighed.

Donna Polston was quick to take his place. Through the lens she saw Mike as a dim figure with light hair. He was still sitting in the captain’s chair. “Why is he just sitting there? They should be attacking now, while the Corsairs are scattered.” Everyone gazed out and saw the Harbinger slowly beating into the wind to join the other ships. Its mast was lit from below so that the flags being run up the forestay could be seen. “Does anyone know what all those flags mean?”

“Without knowing which code they’re using, it’s impossible to tell exactly,” Knights Reserve Commander Jennifer Edgerton answered. Her eyes flicked nervously toward the Queen. “I think I know why they’re not attacking. They’re probably extremely low on ammo. They’re out of torpedoes, that’s for sure.”

Once more, she bent and squinted down the telescope, moving it back and forth, her frown deepening. “Yeah, the Revenge is passing over magazines to the Harbinger, and to the Mary Magdalene. They all are. Oh, Lord above. They only have seven. Is that right? Is that all they have?” The roof top was silent as she scanned each boat. “It looks like every soldier has only one magazine. That means maybe two hundred rounds per boat.”

“Is that enough?” Bishop Wojdan asked. “Can they fight a battle with so little ammunition?”

Edgerton held her tongue and Jenn had no idea. The crowd waited in silence on the roof, their elation dying by degrees.

The fact that Mike kept his fleet upwind of the Corsairs and did not come flying down at them was answer enough for Jenn. It was also answer enough for the Corsair Commander. He crept west, fearing an ambush, but suspecting that the Queen’s fleet had shot its load.

When Mike only retreated further northwest, the captain knew he faced a toothless opponent. Still he didn’t rush in. He figured that his best hope to salvage his position as fleet commander and keep his head on his shoulders was to take the Queen’s fleet intact. It would make all of his past reverses less damning. All he had to do was keep their fleet from getting back to Alcatraz, where he supposed they had more ammunition.

To further trap his opponent, the Corsair captain sent men from the bridge running along the coast opposite the Marin Headlands all the way to Sausalito. It basically ensnared Mike in a shrinking square with the bridge on one side, the coast leading to a rocky cove on another, Angel Island on the third and finally the Corsair fleet holding the entrance.

The minutes drew out and everyone around the bay waited on pins and needles for Mike to do something.

“He’s just sitting there,” Donna said, once more back at the telescope. “I mean literally, he hasn’t gotten up once. What’s he waiting for?”

“A change in the wind perhaps,” Wojdan suggested. “A divine wind that’ll drive his enemies away. There is historical precedence for it.”

Jenn glanced up at a million stars. Far to the north was a haze of grey clouds, but the wind was coming in from the west. No storm was going to swing in suddenly and rescue the fleet. “It’s not the wind,” she said. “He could be waiting for me to make his choice for him.” It wasn’t a farfetched idea. Her orders had been to fight ship to ship and man to man, only now that seemed like an order condemning her men to a violent and unnecessary death. She knew perfectly well how quickly a soldier could burn through a single magazine in battle.

“May I?” Jenn asked, stepping up to the telescope. With the light of three lanterns shining up to the mast, she had a better view of Mike than she had before. He was indeed still sitting in the same chair. On his handsome face was an odd look, one she couldn’t place. She had expected to see determination or perhaps anger.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered. It was impossible to tell in that light and from that distance. She let the lens rove over the Harbinger. Only two crew members were visible. They were hauling items up from the cabins and galley below and already the deck was cluttered. “Something strange is going on. Mike’s making a mess of his deck. All the boats are. Strange.”

Edgerton asked to look and when she had satisfied herself, she gave the Queen a tight-lipped smile. “They mean to attack at close quarters. They’ll use all that clutter as protection until they can board.”

“Board?” The word sounded foreign to Jenn, although she knew perfectly well what it meant—they were going to fight ship to ship and man to man. They were going to make every bullet count. Jenn felt like vomiting. At least now she understood the look on Mike’s face. It was something like melancholy with a mixture of impending doom thrown on top. The doom was beginning to be a familiar look, however the melancholy was completely new. Mike was always upbeat and when he was on a ship, he thought he was invincible.

The look wasn’t the only thing different about him. He wasn’t helping. That never happened. She looked again at him, now seeing how pale he was. “It must be his arm.” He wore a salt-stained jacket that hid his injured arm, and yet there was blood on it…on the outside of it. And his blue shirt was wet and not with water as she assumed. Even as she watched, someone came up from below with a folded hand towel. The soldier pulled back Mike’s jacket and revealed a blood-soaked bandage on Mike’s abdomen.

Jenn pulled back from the scope. “He’s hurt! Mike’s hurt! We…we…we have to stop this. We have to call it off.”

“I’m afraid that won’t help him,” Bishop Wojdan said. “The Corsair are not going to just let anyone through. You know what will happen to him if they try.”

She knew. Deep in her heart she knew what they would do to her Mike. And it infuriated her. “Then you better start praying for him!” she screamed at the Bishop, her face pale as death. “Pray that he lives, because if he dies then we all die. Every last one of us! Go. Take all your Guardians with you and get praying.”

Her anger was beyond reason or logic. The Bishop merely bowed from the shoulders up and left the rooftop with his people. This did nothing to calm Jenn. She didn’t simply pace the roof top, she marched back and forth, coming so close to the edge each time that she sent showers of rocks skittering away into the darkness.

Finally, she realized she needed to do something constructive. “Bring me those med books that Jillybean left for me,” she ordered Donna. “Shaina! Go fetch a lantern. I need one bright enough to read by. I have to figure out how to fix him.” Her orders were carried out quickly and were a waste of energy. She couldn’t sit still long enough to read. Not that it would’ve made any difference. Surgery wasn’t learned from a book.

She went from the telescope to the edge of the roof and back, wearing out a path.

The wait was agonizing, but when Mike’s fleet set sail and swept silently down on the Corsairs, she thought her heart was going to burst. The Harbinger was the lead ship, out in front by a good fifty yards. Only Mike could be seen on her deck. Everyone else was hiding.

The Corsairs began firing when the ship was a hundred yards out. They sent a storm of bullets across the water, tearing up the decks and shredding the double sails. The Harbinger was hit so many times that she fell off and began drifting, her bow slowly sinking. And still they fired at her with everything they had.

Jenn found herself on her knees, the rocks biting like teeth into her flesh. “Please, no. God! Listen to me, please. Save him!” she screamed. “You have to.” Uncaring whether she looked the part of a queen or not, she sobbed and begged. She was not the only one in tears. No one could watch the final charge and remain unmoved. The rest of the fleet came racing past the stricken Harbinger and were swept by a hail of bullets. Men were hit in spite of the junk strewn across their decks. So much blood poured from the holes in the ships that it looked like they too were bleeding.

Women wept and men beat their chests and pounded their fists, wishing they could do anything to help. There was nothing anyone could do, except pray.

It took two very long minutes for the fleet to reach the Corsairs. The ships did everything they could to get close enough to grapple with their counterparts and in some cases their hooked ropes managed to catch a rail or tangle in another rope. When that happened, the ships were hauled close and boarded. The fights across the deck and down in the cabins were desperate and without mercy. Neither side could afford the luxury of taking prisoners.

In their fury, the Guardians were unstoppable.

Seeing the fate of boarded ships, the Corsairs did everything they could to keep a boarding ship at bay. Guardians brave enough to break from cover to fling their ropes were sometimes targeted by seven or eight guns at once, and no amount of armor could save them. It was the same for the helmsman or any sailor who exposed himself to help winch in a rope or move a sail.

The Harbinger was not as lifeless as she appeared and as the fight began to go against the Guardians, sailors raced up from the galley and cut away the old sail. They worked furiously and in a matter of minutes had a new sail run up the mast. Mike swung the ship back into the fight. He had slipped from the captain’s chair and couldn’t find the strength to get back up again and so sailed by feel alone. Even blind he was able to swing the Harbinger into boarding range of two Corsair ships at once.

Rylan leapt up to hurl a rope and was hit by an even dozen rounds and fell dead across Mike’s legs. Chet and another sailor hauled the ships in close, however the fire was so murderous that no one could possibly raise their head.

“Get him off me,” Mike hissed, shoving weakly at Rylan. “I’ll go first.”

“You’re not going anywhere!” Chet hissed. “You’ll be dead before you get over the rail.”

I’ll be dead soon, anyway, Mike thought. It wasn’t a particularly morose thought, it was simply a fact. Just like it was a fact that his men and his fleet were dying all around him. “But I’m not dead yet,” he muttered. He strained to lift up so he could see over the rail. It was too dark to see anything. The ships were dark, the sails were dark, the water was cold and dark. “We need fire. That’s what we need. Be a good soldier and burn that ship, Chet.”

Chet, tears in his eyes and blood running down his head, let out a wild laugh. “Yeah, I could do that.” He squirmed forward to where the oil lantern still burned. It had over a pint of oil in its reservoir and when he heaved it across at the Corsair ship, it splashed into golden light and sent flames roaring up the length of the sail.

The fire might have engulfed both boats, however, the Corsairs had just cut away the rope entangling them and the two drifted apart.

“Light ‘em up boys!” Chet screeched across the water before he burst into a mad cackle.

The idea was appealing to the Guardians, most of whom were down to their last few bullets. More lanterns were thrown, as were cups of oil, and even chunks of railing wrapped in burning sailcloth.

Four more Corsair ships were set aflame and lit up the night. The orange-gold light revealed what they all knew: the Guardians were beaten. Their ships were in tatters and their sailors dead or dying. Mike gazed out at his command, broken in body and spirit. Broken but not dead yet. He had three men still with him. Their deaths and his were already written in stone. What mattered was how they died.

“We’ll go fighting,” he muttered. Louder, he growled, “Come about. Aim us for that clump of ships.” Sixty yards away was the big catamaran and three other ships. They were firing in loud volleys, twenty guns at a time. It sounded like they were having fun.

The command was carried out quickly enough and as the Harbinger plowed slowly forward, the sailors scrambled around, searching the dead for more ammo.

Mike did his best to hold himself up for as long as possible. He had to so he could warn his men when the Corsairs were about to fire. Thirty seconds was all he could stand, and all that was needed. “Everyone, get down,” he cried and then slumped over himself. The Corsairs fired into his beloved ship. Three volleys and the new sail tore with a shriek. Another volley and her mast splintered and broke. It came screaming down and now the Harbinger lay dead in the water.

“Sink her!” the Corsair captain bellowed across the water. “Sink them all!”

Chapter 39

Washington, west of Puget Sound

When Jillybean thumbed the button on the detonator, the explosions were so bright that they made the sun look like nothing more than a pale nickel suspended in the sky. Seconds later, that sun was blotted out by the smoke and a vast cloud of dirt and sand. Shards of wood like spears became deadly missiles. Planks of decking, five feet across whipped outward like hundred-mile an hour frisbees. Body parts rained down hundreds of feet away.

The earth shook beneath Jillybean’s feet and when the shockwave sent a blast of hot air racing across the ground with hurricane force, everyone around her cringed. She only turned her battered face into the oil-stinking wind and rocked back on her bruised heels. The ragged clothes she had picked up along her march fluttered around her skinny body. She needed a proper meal, but for the moment, the smell of a world on fire was enough to sustain her.

Eve’s laugh inside Jillybean was so high and sweet that it came bursting from her lips and she smiled with all the radiance of thirty ships on fire. In his paranoia, the Black Captain had made sure not to put all his eggs in one basket and had the rockets spread throughout his fleet. Twenty ships had disintegrated in the first millisecond and nearly three dozen more were burning like torches.

“It’s beautiful,” Eve whispered.

Emily was close enough to see the fire dancing in her mad eyes. “Hey, Jillybean? Jillybean? We still need you.”

Eve spun as Emily tugged on her ragged coat. “Sorry, but you got the wrong girl,” Eve sneered. “Besides, what do you need from her? Wait, does she have more bombs?” Her eagerness for more destruction was sickening. Eve reveled in the idea of a higher body count. “Does she? Tell me. If she doesn’t, then screw you, squirt. We don’t need her anymore. Can’t you see the Black Captain is all sorts of dead?”

“You don’t know that,” Paul Daniels said. “And even if he is, there are plenty of the rest of them. Look. You can see a whole mess of them right there.”

There was a crowd of armed men standing in a long line watching the blaze. From where Emily stood, they looked small and not very frightening, but only if you discounted their numbers. She guessed there were at least a thousand of them, and there were definitely more that she couldn’t see.

Eve shrugged them off as if they were ants she could step on. “They’re your problem, not mine. I blew up the rockets and I saved your stinking wall. Hell, I just saved your whole island. What else do you want me to do? Fight all your battles for you? Weaklings, all of you are weaklings. You’re on the brink of extinction and you look to a poor beat-up woman to save you. Pathetic.”

They gave her angry looks and she spat on the ground at their feet.

Emily stepped in before things got worse. She came to stand eye to eye with Eve. “That’s not true. We don’t want you, we want the real Queen. You know why? Because you’re nothing. Only she can save us, not you.”

Black anger filled Eve’s mind, drowning out the other voices. She shoved Emily in the chest and then advanced on her, shouting, “I am the queen! I was the first! I was always the first. Jillybean would be nothing without me.”

“Prove it,” Emily challenged. She pointed to the remote that was forgotten in Eve’s hand. “Blow up the rest of the bombs. All you need is the code.”

“There are more bombs?” Eve asked, staring at the remote in wonder. “Is the code Pi? Is that it? Jillybean is weird about that number and I don’t get it. But I know it.” Eve punched in 314 and then hit the detonate button. Nothing happened and she grew so angry that she almost smashed the remote.

Emily calmly suggested, “Maybe it’s my birthday.”

“Yours? Why would she care about your birthday?” Emily only smiled as if she was in on the “big” secret. “You aren’t going to tell me, are you?” Eve snarled. “Fine! I know this. Wait, where were we when you were born? Kansas? No, it was Nebraska. That’s where I poisoned you.”

“I was never in Nebraska.”

Confusion reigned in Eve’s eyes before they gradually cleared and gave way to sanity. “I wasn’t there when you were born.” It was Jillybean back in command of her battered, worn-out body. She lacked the burning hatred that fueled Eve and her shoulders slumped. “I think I was busy saving your dad at that time.” Her eyes flicked to Gunner.

“I know,” Emily said, speaking quickly. “I know all of it now. Everything. And I’d love to talk to you about all of it, but we still have Corsairs left. The bombs didn’t get them all. Look.”

Jillybean turned and stared back at the burning docks. Still with her back to the group, she said, “It’s as I expected. If only I had gotten here sooner.” A tired sigh drifted out of her. “Unfortunately, I doubt we were lucky enough to catch the Captain in all that. If he’s still alive, then we have at least one more battle on our hands.” Silence made her turn. What she saw was disappointing. Even with a good chunk of the Corsair fleet in flames and their rocket threat destroyed, the Islanders had no heart for battle.

“Don’t you think they’ve had enough?” Debbie Meredith asked. “Maybe they’ll leave now.”

“I’m afraid that’s just wishful thinking. The Captain needs a battle now more than ever. And he needs to win.”

Even from this distance, Jillybean could practically hear her enemy’s thoughts. He was afraid, and not of the Islanders. He was afraid of his own men and his new allies, the mountain bandits. He was right to be afraid. Jillybean understood his growing paranoia and knew it was perfectly justified.

In his Corsairs, the Captain had created a race of monsters that were barely human. They were stupid because anyone demonstrating too many smarts usually got his neck stretched. They were overly-aggressive because anyone who acted the least bit weak was singled out for castration. He had made them thoroughly evil because he knew that only a person with a good heart would ever stand up to him. And they were loyal for two reasons: he put the fear of the devil in them, and he was a proven winner.

For ten years he had been untouchable. His record as a conqueror was unblemished. He had never lost. Oh, but now that wasn’t even close to being true. Over the last few months, the Corsairs had faced setback after setback. That’s how he spoke of his catastrophic losses. They were only “setbacks” that could be expected from time to time.

Even though he made sure the blame for these setbacks was always assigned elsewhere, he knew that his men had begun to whisper.

Jillybean knew it as well. She could almost hear the words: He’s lost it. He’s done. Maybe we should get out while we can, floating on the wind…except the wind was out of the west. It smelled of earth, which meant rain was coming.

Would he fight in the rain? Yes, she decided. He would have to. His men were on the verge of mutiny and it wouldn’t take much to send them over. Yes, he definitely needed a win; a new scapegoat wouldn’t be enough this time. And he could win, easily. He had the numbers and he knew his enemy was weak.

Jillybean also needed a win. The Bainbridge army was in danger of disintegrating right in front of her. She could see from their faces that ordering a new assault was completely out of the question. This reduced her options drastically.

“Maybe we should pull back,” Wayne suggested, interrupting the flow of her thoughts. “Just a little, you know, to give us time to regroup.”

How many hundreds of you would melt away during the move? she wondered. And would it indeed buy any time? Perhaps, but not much. And if we pull back we’ll be giving them a greater opportunity to use their numbers against us. She judged correctly that a battle of maneuver would work in the Captain’s favor.

She shook her head. “I’d give my right hand for a company of Guardians right about now,” she muttered, gazing again at the Corsairs and the land in front of her. She took a deep breath of the earth-smelling air and gave Paul a brief smile. “No. Pulling back will let them out of the trap they’re in.”

“We have them trapped? How?” he asked, laughing high in his throat. “They have boats in case you didn’t notice.”

“I have noticed. Very little escapes my attention. For instance, I see that the docks have been blown to pieces. How will they load three-thousand men onto those ships with a storm approaching? And I noticed that their ships have pulled well away and to me, they don’t look eager to rush back. Which is just as well. After watching half their fleet get blown up, the Corsairs are not going to be jumping at the chance to get back on board right about now.”

A grin flashed across her face as her coat fluttered in the wind. A plan was beginning to gel in her mind. “And what about their fearless Captain? Will he cut and run with his enemy right in front of his face? How will that make him look in the eyes of his men? Like a coward, I dare say. No. The fight will happen right here. They will come to us, and we will win.” She made a fist and then grimaced. The thin bones of her fingers were taking forever to heal from her torture.

The conviction of an insane crippled woman did little to sway the Islanders. There were more calls to “Pull back.” It was code for running away.

“When I tell you we will win, it’s not just a rah-rah speech,” she told them, raising her voice. “We’ll win because we will make allies of the four elements.”

Paul leaned back, squinting at her. “Which four? There are more than four elements, right?” He looked around for support. While most of the onlookers were trying to recall ninth grade science, a few of them agreed that there were indeed more than four elements. Someone even suggested that there were close to five-hundred.

Jillybean laughed as if that was a joke, before she explained, “The ancients believed that there were only four elements: air, earth, water and fire. With these on our side, we can’t lose.”

Their skepticism ran deep, right up until Jillybean ordered them to torch the forest along the front of their lines. This stopped their whining cold.

“Did you say burn the forest?” Wayne asked in a nervous voice. The idea of being burned alive made his heart flutter.

“Yes, burn it. Fire and wind will give the Corsairs something to think about.” None of the Islanders were master tacticians, however they could all see the immediate benefit of a raging inferno being pushed along by a westerly wind, and they rushed to obey. Within minutes, fires were roaring up and down the line. The Islanders burned with abandon and, in many cases, a heartless joy. They pictured the fires washing over their enemies and leaving nothing but charred bones and ash.

The thick underbrush went up so quickly it was frightening, however the trees were slower to catch. It wasn’t until a fifteen-year-old began throwing burning branches up into the boughs that they started to ignite. His mom was also among the soldiers, and she was the only one who worried about “putting an eye out.” Everyone else joined in until the fire raged across both the sky and the ground.

As Jillybean had foreseen, the wind slowly pushed the tremendous wall of flames westward but, much to the Islanders’ disappointment, the Corsairs were not burned alive. The forest went on for only about three hundred yards before it gave way to tall grasses and then to sand that sprouted straggly weeds. The Corsairs backed away from the advancing flames, some going to stand in the Sound itself. The fire never really got close.

Still, the smoke was choking and the heat was outrageous. The Corsairs huddled in a great mass along the shoreline for two solid hours until the wind brought the rain. It came in a grey burst that soaked everyone within seconds. The land hissed and steamed as the fires withered until finally there was nothing left except a black, soggy, bog of mud and ash that stretched from the Islanders’ line to the Sound. It looked like the scorched earth was softly giving up its ghosts as pale, membranous mists.

While the fire raged, Jillybean set the Islanders to work, bringing the earth in as their last ally. They trudged and dug and hauled and by the time the fire was out they had formed a crude wall a thousand feet long. It was made from old fallen pine trees, branches, stone and dirt. It was low, barely over three feet in height, and had a slapped together feeling to it. Yet the Islanders felt secure behind their defenses. The wall, such as it was, could stop bullets and that’s all that mattered. They would be able to shoot from a safe and secure position against enemies slogging through muck that was knee-deep.

Jillybean’s “allies” gave the Islanders such a boost in confidence that they couldn’t wait for the battle to begin. They screamed increasingly inventive insults at the Corsairs, made obscene gestures and a few of the braver souls bared their rears and mooned them. Laughter ran up and down the line.

Only Jillybean, Emily and the worst of the wounded failed to join in. Once Jillybean had given the briefest of instructions to the captains concerning overlapping fields of fire, reserve tactics and logistics management—using the simplest of terms—she went to work on the wounded, starting with Gunner. She loved him fiercely and even though he seemed to be fading away, she opened him up and attacked the dozens of bleeders that were turning his insides into a red bowl of death.

The larger holes were sewn shut, while the smaller ones were cauterized using orange-tipped needles that she plucked straight from the fire. She worked as quickly as she could, but still two patients died while she kept him alive. Once he was stabilized, she went to the others. Some were beyond her help and some, like Wayne French, decided against being operated on without anesthesia.

“You can’t give me back my legs one way or the other, can you?” he asked. His spinal column had been severed; there was no chance. She shook her head. “Well, damn. I wasn’t supposed to…” His throat tightened and he could feel tears coming. Savagely he tore his sleeve across his face. The tears were an obscene and unmanly expression of self-pity. He hated them. “Put me on the line,” he growled. “Give me a gun. I can still shoot until I bleed out.”

A number of the other wounded had the same attitude. One man even hobbled away on a new stump. Jillybean had been forced to take his foot off just above the ankle.

Emily had assisted where she could, but her main concern was for her father. She propped a tarp over him and kept a fire going as close to him as she dared. She kept coming back to him right up until the Corsairs began to creep forward. With a last kiss, she hurried along next to Jillybean as she made a last-minute inspection of the line.

There was little that needed to be changed. Because the underbrush had been turned to ash, the Corsairs couldn’t actually make any surprise moves. It was going to be a slugfest with almost every advantage going to the defenders. The Corsairs had the numbers, but were burdened with the responsibility of moving forward into the teeth of a fully prepared defense.

Jillybean grinned as she watched through binoculars as three of them slid into one of the deeper bogs. They became trapped in thigh-deep mud and were stuck until a rope was found and they were pulled free. “The Black Captain is even more desperate than I expected,” she remarked. “He’s only waited long enough for the land to cool. I’m afraid he will push them very hard.”

“Will we still win like you said?” Emily asked.

Before answering, Jillybean glanced up and down the line. On one hand, she saw farmers, goat herders, school teachers and fishermen, while on the other she saw the descendants of Lexington and Concord. “Yes, all we have to do is stand our ground.”

That was one of two little bits of advice which she doled out. The second was to let them get close. The closer the better. That was it. She didn’t see the point of trying to overload them at this point in the game.

It wasn’t long before the first shot was fired. Every one of the Islanders ducked down behind the wall as if they were being targeted. Inside Jillybean, Eve laughed, braying like a donkey, and Ipes groaned. “Shush, the both of you,” Jillybean warned. Louder, she clapped her hands. “Good. Don’t waste the ammo. Let them get in close and while they’re hiding behind a tree in front of you, someone down the line is ripping into them. Remember, we work as a team. We cover each other. If you run, it means your friend down the line is going to die so, stand your ground!”

“I should find a place on the line,” Emily said. “I’d like to be over by where we left the patients.” Where we left my dad, is what she really meant.

“No. I need you with me. Eve can get a little, uh, hungry, you might say during battle. I need you to keep her at bay. Can you do that?”

Emily nodded and ducked as more bullets began to splatter into the wall. Most thudded softly, making the same sound they would when striking a man in the chest. Some found stone and screamed away.

“Let ‘em come a little closer!” Jillybean cried. The closest Corsairs were now only a hundred yards off and a few of her men were getting anxious to return fire. Too few in her mind. Hiding behind the wall was the easy part. The tough part would be when the time came to expose themselves. How many would answer the call?

Two minutes later, the roll of gunfire was almost constant as the Corsairs came trudging forward through the muck as fast as they could. They had to get closer than close. They had to actually break the line and pour through. But their sprint was the stuff of nightmares. It felt as if they were running in slow motion as the mud grew deeper with every step. Moving in combat was strangely exhausting under the best of conditions, but this was torture.

By the time the first of them was fifty yards from the little wall—to them the wall appeared laughably weak—he was staggering, flailing from side to side, his breath coming in hoarse gulps. He died a second later as he was hit by two different shooters.

“Everyone up!” Jillybean screamed. “Fire! Shoot them! Kill them! Kill them all!”

Emily was shocked to see how quickly her eyes had darkened. She pulled Jillybean down. “Focus, Jillybean. Look at me. You’re Jillybean, got it? Say it. Tell me that you’re Jillybean.”

“I know who I am.” Emily shook her once and stared hard until Jillybean said it. “I’m Jillybean. Now, let go. This is a crucial time. The Captain has weighted his attack somewhere along the line. We have to find out where before the blow lands.”

From all appearances, the Corsairs were attacking in one long, unimaginative line. For ten minutes, the drumbeat of fire neither rose nor fell. Everywhere Jillybean went, she was confronted by the same methodical shooting, the same vision of slime-covered men crawling along, using the mud as both concealment as well as cover.

Unbelievably, there was no hidden troop build-up, no crab-like shifting left or right by companies preparing for a sudden surge. The closest the Black Captain got to anything smacking of strategy was the reserve force of about four-hundred men he kept a hundred yards back. Jillybean supposed that they were waiting to exploit a breakthrough and she had her own reserve force to shadow them.

The fight was only methodical from her sterile point of view. From the view of the men and women fighting behind the wall, it was terrifying. The wall was slowly disintegrated as much from the bullets as the rain. And as it fell to ruin, the Islanders shrunk down lower and lower.

On the other side of the wall, the Corsairs who reached the fifty-yard mark realized that they were up to their necks in a real battle. The Captain had convinced them that the Islanders were weak, that they would cut and run before they even got close, that they were low on ammunition and couldn’t shoot to save their lives. Every last Corsair was certain that they would overwhelm their wimpy enemies in no time in a straight up fight.

But that was not how the fight was going. Bullets by the hundreds hissed through the rain coming from strange angles. Always from the sides. And always both sides at once, making it impossible to find real cover. The Corsairs died screaming like little girls, while beyond the wall there was almost no screaming at all. There was only the bellowing of leaders, exhorting their men to keep shooting.

It seemed as if the Islanders were bulletproof. The truth was far different. The Islanders rarely exposed more than just their head and part of a shoulder. When they were hit, it was almost always a head shot and was almost always immediately fatal. Still, the relative silence it was unnerving to the individual Corsair who was surrounded by the black mud, grey bodies and deep red blood.

Those pushing up from behind found that the best cover available to them was to huddle in the shadow of corpses piled one on top of the other.

It was a horror, but still they fought, knowing that they were bigger, stronger, faster, and better in all ways compared to the Islanders. They had been bullies for so long that their supremacy was imprinted on their black hearts. They couldn’t lose. And so the guns roared back and forth without let up. The number of defenders grew thin in spots and Jillybean was forced to split up her reserves to fill the holes.

On the other side, the Black Captain saw his chance and sent in his four hundred. They were rested and had the rain not been coming down in sheets, they might have been able to cover the hundred yards in less than a minute. The slop was too thick for a sprint, and they could only crawl forward, facing a withering unrelenting fire. When they finally got close enough to really see the wall, most of them found that their guns were so choked with mud that they jammed after every shot.

To clear their weapons required them to roll to one side or the other and yank back on the charging handle. It made them obvious targets and, as they began to die by the score, their assault was brought to a dead stop.

From that moment on, it was a new battle. It was the battle of logistics. With their wall and the firm ground under their feet, the Islanders could shuttle men and ammunition anywhere along the line. The Corsairs could not. If someone ran out of ammunition, their only choice was to beg for bullets from the men around him. Greed was as ingrained in them as their cruelty, and few would part with so much as a single round.

Men with empty guns began to squirm back in the direction they had come. Then the wounded started leaving. Many of the mountain bandits decided that they had backed the losing side and they started crawling away as well. The trickle of retreating men became a flood.

“We have to attack!” Jillybean cried, seeing her chance to end the war. An attack, even a small one, could be the final straw that broke the Corsairs’ backs. “Come on! Right this minute,” she yelled to Paul Daniels, the nearest captain. “Get your men up. Let’s go!” She was wild-eyed and frantic with haste. The mud would slow them down as well and she didn’t want to give the Corsairs time to breathe, let alone think.

When no one moved, she ran to the closest of the Islanders and tried to pull her to her feet. “Get up! Get up!” she screamed.

Emily almost tackled Jillybean. “Stop. You’re Jillybean. Look at me. Say it. I’m Jillybean.”

“I know who I am. Let go, this instant. Emily, look at them. They’re beaten. They’re crawling for their lives. Now’s the time to strike. Quick before they rally. We have to…” She was cut off as the Islanders began to cheer. They were only then realizing that they had won.

They danced, and splashed in the rain, and hugged each other in perfect joy. The one thing they did not do was listen to Jillybean. No one wanted to fight anymore and couldn’t the crazy girl see the Corsairs rushing to board their boats? Didn’t she realize the war was over?

They lied to themselves and the moment passed. The Corsairs slipped away and the war had not ended.

Chapter 40

San Francisco Bay

When the Harbinger’s mast fell across her deck, something broke inside Jenn Lockhart, Queen of the Bay. It was the last of her innocence she assumed, since all she felt inside her was a seething rage the likes of which she had never felt before.

“Someone find the damned Bishop and tell him to pray harder! Get every Guardian up here. They need to get closer to God, because whatever they’re doing is not working.”

Donna Polston tried to calm her down. She came up close and whispered, “We can’t turn on each other. You know that. We have to think of something.”

“We have to think of something?” Jenn cried, pushing the older woman away. “No! You think of something, Donna. And you Guardians say your prayers like good little morons. And Shaina, you can just sit there looking stupid because that’s all you’re going to do anyway.”

Shaina stepped back, her eyes filling with tears. Donna put an arm around her shoulders and glared at Jenn. “What about you? What are you going to do? You’re supposed to be queen. We’re supposed to look to you for answers.”

“I don’t have answers,” Jenn answered, her voice cold as the wind stealing past her long black coat. “I only have the truth. What I’m going to do is watch the man I love die and then, when the Corsairs come, I’ll hang myself in a cell down in the dungeons.”

Donna was taken aback by the coldness in Jenn’s voice. She wasn’t lying. “That’s a coward’s way out,” Donna challenged.

“What would you have me do? Fight them myself? Should I order the children to throw rocks at them as they come ashore? Should I have the women cut off their own breasts to keep them from being raped to death?” Donna dropped her gaze. “Look at me, Donna! You can’t call me a coward and then not face the truth. Mike was our only hope.”

Silence reigned across the prison roof. Two dozen people stood mutely, watching their queen fall to pieces. “I’m sorry, I’m so stupid,” Shaina whispered. “I d-don’t mean to be but it just happens. And Mike was never our only hope. It was always you, because you’re so great. You have powers. Everyone knows that.”

Jenn’s heart was still like ice. Far out on the bay she could see the catamaran coming closer to the stricken Harbinger and she knew that in seconds there would be a few final shots and that would be it for the boy she had fallen head over heels for. And that would be it for her people.

“I don’t have powers, Shaina. Sometimes I see signs. That’s it.” And just then the signs all pointed to death and torture. She shook her head, knowing that wasn’t right. There were no signs to be read as far as she could tell, and if there were, her mind was closed and her heart was dying second by second. Besides, if there were signs, what could they possibly show her? Signs could not bend reality.

“Sorry Shaina, I can’t turn ants into soldiers or wishes into ships.” She didn’t even have normal everyday powers. Even if Mike could make it back, she could not fix a belly wound. He would still die. It would just be a slower, drawn-out death. Her eyes dropped and her heart sank.

“But if you could…” Shaina began.

Furiously, Jenn kicked a spray of rocks from the roof. “But I can’t!” She scooped up a handful of the white rocks and was close to hurling them into the woman’s face. Like a child, Shaina cringed from her anger. Seeing her fear killed the fury roiling inside Jenn’s heart. There’s going to be enough fear without me making it worse, she thought. “I’m sorry, Shaina.”

The stick-thin girl smiled through her tears. It was the saddest thing Jenn had ever seen. Shaina didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. She only wanted to be happy. Jenn showed her the rocks. “If I could, I’d turn these into ships and we’d be safe.” She threw the rocks high in the air. At the top of their arc, they were like the stars, small and sparkling against a black background, but as they fell and passed in front of Jenn, they blurred.

They should have remained white against a dark background but instead they were white on white.

“What?” Jenn whispered, seeing what the white background was. There were ships—white ones with great silken sails—forging across the bay. They were Guardian ships, she realized in that instant. How did they get past the bridge?

Just as this thought crossed her mind, the rocks she had thrown in the air rattled as they struck the stones at the base of the prison wall, and as they did, there came an answering rattle: the distant pop, pop, pop of rifle fire. Her head swung to the Golden Gate Bridge where a battle was even then erupting on the south end.

“Did you do that?” Shaina asked, as she stared in awe at the fifteen ships.

She didn’t see Jenn shaking her head without conviction. What she was seeing was impossible. The Guardian fleet was heading northeast. If they had somehow slipped beneath the bridge, they would’ve been heading straight east to join the battle. How did they get into the bay at all?

The answer lay in Knights Sergeant Troy Holt’s audacious plan to gain access to the bay by land. Earlier that day he and sixty others had trekked to every marina within twenty-five miles, collecting boat trailers that could handle fifty-foot long ships. These were exceedingly rare. Another group had prepared the ships for travel, which meant removing the sails and dismasting them. A third group picked out the best route through a trashed-out city that still bore the scars from a major earthquake. A fourth group spent the day ringing bells, banging drums and running for their lives as they tried to shift as many zombies as they could out of the city. And the final group made preparations to attack the southern ramps to the bridge.

It was a long dangerous day for everyone, and the night was expected to be twice as bad.

As soon as the sun had set, the Guardians went into action, hauling the ships out of the water and heaving them through the southern stretch of the city. It was no easy task as the lightest of their boats came in at twelve tons. No one complained and no one even considered pausing for a break. When they had crossed over the peninsula and reached the bay, their labors doubled. The ships had to be made sailable in record time.

Although the Guardians weren’t the most imaginative sailors, they worked tirelessly until the masts were raised and the sails were roped into place. Once they were done they paused only for a quick prayer and to split into two teams: one to take the bridge, the other to throw themselves at the remaining Corsair ships, no matter the cost.

Troy was put in command of the second group and chose the forty-eight foot Lamb of God as his flagship. It was neither the biggest nor the flashiest of their ships, but its captain was feverish with pneumonia and Troy saw no need to displace another captain. The Lamb was a fine ship and a nifty little sailor. It had been brand spanking new on the day the first zombie arrived in the US and still sparkled. Its winch and pulley steering system made running the ship a breeze and Troy found himself with little to do as they ran first northwest as close to the wind as they could.

With the battle raging, Troy threw caution to the wind and charged through the uncharted waters at breakneck speed. When he finally skirted Telegraph Hill and shot into the northern part of the bay, he was shocked to see the fires raging across the water, the wall of smoke to the east, the carcasses of ships drifting on the swell—and where was the ugly barge they called the Floating Fortress?

“What is all that?” one of his Guardians asked, parroting his thoughts. It was all that remained of the two fleets.

Gunfire to their left showed that there were still ships left to fight. Instead of attempting to “over command” Troy simply said to his captains, “Go at them in twos and don’t stop firing until they beg for mercy.”

This had barely spread to the last of the fifteen ships when firing broke out on the approach to the bridge. Prayers were whispered across the fleet. It was assumed that the Guardians tasked with retaking the bridge would have the harder time of it, and they might have except that the seventy Corsairs weren’t in their painfully dug bunkers as expected. Instead, they were lined up along the far edge of the onramp watching the sea battle.

Having left their weapons in the bunkers, most of them weren’t even properly armed. The Guardians were on them in a flash and overwhelmed them so quickly that it was hard to call it a real battle. It sure made the Corsairs along the center of the span wonder if it hadn’t been just a few zombies that had caused the shooting.

They too were watching the sea battle and were only just noticing the new fleet. Chills broke out at the sight of the majestic white sails. To them the Guardian fleet looked less like ships as they did a flock of huge avenging angels and there was no pretending what their presence would do to the fate of the battle.

“To the south! Look to the south!” they screamed, jumping up and down, pointing as the white ships raced on. The Corsairs on the black ships were oblivious to the danger coming up from behind. They were night blind because of the fires around them, and they had tunnel vision as they saw only victory. They thought the cries from the bridge were their friends cheering them on.

Neither group of Corsairs was aware of the danger until it was too late. On the bridge, the Guardians outnumbered their opponents six to one, and with the element of surprise thrown in, the fight was over just as fast as the last.

The white fleet had much stiffer resistance to overcome, but when they saw the bodies of their fellow Guardians floating in the water, their faces so riddled with bullets as to be unrecognizable, an unbridled fury swept them. They charged down on the Corsairs without regard to their own safety. In some cases captains rammed the Corsairs and boarded their ships from two sides, killing anyone who didn’t immediately throw down their rifles.

Troy was not immune to the rage. When he saw the Harbinger, with the Queen’s flag dragging through the water from the broken mast, being blasted unnecessarily, he went to the wheel and aimed the Lamb of God squarely between the twin hulls of the catamaran.

“We’re boarding her,” he told his crew. No other instructions were needed. The black look was all that was needed to let the men know they wouldn’t be taking prisoners. In seconds, they were on top of the ship, smashing up under the raised platform that sat between the twin hulls. The shock of the collision knocked the six Corsairs on board off their feet.

In his blood fury, Troy bordered the cat with spear in hand instead of his M4, and went straight for the Corsair commander. The man was just climbing to his feet, his eyes filled with wicked malice, his mouth spitting foul words one after another. He saw Troy coming and leveled his rifle just as the Guardians came over the rail with roars of anger. The spear was long and not the quickest of weapons. Troy was only then bringing it to bear when the captain fired. The bullet kissed off the outer edge of Troy’s armored vest and then cut a velvet-red line along the inner aspect of his arm. Blood ran like water from the wound.

The Corsair lined up a second shot, but it never came. A minute before, he had been gleefully firing his gun into the stricken Harbinger. Twenty-nine times in fact and now his gun was as empty as his heart.

Troy filled that heart with twice-blessed steel. He pinned the man to the mast even as his Guardians swept the ship with bullets. In seconds, the only Corsairs left on the cat were dead Corsairs. Troy slashed down the black flag to cheers that soon were taken up by his entire fleet. The few Corsair ships left that hadn’t been targeted in the first attack were trying to flee. Only three made it to the coast of Angel Island.

By then the Guardians on the bridge had thrown the Corsairs back from the north end of the bridge. This area had been stripped of defenders earlier in the night and the fight was, once again, easier than expected. The bridge had been won, but not secured. The Guardian’s lacked the manpower to assault Battery Spencer on the Marin Headlands which overlooked the bridge.

The Corsairs did not counterattack as they should have when three-hundred of them could have destroyed thirty knights. They were stricken with fear as the Queen’s forces appeared victorious everywhere. The moment soon passed and the Guardian commander ordered fires to be lit along the bridge to show the bay that it had been taken back. An immense explosion of joy swept Alcatraz from one end of the rock to the other. The cheering could be heard on the bridge as well as on Angel Island where the Corsairs were just realizing that they had lost everything.

Only two people on Alcatraz were silent. The first was Denise Woodruff, who was nervously pinning her hair back with shaking hands. She knew the butcher’s bill was going to be long, and she hated what lay in store for her and the poor wounded soldiers. There would be too many, and she had almost nothing in the way of supplies left. Twine and yarn would have to take the place of proper surgical thread. IV tubing would replace actual drainage devices, and torn up boiled sheets would have to make do instead of real bandages.

The Queen was the other. She dreaded the moment the Harbinger was towed across the bay and tied to the dock to keep her from sinking. Mike Gunter would be on her, perhaps wrapped in a blanket from head to toe, or maybe still sitting on the captain’s chair, his head flopped to one side and his blood an inch deep across the deck.

Few people knew that Mike had been gut sho. For those that didn’t, they couldn’t understand their queen’s reluctance to celebrate. This was especially true in light of the fact that it was common knowledge that it was she who had won the battle almost singlehandedly. The news of the victory sped around the island in exactly one minute. The fact that Jenn had “conjured” the Guardian fleet from a handful of rocks took four minutes longer.

Although there had been twenty-three witnesses to the fortuitously timed rock tossing, nearly a hundred people swore on their mother’s graves that they had seen it first hand. And they all swore that Jenn had said, “I can turn these rocks into ships.”

Jenn caught only snatches of the silly rumor and could not find the energy to care. She watched as the white fleet sailed back and forth, rescuing sailors from the cold water of the bay and saving those ships that could be salvaged. Only gradually did the ships come in and, as she and Denise had feared, they were filled with wounded men. Many of them were Corsairs.

Coldly, Jenn ordered them to be laid in the barren prison cells. “We’ll get to them, if we have time,” she said. Just then, her heart was a black hunk of coal.

As much as she wished she could hang around the dock and wait for word about her love, she could not leave Denise alone to handle the wounded. The two went right to work, doing what little their incomplete training would allow. Sixteen volunteers helped to mop up blood, hold lanterns and remove corpses from the operating room. Many died while waiting their turn, but enough died on the operating tables that Denise cried as she worked.

Jenn held back. She didn’t dare cry, knowing that if she started she might never stop. As she worked her anxiety mounted with every new patient brought into the operating room. Each time she expected it to be Mike. Each time it wasn’t, she didn’t know whether to be happy or crushed.

When he was finally brought in, there was no need to ask who it was beneath the blood. The room went stone quiet. Even the dying held in their moans out of respect for their captain. The dying knew who had truly won the day and it hadn’t been either the Queen or Knights Sergeant Troy Holt. It had been Mike and those that had died with him. They had sacrificed everything for the chance at winning.

“Through there,” Jenn ordered, pointing at the other door in the room. “Denise, take over here.” To leave a patient biting on a leather strap in the middle of surgery was one of the worst things a person could do. Perhaps the only thing worse was hoarding supplies for personal reasons, and she had done that, too. The day before the battle she had Shaina create a secondary operating room, one that was designed for only one patient: Mike Gunter.

She’d had a feeling it would be needed even as she sent him off.

Jenn lit the lanterns and stared at her love’s broken body. He was alive, but only barely. “Someone fetch Donna. Everyone else out.” She didn’t need an audience as she cut away his clothing. Right away she saw that he was going to die. He had been shot four times; three were through flesh and muscle and were not life threatening. The fourth went through the right side of his abdomen and out his lower back.

“No,” she whispered. His liver had been nicked and two loops of intestines holed, but it was his right kidney that scared her. About a quarter of it was missing. She had no idea how to fix a kidney. When Donna arrived, Jenn pointed to a drawer of a cabinet. “Jillybean’s med books. See what it says about fixing a kidney.”

While Donna did that, Jenn put in two large bore IVs and then went to work on the lesser gunshot wounds. Small bleeders were cauterized, large ones tied off. The wounds were cleaned and bandaged one after another, and still Donna pored over the books.

Finally, she looked up in distress. “These books, they’re not written normal. They don’t make any sense. It doesn’t really say…say anything that I understand. Look.”

The sixteen-year-old queen gazed at the diagrams and the long foreign looking words in growing fear. “What about surgery? What does it say about that?”

It said too much and none of it made sense. Even Jillybean’s handwritten notes in the margins only made things more bewildering. In the end, Jenn was forced to open Mike up and sew here and there whenever she saw a torn artery or vein, knowing that she really wasn’t saving his life; she was only prolonging it.

It might have been kinder for both of them if she simply snipped his exposed descending aorta.

When she finally left his bedside, it was full light out. Denise was still struggling to catch up and the line of patients seemed just as long as it had when Mike had been brought in. “I need just a moment,” she told Denise and then left to feel the sun on her face.

The air was strangely quiet and the island had a hangover feel to it. Few people were up and about. Those that passed her either gawked in awe or knelt swiftly and told her how great she was. She didn’t feel great. She felt low in spirits, exhausted to the core and convinced Mike would die if he didn’t get real help. The same was true with dozens of others.

Without guidance, her feet followed their usual route to the top of the prison. At once her eyes were drawn to the Golden Gate where her flag was proudly flying from both towers. Off to the north were the three Corsair ships. They were shuttling men from Angel Island. It was being abandoned. She bent over the telescope and saw long lines of Corsairs heading north. Leaderless, they could think of nothing better to do than to walk back home.

Closer, practically beneath her feet, were the docks. She counted forty-six ships almost evenly divided between black and white.

“How did so many survive?” she murmured. Some had only barely survived the battle. At least ten of them were being kept from sinking only because they were lashed to the dock and were being pumped dry by prisoners. The Harbinger was perhaps the worst of these. The ship looked as bad off as her captain.

“I want her saved,” she told the closest person. “I want new sails and rope and whatever she needs. She’s a good ship.”

It was only when she saw the Bishop’s outthrust belly out of the corner of her eye that she realized who she’d been talking to. “Yes, she is,” he said. His voice was rough and his eyes sat in deep fleshy bags. “You like her because of her name I suppose?” She frowned and he guessed correctly that she didn’t know the meaning of the word. “A harbinger is a portent of things to come. An omen in other words.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s a good name.” And if she could be fixed could her captain be as well? “Yes,” she said again, this time answering her own question. Mike could be fixed. That was a fact in her mind. Not fixed by her, no that had been made evident. But he could be saved by only one person in a thousand miles—the “Girl Doctor.” Jillybean could do it.

“May I ask a favor of you, your Excellence? In one hour can you wake everyone on the island? I’m going to need all hands on deck. Those ships will need to be ready to sail by tomorrow.”

He shot her a look of surprise. “Why would you have a need of a fleet so soon after a great victory?” He paused only half a breath before going on. “Your people are tired. They’re entitled to a…”

“Many of my people are grievously hurt,” she said, speaking right over him. “Over a hundred by my last count. Most of them will die no matter what I do. But there is one person who can save them.”

“Ah, yes. Her.” His chins jiggled as he went up and down on toes. “You’ve always had an amazing faith in the old queen. Justified or not, the real question should be, why on earth would the Black Captain give her up? Forty ships, even packed with men wouldn’t scare him.”

He was right. Forty ships might mean nothing to him, if he wasn’t also dealing with Bainbridge. “Perhaps, but it also might be the final straw that breaks his back. It’s my guess that when he sees that big catamaran with my white and gold flag flying over it, leading forty ships straight into his harbor, he’ll be plenty scared. It’ll be all the proof I need to show that I’ve destroyed his fleet and crushed his army.”

“I’ll grant you that he should be afraid,” the Bishop conceded. “But will he just give her up? I doubt it. He’ll want something in return.”

“I’m sure he will. It’s why I plan to trade myself for Jillybean.” The Bishop had been about to go back up on his toes when she said this and was so shocked that he stumbled in place. Jenn caught his arm. “Yes, me. And I think he’ll go for it. After all, I’m new, I’m sane, and I’m much more of a threat compared to the girl he’s been torturing for the last few weeks.”

The Bishop started shaking his bald head. “But…”

She silenced him with a snap of her fingers. “There will be no argument on this. I have spoken.”

He sucked in a long, slow breath, held it, ready to spew a dozen arguments, and then let it go in a tired sigh. Her face had become stone and her eyes cold with determination. He would not be able to change her mind, that was obvious, and with her hold on the people utterly cemented after the victory and the strange circumstances that led up to it, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to change anyone else’s either. He bowed from the shoulders.

“Thank you. Now if you’ll carry out my request, I would greatly appreciate it.” He turned to go but she stopped him with a word. “Your Excellency? One more thing. To me she is not the ‘Old Queen.’ She has always been my queen. She has always been greater than me in every way. I want you to remember that…when I’m gone.”

Chapter 41

Bainbridge Island, Washington

“The war is not over,” Jillybean stated with quiet intensity. Her eyes no longer held the least bit of white. Surrounding the marvelous blue was an intense red. Although the actual mortality rate among their casualties had been staggeringly high, there had been enough wounded to keep her at the operating table around the clock. She didn’t know what day it was. Worse, she could barely keep track of who she was at any given moment.

She left it up to Emily and Neil to keep Eve away. When Ipes was in charge, he was punch-drunk and fretted about the state of her body, constantly suggesting she be “groomed,” something no one understood. When Sadie was in charge, she went immediately to sleep and if shaken, she would whisper, “Five more minutes, mom.” She never got the five minutes. Jillybean would usually come gasping awake, filled with guilt that she was sleeping while people were dying.

Deanna, who was running on fumes herself, had fully expected Jillybean to sow doom and gloom. She smiled as a politician should and told her, “It’s over for us. We won thanks to you, and we’re very grateful for all you’ve done and all you’re doing for the wounded. Perhaps you should take a break. Lord knows you need it and deserve it.”

Jillybean rubbed the grit from her eyes before she brushed the idea of resting aside. “We won a battle, not the war. As long as he remains alive and in power, he’s a threat to Bainbridge.” Deanna’s practiced smile remained undimmed and Jillybean added, “As long as he’s alive he’s also a threat to you, and to Emily. You do understand that he could have had her killed at any time in the last five years. Throttled in her sleep. Poisoned. Her throat slit from ear to ear. This is what we can look forward to, and this time, I don’t think he’ll wait.”

Deanna’s smile had disappeared. She drew back from the table, her eyes flicking to her daughter’s face. Emily was tight-lipped at the suggestion that she might have her throat slit. As horrible as the idea was, Deanna knew that carrying on the war would be worse. More battles, more corpses, more grieving mothers. She clung to the notion of peace. “We have no proof he’ll do anything like that.”

“I’m proof,” Neil Martin noted, pointing at his grey face. He was dressed in a teal sweater vest, which matched his crocs, dark blue Jordache jeans, and a Seattle Mariners baseball cap that hid the hideous gash across his hairline. Emily had finally sewn his scalp back in place, but her hand at stitching made him look like a small version of Frankenstein’s monster trying to pass himself off as a soccer-dad.

“He’s done it before and now he has more incentive to go after you,” Neil said, scratching up under the baseball cap. “When he strikes again, he will strike at the head.”

“Then it’ll be Jillybean he goes after,” Deanna answered. “She’s the brains around here. You should be worried about yourself.”

Jillybean demonstrated her level of fear by yawning like a cave bear. “I suppose I am a little frightened,” she admitted. “If he’s animated by revenge rather than victory and self-preservation, I would be the likely target. But he’s more of a rational thinker than an emotional one, and as such he will target you, Deanna. He may fear me as a military leader, but he knows that I’m not loved as you are. I do not inspire the people of Bainbridge like you do. I could never motivate the entire population of the island to march across Washington and attack Hoquiam like you could.”

Deanna jerked in her chair. “Hold on. You want us to attack? After everything that’s gone on? Oh, Jillybean.” She began shaking her head, sadly. “Why? Tell me why…no, first tell me how. How can we possibly win? You see how they are. Our people are not warriors. Yes, they might have won this battle, but it took everything they had and it left them dry. I can tell you right now they aren’t going anywhere.”

Another yawn, this one springing tears to Jillybean’s eyes. It went on and on, and when it was finally done Jillybean swayed in her seat. It took her a second to remember where they were in the conversation. “Oh, right, attacking. They’ll do it, but only if you demand it. And if they think I have a foolproof plan. And most especially they will when they see all the explosives we have.”

Deanna jerked a second time. She shot a glance at the closed door of her office before she hunched low and hissed, “Watch what you’re saying. If anyone found out that you had all those bombs squirreled away in the wall, they might hang you alongside Deberha. Speaking of which.” She checked her watch and saw that she was going to be late for the execution. There had been no reason to delay the sentence, just like there had been no real reason to delay the trial. The battle hadn’t been over an hour before Deanna held a five-minute trial and condemned Deberha Perkins to death for her crimes. Mary Page and Rod McCade received banishment as their punishments.

“Forget Deberha for the moment,” Jillybean said. “Don’t worry about the explosives. We’ll tell everyone that I had the components already and that it was just a matter of assembling them. No one will care. In fact, they’ll be relieved we have them. And, before you ask, I don’t have a plan. Not one set in concrete. I have ideas, however, and none of them involve sitting around while the Captain recoups his strength and sends assassins after us. If you think our people are weak now, what will they be like when you and I are dead? Who will lead then? Emily? She’s the only person I trust to do the job…”

Neil harrumphed her, hawking up something black and chewy in the process. Much to everyone’s discomfort, he swallowed it as he folded his arms across his sweater vest in indignation. Jillybean sighed. “No offense, Neil, but you’ll never be voted in as governor. We have to look at this realistically. When Deanna is murdered, the position of governor will cease to exist. Without leadership it will be only a matter of time before people start leaving or worse start turning to the Corsairs. This is the reality of our situation. It’s why we need to strike now. According to the prisoners Neil was kind enough to question with such thoroughness, the Captain has split his forces, half to attack us and half to attack the queen in the south.”

She’s dead, you know, Eve whispered. You left her without an army or a navy, and no one to turn to. Yes, she’s long dead. And so are those useless Guardians. We both know how weak they were. They’re all dead because of you, Jilly. Because you were the weakest of all.

“Shut up,” Jillybean whispered, not wanting to hear the truth, not wanting to picture the Corsairs swarming over the Golden Gate Bridge and sailing through San Francisco bay, firing torpedoes into the outgunned and outnumbered Guardian ships. She took a deep breath and went on, “Like I said, half the Corsairs went south and no matter what anyone says, Alcatraz can only be starved out and that will take time. Weeks. Making this our best opportunity, Deanna. You saw how the Corsairs left. We chased them out of the Sound with their tails between their legs. We have their ammo and all of their supplies. We’re practically ready to start marching on them this second.”

“And then what?” Deanna asked. “We march out to Hoquiam and then?”

“Then we’ll figure it out,” Jillybean snapped, her eyes darkening.

Emily cleared her throat and put her hand on top of Jillybean’s. “I think we should listen to her. She’s been right about all of this from the start. But if you want another opinion we can ask Gunner. He’s a genius when it comes to fighting and strategy and that sort of thing, and if he hadn’t been hurt, he could have won that battle, too.”

“Gunner? No. I don’t want to bother him. He’s…” She had been about to say On death’s door, but as her daughter had some sort of strange preoccupation with him, she amended her words to, “He’s still recovering.”

“Talk to him,” Emily insisted. “You owe him that.”

Deanna saw the same stubborn look in her eye that her father used to have and knew that simply giving in would save her from having to hear Emily say, “But mom!” every five minutes as she came up with each new reason why she should go bother a dying man. She agreed but only if she was allowed to go alone and if Jillybean went to sleep for at least two hours.

The stipulations were agreed to and as Emily and Neil frog-marched a drooping Jillybean to the bed she had left months before in the middle of the night, Deanna went to the crowded, chlorine-smelling clinic. A person might have expected it to be a somber place filled with the moans of the dying, instead it was bright and buzzing.

Jillybean hadn’t just encouraged visitation of the wounded, she had practically demanded it of friends and family, and the turnout was amazing. There were three visitors for every patient and with the endless chatter the clinic felt more like a bar than a hospital. A battle had been won against great odds and everyone had a story to tell.

Only one patient was without visitors: Gunner. He had six different tubes running in and out of him, and he hated them all. Even then, so sound asleep that Deanna’s knock went unheard, he wore a scowl so fierce that it made her hesitate to touch him, fearing that he would come awake like an angry bear and tear himself wide open.

She found herself staring at his ruined face. It was a face that might have been handsome once, long before. Now, it stirred only pity and revulsion in her. Neither feeling was fair to him. If Emily’s many stories of Gunner were true, he had the heart of a knight and that should be what counted.

Her presence woke him. His eyes cracked and immediately he felt naked without his mask. He started to pull the sheet up to cover himself, but she put her hand on his, stopping him.

“Weren’t we always taught that it’s what’s on the inside that counts?” she said. Her touch was both soft and electrifying. She smiled when he sucked in his breath. “You act like a boy with a crush. I hate to burst your bubble, but I’m spoken for.”

She moved her hand to the rail, and when she did, he slid the sheet up so that only one eye showed. “Oh yeah? Is this love of yours anyone I know?” His voice was rough and thick with congealing blood.

“I think you might have crossed paths with him long ago. I don’t really want to talk about the past. It’s the future I want to talk about.” His single eye showed suspicion. “It’s not about you. It’s about me. Will the Black Captain come after me? You know, with another assassin?”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation on his part. “He underestimated you before. He thought you were just a politician. Now he knows that you’re a real leader. So, yeah, he’ll want to kill you. With you out of the picture, who will the people turn to? Certainly not Neil or what remains of your council. Emily is too young and Jillybean is too crazy.”

Deanna didn’t like how this was going. “Jillybean is much more of a threat. She’s a queen, or she was one at least. She could lead.”

Gunner looked away, considering the idea. “No,” he said, at last. “We’ve become too soft for her. We…I mean you people won’t accept her until it’s too late.”

“She wants me to attack Hoquiam,” Deanna whispered, leaning in closer to his bedside. She smelled of flowers and soap which had Gunner blinking and trying hard to focus on her words. “She thinks we should march soon, probably tomorrow at the latest. That’s crazy, right? You led these people. You know they won’t storm a wall or a barricade or whatever they have over there. It’ll be a slaughter.”

“Here’s what I know for a fact: we should trust her.” He took a phlegmy breath and went on, his words slowly losing energy. “We’ve always been able to trust her. And what’s more important, the Corsairs are afraid of her. At least they should be.” He coughed softly and laughed even softer, “Fire. I should have thought of that.” His eyes were losing focus and Deanna remained still until he faded back into sleep.

She sat there turning his words over in her mind and slowly came to accept that maybe Jillybean was right. They couldn’t just sit around and wait for the Corsairs to return. As much as the idea frightened her, attacking might be the best course of action. There was only one problem: how could she convince her people? What combination of words could possibly sway them? What appeal could she make to get them to storm the lair of the Corsairs?

After five minutes of running it through her mind, she could think of nothing.

A check of her watch showed that her time had run out. Deberha was due to be hung and it was only right that the person who had sentenced her be present when the sentence was carried out. Slipping from the room, she made her way to a field out beyond the high school where the execution was to take place. The field held a single apple tree that hadn’t borne fruit in years.

Deberha was already standing on an old dining room table that had been dragged out there for this one purpose. Her hands tied behind her back, and a rope hung around her neck. The other end of the rope was trussed to a heavy limb that jutted from the trunk twelve feet off the ground. Around the tree was most of the population of the island. Unlike the crowd in the clinic, these people were silent. Their anger filled the field making the air under the tree feel stagnant and warm.

Deanna pushed through the crowd and came to stand in front of the person she had condemned. “Any last words?” Deberha shook her head without looking up from the ground. Her face was set in a harsh, miserable grimace. Deanna was unmoved by it. “Have you prayed?” Deberha nodded. Deanna stared at her for a long time before asking a final question. “Will the Captain try to kill me again?”

The question caught Deberha off guard; her head snapped up and she looked into Deanna’s face. It seemed to take a lot out of her, but she nodded and said, “Yeah, he will,” in a trembling voice. This set off a ripple of whispers that spread outward from the tree.

It also set off a ripple of fear through Deanna. Five people in a row had now predicted her death.

It made her want to hide because who knew if there were more spies amongst the crowd. One thing she had learned from all of this was that there was no hiding from the Black Captain. He had to be dealt with.

“The war is not over,” she said in a carrying voice. “As much as I wish it was, we’re not done. The Black Captain will not stop. He will come after me. He will come after Jillybean. He will come after the next governor. He will come after anyone who dares to defy him. He will be back, with more rockets and more ships. This is our choice: do we wait until he kills our leaders and tears down our walls or do we take the fight to him?”

This was met with complete silence. It seemed like a question of that magnitude was beyond them. They were going to leave it to her to answer her own question. “Both Gunner and Jillybean urged me to take the fight to the Captain, now that he’s weak. Half his fleet is in the south and we have defeated his other half. And…and…I think they’re right. Now is the time.” This sent out a new and louder ripple.

Deanna couldn’t let the ripple grow into a wave. “We have to end this once and for all!” she practically cried, her voice gaining strength now that she had made her decision. “We will march on Hoquiam, and heaven help anyone who gets in our way.” She glanced up at Deberha, cocked a sharp eyebrow at her and then pushed the table over. The rope twanged tight. Deanna didn’t watch as Deberha began to kick, the rope digging into her throat, slowly choking her to death.

Without a glance back, she marched to the Governor’s mansion and began writing out orders. They came streaming out every few minutes and it wasn’t long before the field was empty save for Deberha’s fly-covered body.

The army of Bainbridge left the next day, fifteen-hundred strong. Sixteen-hundred if the blindfolded prisoners were counted. These were the walking wounded who had been left behind by the Black Captain. He had also left behind nearly a thousand dead and dying bodies. The dying had been sent on with hammer blows—supposedly. A team had been sent among them but whether they actually smashed any heads wasn’t known. They didn’t talk about it.

It was a slow, cumbersome march. Zombie teams had to be sent ahead to light fires in order to tempt as many of the beasts out of the way as possible. Still a few lurked up in the hills and everyone had to be on guard as the giants came charging down without warning, striking anywhere along the line of marchers. At least the danger kept the formation compact and kept anyone from straggling.

Fair or not, the blindfolded Corsairs were chained in groups of ten and placed in front and on the outer edges of the column. Sixteen were killed during the three day trek.

Those that lived were fed a steady diet of misinformation. Instead of an army of fifteen-hundred men and women of dubious courage, the Corsairs were told that there were four-thousand battle-hardened men surrounding them. They were told that Jillybean had created hundreds of rockets all larger than the ones used by the Corsairs. They were told that special suicide bombers would take out the barbed-wire and the concrete pillboxes. They were told that surrender was their only option.

Jillybean planned on trading the wounded for slaves, knowing that wounded would spread these lies throughout Hoquiam to weaken the Corsairs’ resolve. It was a fine strategy that had a secondary motive. Because everyone was in on the “Big lie” almost everyone did their best not to let their fear show. In fact, some had to be told to tone down the tall tales. Who would believe they had tanks and artillery?

The talk of bombs and giant armies unnerved the Corsairs, but it was the talk of “The Queen” that made them scared. There were some among them who had been there when she had thrashed their army as it attempted to take the Marin Headlands. Others had been hunted by her on Treasure Island when she had first started using smoke. A few of them had fought with her against their own people and still others had helped dig the ditch that had undercut the Guardian’s great wall.

They all agreed that she couldn’t be defeated.

Had she been there, she would have helped feed their paranoia. Instead, she was on the Dead Fish, sailing the long way around. The journey to Bainbridge had taken its toll on her legs. The hairline fractures had grown and she needed a cast on her left leg. She settled for proper crutches.

With her were Neil and Gunner as well as a crew of four. They were a nervous crew and for good reason. Neil was no longer the sweet, somewhat shy little man they had known for years. He was now a zombie. Sure, he was a croc-wearing, talking zombie, but, like a great white shark in a sombrero, he was still dangerous. To them Gunner wasn’t much better. He was a growly human/bear combo that filled a spittoon with blood every couple of hours and looked as though he would tear someone’s arm off if he was in a bad mood—and he was always in a bad mood. Jillybean, who they had always known to be a little crazy, had graduated into a full-blown loon. She carried on frequent conversations with herself about how much she would like to kill everyone on board the ship. And, to top it all off, the Dead Fish’s hull was crammed with explosives. A few thousand pounds worth.

“Enough to vaporize the ship in a blink,” Eve was fond of saying. She would get real enjoyment playing with a detonator and watching them squirm.

Neil could barely control her. Jillybean’s nerves were frayed to the breaking point. She was going back to the city where she’d been tortured for days on end, and in her heart she feared that no army of any size was going to unseat the Black Captain from his wicked throne.

Because her army lacked the teeth to make a real assault against Hoquiam, it was little more than an empty threat. This meant that the future of her people depended on her coming up with “something.” She kept telling herself that she needed to see the lay of the land before she came up with a plan. How had the Captain arranged his forces? What sort of weather would she be dealing with? These were just excuses. She knew the city’s layout, and she knew its defenses, and she knew the weather would mean nothing. She knew that fire would not save her this time, and neither would zombies.

These tricks had been used and were easily countered. She had considered using rockets against the sprawling town but knew it would result in little more than making a mess of the mess.

In other words, she had no idea how she could prevail this time.

She had dragged fifteen hundred people across the state hoping that something would come to her. She hoped that one of her corrupted prisoners would whisper his poisonous words in the right ear and start a panic. She hoped that someone would have the guts to shoot the Captain in the back and end the threat forever. She hoped that a miracle awaited her when she got to Hoquiam.

She also knew that relying on hope in the face of insurmountable obstacles was the mark of a weak mind.

All of her hopes seemed very distant as she stood at the bow of the Dead Fish on the third day out of Bainbridge. She was back in black leather, her three-quarter length coat flapping in the wind. Except for her bald head, she was beginning to look like herself again. Her bruises had faded to almost nothing and the dark circles beneath her eyes had disappeared after three dreamless nights.

“What do you think, Myron? Will their fleet be in the harbor?” she asked the ship’s captain. Myron Schwartz was a long time fisherman with a net of wrinkles around his perpetually squinting eyes.

He almost shrugged; a habit of his that frequently set Jillybean off. She liked answers to her questions, not shrugs. “Can’t say either way. Likely though.”

“Hmm,” she murmured, loud enough to be heard. The answer had been the equivalent of a verbal shrug. Their lives depended on keeping out of reach of the Corsair fleet. She set the binoculars up to her magnificent eyes and scanned ahead. Even with the field glasses she could just make out white waves crashing along the jetty that marked the mouth of Grays Harbor. Between her and the jetty, the deep emerald sea was empty.

To the west the sunset was a fiery furnace and to the east night was coming on strong, the sky already a darkening cobalt.

“I’d say, very likely they’re in the harbor,” Myron said, amending his answer. “Just in case, Maxine, you be ready to come about in one hell of a hurry, okay?” He had his own binoculars out now and he scanned ahead, picking out every shadow and worrying over it.

Minutes ticked slowly by and as they did, Gunner stumped on deck, helped by Neil. The grizzled veteran was pale and felt as though he was still only a sneeze away from death. But he was stronger than he had been and he was sure he could still outshoot everyone on board. He glanced up at the mast where the black banner of the Corsairs whipped in the wind. He growled at the sight of it before settling himself in at the rail, an M4 next to his good hand.

“We’re going to zip by the entrance to the harbor and take a peek,” Myron told Jillybean, giving her a quick once over out of the corner of his eye; she had begun to twitch. He had known her for the last nine years, but had never seen her quite like this. She nodded without moving the binoculars. Closer they came until they were framed in the mouth of the harbor. All eyes were staring in.

“I see ‘em,” Myron said in a whisper that made no sense. The forty or so ships were moored near the mouth of the Hoquiam River, five miles away. “I thought there’d be more of them.” They all stared as the Dead Fish eased slowly along, when they neared the far end of the entrance, Myron turned them up into the wind so that the setting sun was right in their faces.

It was why they didn’t see the black ships bearing down on them until it was too late. There were a dozen of them spread over half a mile, their course all converging on the Dead Fish.

“Christ on a cracker!” Myron bawled. “Maxine, turn us about. Jed, come on, damn it. Get the jib over t’ the other side.” There was a world of difference between a fisherman who puttered around Puget Sound in an eighteen-footer, and a proper captain of a fighting ship. Maxine turned the wheel too early and too far, and instead of spinning on a dime and shooting back north, they fell off the wind and lay dead in the water for a full minute.

By the time they were able to pick up the wind again, even Neil, who knew next to nothing about boats, saw that they were going to be pinned to the shore.

“Turn us back, you moron,” Jillybean/Eve ordered. Her hands were hooked on the rail; one under the control of Eve and the other was Jillybean’s. She felt like she was splitting down the middle. “Into the harbor. What are you doing?”

Maxine, her round, pink face stricken in terror, had turned the wheel prematurely again, and once more the ship seemed to plow into an invisible hand. The sail was shifted and they began to pick up speed, but it was too late. From the left and right ships were crossing in front.

“What do we do?” Myron cried. “They’re going to…” His eyes shot wide as he saw Jillybean feeding a pair of batteries into the detonator. “Neil!” he screamed and pointed.

“Huh?” Neil seemed only mildly interested in the boats racing around. He couldn’t understand the significance of the little black device. “Yes?”

“She’s going to blow us up!” Myron looked stricken.

Neil suddenly remembered the explosive. “Oh right. Yeah, I suppose that would be bad. Jillybean? Is this your way of getting me to part my hair down the middle? Ha-ha.”

Her eyes were mismatched; one dark and angry, the other bright and frightened. “It’s Eve. She wants to do it. She wants to feel it. The fire. She wants to feel the fire. She’s only waiting until they get closer.”

Gunner had been sighting his rifle on one of the ships, getting a feel for the rhythm of the sea. Something bright caught his eye and he found himself looking at a spear. “The Corsairs don’t use spears, Jillybean. Tell Eve to look up at their flags.”

The ships weren’t flying the black flag, they were flying a white flag with a golden crown. The Queen’s fleet had arrived.

Chapter 42

Grays Harbor, Washington

The Queen’s Revenge had led the fleet to Grays Harbor. With her three masts, her immense, snowy white sails, and her sixty-four feet above the waterline, she was an impressive vessel. She was not the Queen’s flagship, however.

Jenn Lockhart had chosen the fifty-five foot catamaran that had dealt so much death and destruction to her people. It was none other than The Courageous, the same ship that the Black Captain had used weeks before when Jillybean had trashed his army north of the Marin Headlands.

The Courageous, with her twin hulls, was the smoothest riding ship in the fleet and Mike Gunter was desperately in need of a stable platform. Day by day he had grown weaker and more listless, until it was all he could do to keep his eyes open for a minute at a time. Jenn became so alarmed that she threw caution right out the window and charged north, racing right for Grays Harbor and Hoquiam without bothering to send advance ships to scout the way.

Although she stayed busy tending to him, he was not her only patient. Thirty men and women had decided to chance an ocean journey north to seek out the “Girl Doctor.” They figured that even if Jillybean was crazy, she was their only hope. So far, eighteen had died.

Prayers were spoken, tears were shed and their lifeless bodies were allowed to slip away off the back rail of the last ship in line. They had brought nothing extraneous to weigh the bodies down and no extra sails to wrap them in. The ocean took them, while the living kept their eyes on the northern horizon. Blundering into a Corsair fleet was their biggest worry, but other than pods of whales, the ocean was clear right up until they caught sight of the Dead Fish, and came charging down on her, thinking they were snapping up a Corsair ship. What they caught was even better.

The Guardians were amazed, and a little unsettled, at seeing the “Old” Queen, come aboard. Even bald, she had a presence about her and when she flashed her blue eyes at any given man, he inevitably turned away.

Bishop Wojdan greeted her with a reserved nod and opened his mouth to ask the first of a hundred questions that were bubbling up inside of him. He never got the chance as Jenn came rushing up with tears streaming down her face, and crushed Jillybean in an embrace that blasted the air from her lungs. Before she could recover, Jenn was pulling her towards the galley.

“It’s Mike. He was shot. I did what I could, but it got his liver and his kidney. He won’t stop bleeding and everyday it gets worse.” Jenn was so focused on Mike that she didn’t think to explain how she and forty ships ended up at Grays Harbor. “You have tools and all that? Of course, you do. I’ll send someone to fetch them.”

She was gone in a blur, leaving Jillybean alone with Mike. He opened cracked swollen, and jaundiced eyes. His eyes were as yellow as a cat’s. “It’s you,” he whispered.

“I think so.” Jillybean was so turned around by how quickly everything was happening that she wasn’t quite sure who or what she was. But it didn’t matter just then. She knew pain when she saw it…and she knew death. Mike was closer to death than he was to life. She moved to his bedside, inspecting what she could see of him. He didn’t look good. His jaundice was advanced, his limbs were swollen, his racing pulse could be seen through the thin skin of his neck. The sweat on his brow indicated fever. The blankets suggested chills.

“Can you take a deep breath for me?”

If he breathed any deeper, it wasn’t noticeable beyond a soft crackling as his lungs inflated. “Did we win?” he rasped out. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t really know. We won a battle back in Bainbridge, but he got away. I suppose you had a battle as well?”

“Jenn won. Magic.” Speaking the three words took all the energy he had and his eyes dulled over.

The Queen was back in seconds and with her were Donna Polston and Shaina Hale. Both stared at Jillybean as if they were seeing someone raised from the dead. Wait until they see Neil. The voice in her head might have been her own or it might have been Sadie’s.

“The injured kidney is still in him?” she asked Jenn.

“I didn’t know how to take it out without killing him. Your books…they aren’t meant for normal people. I couldn’t follow along, so I came here to find you.”

There was much left out of the brief explanation. So much so that Jillybean’s head was abuzz with questions. “First things first,” she told herself. “We need to find a safe place to anchor. We have to hook up with Deanna and the army out of Bainbridge. Then I need to reconnoiter the bay and Ho…”

“No!” Jenn said, raising her voice. “You need to fix him. That is why we came. So, get working.” She had gotten almost no sleep during the last three days and could hear the hysteria in her own voice. She knew what she was saying was wrong, however her heart was tearing itself to pieces. “Please. I mean please help him. I’ll take care of everything else.”

At first, Jillybean’s hackles had gone straight up at being told: No! in such a forceful way. No one ever talked to her like that. At the same time, no one had ever said they would “take care of everything else.” Hearing those words, and seeing the fleet, and being close to Jenn once more was a bigger relief than she could ever have expected.

Jillybean jumped at the chance. “Sure. Sounds like a fair trade.” She was even given a competent assistant in Denise Woodruff. Leaving everything in Jenn’s hands, Jillybean went to work, first on Mike and then on the others. It was a grim task. Many of the wounds had been improperly cleaned or the tools hadn’t been completely sterilized. Infection was rampant, as was sepsis and the smell of the seeping wounds was enough to make her head spin. Two men died within minutes of Jillybean opening them up. Three others lost limbs to the beginning stages of gangrene. One man had lost his pancreas and should never have made the trip.

Mike should have been one of those who had died along the way. He was so bad off that Jillybean couldn’t take the chance of sedating him properly. Thankfully, he passed out quickly. She didn’t like his chances; he needed an immediate transfusion, dialysis, and the strongest antibiotics possible—and this was after Jillybean removed his kidney and sewed up his liver properly. The best she could manage was to give him her homemade antibiotics and some normal saline in an IV drip.

After Mike, the patients became something of a blur. To her they became a list of afflictions and damaged body parts. She remembered a few bellies, a number of chests, an arm that she took off just above the elbow, a femur that needed to be set and cast, and a brain that was swelling alarmingly.

It was because of that brain that she wandered onto the deck blinking furiously against the blazing sunlight. “It’s day,” she muttered.

Yeah, but what day is it? Ipes asked. The little zebra had been coming in and out of the little operating room for the last few hours, always munching on a new kind of cookie. Currently, he clutched a peanut butter cookie between his hooves.

“I don’t think it matters what day it is. Where’d you get that cookie? It looks freaking-A good.”

“Cookie?” Faith Checkamian asked. The dour, stern-faced woman had been standing by the rail. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed as though Jillybean had looked right through her. “I don’t think we have any cookies. We do have some fresh-caught halibut if you’re hungry. I can fry that up for you in a second.”

Ipes disappeared with his cookie and Jillybean found herself staring into Faith’s washed-out eyes. “Fish? Sure, that sounds good. Wait, no. I didn’t come up here for food. I need a flat piece of metal and some surgical screws. Herbert screws if you have them. If not then something exceedingly small. There’s a fellow down there with a brain bleed and increasing inter-cranial pressure.”

“You can fix that?”

The question was an odd one, almost as if Faith was joking with her. “Sure. I just have to rouse out his brains, plug the hole with a wad of cork, and fit the whole thing back inside his head without getting them turned around. We don’t want him waking up thinking he’s Mary Poppins, right?”

Faith wasn’t sure what to think, except that having a man prance about like Mary Poppins would indeed be a bad thing, perhaps even a sinful thing.

Jillybean couldn’t answer to what was a sin and what wasn’t as the thought of cookies was still very prevalent in her mind. She decided on breakfast and ate fish on deck while a metal plate and screws were scrounged for. While she ate, spitting the tiny bones demurely over the side of the ship when no one was looking, she gazed about Grays Harbor. The Queen’s fleet was moored along the remains of a dock on the southern side of the harbor, while three miles north-northeast was all that remained of the once great and terrible Corsair fleet.

It seemed so small now, though in truth it was still slightly greater in number than Jenn’s fleet. It could have been twice as large and the Black Captain wouldn’t have risked it. He had been stung time and again, and now he was holed up in Hoquiam, layering his defenses. Or at least that was what Jillybean would be doing in his shoes. And he was no fool. He would make sure any attack would be far too costly to even attempt.

But was there an attempt in the offing? It was hard to tell what Jenn and Deanna were doing with their combined forces. Other than a few fires burning up in the hills to remove the zombie threat, Jillybean couldn’t see that anything was being done at all. Which wasn’t a bad thing. An unseen opponent could be twice as frightening as one splayed out for all to see.

Jillybean fell asleep in her chair, the cool winter sun on her face. She dreamt of cookies and woke to Faith holding a little disk of galvanized aluminum. It was somewhat disappointing, especially to Ipes who cocked a floppy ear and decided he wasn’t ever going to speak to Faith again.

“You never spoke to her before, so how is that a punishment?”

I’m withholding me. Think how dull her life will be now.

“She can probably use a touch of dullness. Oh, thanks for the fish, Faith. It really hit the spot.” The woman had been standing there watching Jillybean talk to herself with her jaw slack, wondering if Jillybean was really crazy like everyone said, or if she was actually possessed.

Faith’s face contorted into the very thinnest of smiles, she nodded and turned away, whispering, “Mother Mary bless us.”

Jillybean snorted a little laugh without rancor. She figured that since she was about to open up a man’s head, a blessing wouldn’t hurt. With the disk in hand, she made her way back down into her muggy little operating room and went back to work. The placement of the disc was a success, though an unnerving one since an electric bone saw was unavailable and the opening had to be cut by hand. It was delicate work especially as the boat constantly shifted under her feet.

It was evening by the time Jillybean had seen each patient. Tired, but happy with the results, especially with the brain bleed, she came on deck and found a small crowd waiting on her. There was Deanna and her daughter, both fresh and vibrant, looking almost like sisters in matching parkas; Bishop Wojdan taking up an entire cushioned bench with his bulk; Knights Sergeant Troy Holt and Reserve Commander Jennifer Edgerton in their armor stood behind him; Gunner draped in a sheet, a new mask in place, took up another bench; Neil Martin, still looking like he was about to take in a Mariners baseball game in hell, leaned against the rail and was eating one of the fresh caught fish, extreme sushi style: the scales were still on it and its innards were dripping onto the deck.

The last of them was Jenn Lockhart wearing her usual long black coat. She was pale and beautiful, and although only sixteen she retained an aura of authority that matched both the bishop and the governor.

She hurried to Jillybean and whispered, “He’s resting easier than he had been. Do you think he’ll make it?”

“Other than having his Excellency intercede on his behalf, I don’t think there’s anything more we can do.”

Wojdan smiled at this. “In the end, we all find God, one way or another. I’m just glad you finally seem to be poking about for him before it’s too late, your Highness.”

Jillybean was surprised that he had addressed her as he had since she was no longer queen of anything, and he knew it. She gave him a brief smile, saying, “When you’ve been to hell, you have to believe there’s a heaven.” She pointed with her chin at the squalid little town. “That’s the closest thing to hell on earth. It’s our job to burn it down. So, where are we on that? What’s the plan?”

Eyes shifted, Reserve Commander Edgerton toed a crack in the deck, the Bishop sighed, and Gunner rolled his eyes. “I think that means they don’t have one,” he growled.

“No, we just haven’t decided on one yet,” Troy said. “It’s a matter of risk versus reward. Most of us think that we need to create some sort of diversion before we attack. I personally like the idea of using smoke across the north side, while we bring the fleet up to the south. Then we feint along the mud river in the east and launch a full-out attack from the west. Yes, we’ll need flotation devices for two-thousand soldiers, but they can be made from anything that’ll float. It shouldn’t be hard.”

Jillybean was a little disappointed. She had hoped that when Jenn had said she would “take care of everything else,” it would include coming up with a workable plan. What Troy was offering wasn’t it.

“Seems somewhat complicated for an untrained army,” Jillybean noted, studying the young knight’s face. He took the criticism without blinking an eye. “Still, the timing wouldn’t have to be exact to draw men from the western defenses. The question is how many would shift? It would take only two or three companies to defend a river that’s over a hundred yards wide. And if our men made it across, they’d have to face at least two rows of concertina wire, trenches and pillboxes.” He only nodded, his face impassive. “What sort of casualties do you expect? Honestly?”

He did not care for anyone questioning his honesty and this was reflected in his glare as he answered, “They’ll be high. The same will be true of any attack.”

“High?” Jillybean asked. “That’s your best estimate? Could you give me a number? Would fifty percent be in the high range?”

“Possibly,” he admitted.

“It’s why we haven’t settled on a strategy,” Jenn said, quickly. “We run up against the same thing with each of these…what do you call them? Scenes? No, it’s scenarios. They’re all too bloody. It’s why I wanted to wait for you to finish and for Mister Gunner to wake.”

Gunner had been sleeping since coming aboard. Sleep was all he did anymore and he hated it. His body, those parts that weren’t mending, ached for action. “Next time, wake me,” he said, doing his best to look Jenn straight in the eye. He felt his gaze constantly being sucked toward Deanna and Emily. “First off, diversions will have only limited value. He’ll be expecting them. Secondly, an attack across the river would be all or nothing. If the fight bogs down there will be no way to retreat.”

“Which is an added incentive to drive on,” Troy said.

“Yes, well,” Gunner started to say, only to stop when he found his eyes locked on Deanna’s. They had just hopped right over to her and he always had trouble doing anything while he was busy staring at her. He grunted and blinked, and made himself concentrate on Troy. “What I mean is that the Guardians are fierce fighters, and very brave; however they are too few to make the crossing alone. You’ll need the rest of the army and I know for a fact that they won’t make it.”

The Bishop stirred his bulk, his layers of vestments rustling. “Then what do you suggest? Can the Corsairs be defeated?”

“Of course,” Gunner answered. “There’s a chance that Troy’s plan might very well work. There’s a chance that the Black Captain is barely holding onto power. I just thought the question on the table concerned casualties. Any attack against a fortified and prepared defense will mean very high casualties and a good possibility of failure. Our best chance is to lure them out of Hoquiam. We could then use the Guardians as a defensive fulcrum to launch coordinated attacks from every direction.”

“Can they be drawn out?” Jenn asked. She had asked Gunner, but everyone knew that the question had been meant for Jillybean.

She rubbed the bristles on her head, noting how they were softer than they had been. “The Corsairs will not come out of Hoquiam unless we drive them out. With the prevailing wind so frequently out of the west, it would not be hard to use chlorine gas against them.” This had everyone’s attention. It sounded like a quick fix to their problems. “The problem with its use is that it will affect the slaves as well as the Corsairs. I’m not willing to kill the slaves in order to free them.”

“I agree with the Queen,” Wojdan said. “I will not be a part of such cruelty. Which brings us back to how do we win? How do we win without getting half of us killed?”

Jillybean felt their eyes on her but she refused to look away from the distant town of Hoquiam. She had been turning the question over in her mind for a few years now and the answer was not one she cared to think about.

“Let’s first plant our poisonous seeds,” she said. “Neil could you be in charge of negotiating for us?” This raised a few eyebrows, yet no one said a word. No one was sure that the Corsairs would respect a white flag. A man might get shot out of hand, while a woman might find herself in chains and being passed from bed to bed. Troy opened his mouth to say something, however both the Bishop and Jillybean shook their heads. There was also a chance that whoever went would be tortured for information and Neil was the least likely to say anything. Anything with any meaning that is.

“Sure thing,” Neil said, grinning monstrously, a trickle of pinkish gray fluid leaking down from his hairline. “I was hoping to be of some use around here. I’m also a whiz at cooking. If anyone’s interested in fondue when I get back.”

No one rushed to accept the invitation, Jillybean included. “I want at least a hundred slaves in trade, and half should be children. Start at three hundred, but don’t go lower than a hundred. And Neil, keep your eyes and ears open. I want to know about their defenses, how many men they have, their mood, everything.”

“Everything? Everything seems like a lot. I can try, though. And a hundred kids for our prisoners. Got it. Should be a piece of cake.”

She fed him more instructions then: “Don’t mention the size of our army besides saying it’s huge. Don’t make any bargains other than for the slaves. If he asks our intentions, tell him we are here to depose him and free his slaves. That’s it. We will accept his surrender and offer only a prison sentence as punishment for his crimes. Also, hint that we’ll be here as long as it takes. It’ll help us with the slave negotiations. After all, to him they’re just more mouths to feed.”

“Speaking of which, I’m getting kind of hungry. Are any of those Corsairs close to, you know, expiring?”

Jillybean laughed it off as if it was a joke. “Good one. Say stuff like that when you’re there. It’ll unnerve them.”

It had unnerved Jenn, Bishop Wojdan and especially Edgerton who went as gray in the face as her armor.

With the instructions swirling in his head, Neil climbed into a rowboat that was tied behind the Dead Fish. It took Neil within half a mile of Hoquiam. A white flag jutted from the prow of the little boat like the horn of a narwhal. Its bottom edge dragged in the water as he fumbled about with the oars. In dribs and drabs he managed to get the boat across the water until he ground up in mud. Taking his flag, he splashed to shore. Through her binoculars, Jillybean could see him waving to the Corsairs and flashing his hideous grin. He disappeared into the town.

The wait quickly became tedious. Unanswerable “What if” questions flew around the boat. Jillybean grew tired of the speculation and left to check on her patients. Jenn left as well and went to sit with Mike and held his limp hand while he clung to life. Gunner did everything he could to sit up straight and not look so much like a monster as Emily dragged her mother over to be with him.

He warned her with his eyes not to say anything and she reluctantly agreed…not to say anything completely obvious. That didn’t stop her from beating around the bush. “You were in the army back before, weren’t you?” she asked, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “Is that how you got so good as a general and all? Or was your rank captain?”

“No, that wasn’t me,” he said, glaring over his sheet. “I was a plumber. Drains and sinks, that sort of thing.”

“You knew the River King, right?” Emily asked, without giving him a moment. “Were you there when he died?”

Gunner had been close. He had been on death’s door being dragged away by Neil when Jillybean had killed the River King. He hadn’t thought about that time in years. Inadvertently, he said, “Yeah. Well, I wasn’t right there with him. No one was, except Jillybean. But I don’t want to talk about that.”

Emily had a follow up question in her holster. In fact, she had an entire interrogation planned to break him, but her mom stopped her. “Let’s leave him alone. Those weren’t good times for him. Gunner was mixed up back then. A lot of us were.”

“He wasn’t mixed up, mom. He wasn’t even a…” Gunner reached out and grabbed her knee, giving it a squeeze and making her jump.

Three lines cut across Deanna’s forehead and she was about to demand to know what was going on, when she caught sight of Neil in his little rowboat, battling foot-high waves as if he were out in a hurricane. He kept going in circles. The Dead Fish angled in and threw him a line and dragged him back across the harbor. He was all smiles.

“A hundred and fifty!” he yelled out as he got close. A small celebration occurred on board The Courageous. They acted almost as if a battle had been won. Neil was in high spirits. “I remembered everything. It was so strange. At first all I could think of was eating this guard and then there was the Black Captain. And I remembered what he did to poor Stu and, just like that, I was myself again. I’m not anymore and I’m still hungry.”

He was disappointed that no one had died while he was gone and had to settle for half of a fifteen-pound nurse shark that had been caught that morning.

While he ate, most of the fleet sailed up into the wind to await the slaves along the harbor west of the town. True to his word, the Black Captain sent a hundred and fifty miserable creatures limping across a narrow pontoon bridge and down to the beach. Once they were safely away, the other part of the fleet slid up and deposited the captured Corsairs on shore.

Once they were out of sight, Jillybean said, “Now we wait and pray that the poison spreads and kills them from the inside.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” Troy asked. He had as much faith in prayer as anyone, but at the same time he liked to be prepared for all contingencies. And they still didn’t have a plan. “Should we start looking for another miracle from the Queen?”

“Just pray,” Jillybean answered.

Praying was what the Guardians did best. The Bishop said mass every night, and that night was no different except the turnout was five times as large. Practically everyone was there and the Bishop had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard. Hymns were sung, hands were held, and the Lord was beseeched.

The next morning, when the sun rose golden and brilliant, it lit up Hoquiam, making even the squalor seem quaint from a distance. To the left was the swollen western fork of the Hoquiam River, while to the right was the long mud bog that was the dammed eastern fork, and where that fork once emptied into the harbor was the Corsair fleet huddled in a mass. In front of the town were the sandy shoals that would make an amphibious attack a bloody massacre.

Along the low beach was something new. Cut down telephone poles had been set into the dirt—the poles still had their crossbars—and hanging from each was a crucified man. The poison had been spat out.

Chapter 43

Grays Harbor, Washington

As the seagulls and the crows battled over the rights to the dead Corsairs, the argument on board The Courageous heated up. A new plan had been called for.

Both Troy and Reserve Commander Jennifer Edgerton offered variants of the their attack plans, though neither addressed the likelihood that they would still result in outrageous casualties. Deanna suggested that they starve them out. Wojdan killed the idea, remarking, “You know it would also mean the death of two-thousand slaves. I wouldn’t put it past the Corsairs to eat their slaves.”

With each new plan trotted out, an interesting dynamic made its presence felt. Jenn Lockhart, who was the second youngest of those present, came to hold veto power over all of them, even if they had never pledged their honor to her. She always spoke last, asked probing questions and when she made a decision, it became the final one.

Once all the ideas had been rejected by the Queen, she turned to Jillybean. “I know you have a plan, because you always have a plan. It can’t be any worse than the ones we’ve heard already.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Jillybean replied.

“So, you’ve had a plan all along?” Bishop Wojdan asked. “Why didn’t you tell us right off the bat and save us the headache of going through all of this?”

“I was hoping someone would come up with something better, something more palatable.” In truth, she had been hoping someone else would have come up with the same idea that had been percolating in her mind for some time. “My plan is very simple. We assassinate the Black Captain.” Before she even ran through the details, some of those present were already shaking their heads. She had expected her plan to be almost universally despised, which was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted to bring it up at all.

Bishop Wojdan refused to bless it, calling it state sanctioned murder. Edgerton said there was no honor in it. Deanna didn’t think it had a chance in hell of working because of who was being asked to go, and Emily Grey was practically in tears because Jillybean wanted her father to lead one of the teams.

Captain James Grey, AKA Gunner, wasn’t exactly thrilled either. Simply climbing a short flight of stairs made him dizzy and his speed topped out at just below two miles an hour. It was all he could do to draw a full breath without breaking down in a fit of coughing, and if there had been another real marksman in their small army, he would have asked that he or she go instead.

Even Jillybean hated her own plan. First off, it was clunky, inelegant and depended too much on chance. Secondly, even if it worked she would be killing two of the people she loved most in the world. For Troy Holt, Gunner and Neil Martin, it would be a one-way mission. They would not live to see morning.

As before, the Queen was last to speak. Jenn listened to the pros, of which there was only one: it was the only plan that didn’t end in widespread slaughter, and she weighed the cons, of which there were too many to count. While the argument over the plan grew loud she remained silent until finally, her silence was noticed. Everyone turned to her as if her vote was the only one that counted.

“What do you think, your Highness?” Wojdan asked.

“I have a question first. Why Neil?” She turned her soft blue eyes on him, making sure not to react to the blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. She didn’t want to know whose it was. “Your courage is as great as anyone’s, but you have to admit you sort of stand out. And even being what you are, you’re not much of a fighter. No offense, it’s just that you are the nicest zombie I ever met.”

Neil was also the only zombie who could blush. The gray cast to his scarred and scabbed flesh took on a deeper gray hue. “Well, thank you! That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me since all this started. Everyone else is like Ew gross or He’s going to eat me! Of course, I did eat the guy who said that, so that made a little sense.” He suddenly realized what he was saying and he quickly changed the subject, “Yeah, why do you want me to go, Jillybean?”

Jillybean had been grinning at her adopted father, but at the question her eyes dropped and her heart began to thump heavy but also hollow. “I picked him because I know him. Because I’ve known him since I was a little girl. In all that time, Neil has always made things right when I couldn’t. He and Captain…he and Gunner are the only people I’ve always been able to rely on. Trust me, if this is a just mission, they will find a way to win.”

Sometimes Jenn looked almost child-like and at other times, like this one, she had the weight of the world crushing down on her. “I wish I didn’t, but I understand completely.” She’d had the same thing in Stu Currans and Mike Gunter. Now, she had to wonder what her people would do when there were no more heroes. “I think we will go with your plan,” she stated, speaking for everyone whether they liked the plan or not. “Tell us what you need.”

Although Jillybean answered, “Not much,” it took the entire day to prepare and get her teams into position. The Queen’s fleet roved all over the harbor, landing here and there, seemingly at random. It was frequently scattered and had the Corsairs ships slipped their anchors and attacked, they could have won an easy victory. Instead, they could be seen dragging their ships through the shallows at the base of the mud river until their entire fleet was safe behind the great chain that stretched across the river.

The chaos behind the fleet’s movements was designed to hide Jillybean’s true intentions. At midday, three platoons were off-loaded along the shoreline of the North Bay, miles to the west of the city. Another two platoons were dropped off to the east. The groups were made up almost exclusively of Guardians. Some of the knights carried nothing except their ash-blackened spears. They fanned out to screen the formation against zombies. Dressed in rags, her face daubed in mud, and fearless as ever, Jillybean did not just go with them, she led the way.

The rest of the group trudged slowly after. They carried enormous loads and walked bent over like old men.

Slowest of them all was Gunner. He slogged along at a dreadful pace, moving from tree to tree, coughing in fits. Beneath his mask he was pale and dripping sweat. When he fell for the fourth time, the younger men offered to make a stretcher of sorts and carry him. Has it come to that? he wondered. Being carried around? The idea left him both tired and furious. He lifted his mask and spat. “Try to pick me up and I’ll tear your face off.”

Neil helped him up, saying, “Now you’ve gone and made me hungry. Oh my, you’ve gained some weight in the last ten years.” Neil felt stronger than ever and yet Gunner had become thick with tremendous bands of muscle. Neil set him up against a tree and paused while Gunner wavered and looked as though he might collapse again. “Look at me, Grey. Focus on me. Hey, you ever think this is Jillybean’s retirement gift to us. You know, one last hurrah. Going out in a blaze of glory by taking down one last bad guy.”

“I hope not,” Gunner said. When he closed his eyes, his mind was filled with visions of his wife and daughter. He didn’t want to die now that he had them back in his life. “That’s not Jillybean’s style either way. She’s all about results. Speaking of which.” He shoved himself away from the tree and plodded away.

Of all the teams, Gunner’s had the shortest hike, and still it took him three hours to move a mile and a half, and by the time he got to their attack position, he was shaking and moaning. The world kept going in and out of focus and he was on the verge of collapse.

Troy eased him down into the brush on a little hill that overlooked the long flat expanse of mud that had once been the east fork of the Hoquiam. Gunner grunted, “Thanks. Gonna rest,” and then didn’t so much fall asleep as he passed out.

“He is a mistake,” Troy muttered to Neil. “We should never have brought him.”

Neil was in the process of raping his fourth and last sandwich. Ever since Gunner’s face-tearing off comment, his stomach had been growling. “Hmm? Mistake?” he asked, part of the Saran-wrap Emily had wrapped the sandwiches in was caught up on one of his teeth and hung from the corner of his mouth. “No, he’s pivotal. He is the plan in a sense. Have you ever killed a man from two-hundred yards away?” Troy answered with a contemptuous look that suggested such a thing was beneath him. “Exactly,” Neil said, taking another bite. “I bet you couldn’t hit a man at a hundred yards.”

“With that fancy scope I could.”

Neil cocked the remains of one eyebrow at Troy as he chewed the cellophane up into his mouth. “But you’ve never done it, have you? I know it looks easy, but when the fate of thousands of people depend on you, you’d better have ice in your veins. Grey does. He’s the best shot I’ve ever seen and the coolest customer when things get hairy.” He took another bite, polishing off the last third of the sandwich. “I just wish he’d had the guts to face Deanna before we left. You know, properly.”

Just before they had pulled away from The Courageous, Gunner had stumped over to his wife and daughter, opened his mouth to tell Deanna who he really was, but at the last minute, had chickened out.

“It reminded me of myself at my eighth grade dance,” Neil said, a wistful look on his zombie face.

“You had a crush on a girl? Was she pretty?”

The little zombie sighed, “Oh yeah. Kim Phillips. She looked like an angel in her white dress and her perfect little nose.” He sighed again and then shrugged. “Too bad she had the black soul of a demon. There I was all set to pour my heart out to her when she whispers something to her friend, Becky-something. Becky starts laughing and then Kim starts laughing. And I’m just standing there like an idiot.” A third sigh escaped him. “Ahh, good times.”

Troy glanced over at Gunner. It was hard to look past the fact that he seemed more beast than man. “I can’t believe he and the governor were ever married.”

“If you had known him ten years ago you wouldn’t have questioned it a bit. He was handsome, of course, and brave and all that, but he was also happier. It makes a difference, you know? He would smile and laugh, and everything, just like a normal person. I don’t think he’s been happy in years.” It was a sad thought and it killed their conversation.

Troy watched as Neil dug in his pack for another sandwich and came away empty. It sparked a frown. The Guardian was about to give Neil one of his sandwiches when Neil pulled a branch from a nearly barren tree and began to nibble on a few leaves. Neil fell asleep not long after, his brown tongue sticking out from between his twisted lips.

While the two slept, Troy picked up Gunner’s rifle. It was a Remington 30-06 and looked like nothing special to him. On closer inspection, neither did the scope. He had expected some sort of high-tech super gizmo with lasers which could enable him to see in the dark. It was just a normal scope. He lined it up on one of the zombies that were trapped in the mud.

In the scope the thing’s hideous face looked huge. “I could probably make the shot,” he told himself. Probably wasn’t definitely, and a zombie was a good deal bigger than man. “And the Captain probably won’t be standing still. But if he was…” Troy simulated firing the gun.

He swept the scope to the south to where the Corsair ships were practically stacked on top of each other. If nothing else happened that day, the world would finally be rid of that fleet. That alone made the risk worth it, and Troy knew it was the only reason that Bishop Wojdan had gone along with any part of Jillybean’s plan.

A check of his watch showed that Troy had an hour to kill before the action started. For the first few minutes, he spent it dry-firing the rifle at “targets” on the boats and along the wall. He soon lost the taste for such practice. It felt wrong even when it was Corsairs he was aiming at. Praying felt like a better use of his time. Normally, he was an in and out sort of praying man. He rarely felt the need to drag on prayers longer than necessary since God certainly knew what his heart desired and five extra hallelujahs wasn’t going to make a difference.

Just then, things were a bit different. In his heart he was sure that he was down to his last day, perhaps even his last hour. He wasn’t nervous about what was coming, it just felt right that his soul should be as pure as possible before he went into battle. He prayed silently until the hour was up, and then he gently shook Neil and Gunner awake. They both were groggy and slow, and both were wracked by low, wet coughs. Neither looked ready to face what was coming. “We only have a few minutes left. Are you okay, Gunner?”

“Yeah. I’m good. Where’s the…” He took a deep wheezing breath. “The gun…can you hand it to me?”

“Are you sure? You’re shaking.” Gunner’s one hand was fine, however his head was doing a little dance on his shoulders. “Maybe, maybe I should take the shot. It’s only a hundred yards and with this scope, I can’t miss.” As much as Troy hated the idea of assassination, he would make an exception for the Black Captain.

Gunner felt haggard and weak, and so tired that he knew that if he closed his eyes for even a second, he’d go right back to sleep. Still, he knew his duty and he trusted his body even if it felt like it was sort of drifting away from him. “No, I got this. Just load it for me. There you go.” He set the rifle on a fallen tree trunk, laid his stump of a left arm on top of the scope and snugged the stock into his right shoulder. “And now we wait.”

He fell asleep thirty seconds later.

Troy sighed and pointed at his watch. “Neil, we have one minute and look at him. You have to see that this isn’t going to work out. We have one chance…”

“Two chances.”

“Maybe two,” he admitted, though he felt the second chance was more of a pipe dream. “Still, I’d rather it be done and over with on the first. If you don’t trust me taking the shot, then you do it. Gunner can’t. It’s obvious.”

Neil squinted across at the trenches and the twisting coils of razor-sharp concertina wire. It was all a blur. “I can’t shoot to save my life. No, I think we should trust Jillybean. She knew his condition and she still chose him for a reason.”

Troy only grunted, “I suppose,” and went back to watching the second hand tick round the face of his watch. When it made its way back to the twelve o’clock position, he said, “It’s time,” and then cocked his head.

The explosion was twenty-one seconds late. It was a great booming thunderclap that shook the earth beneath them and jarred Gunner out of sleep. They all turned to watch as a fireball rose in the north; it was followed a few seconds later by a blast of hot air that washed over them, stirring up the leaves. More seconds ticked by and the three squatted in the underbrush, waiting.

“Did it work?” Neil asked.

“Of course it worked,” Gunner growled. “It had to. I taught her everything she knows about explosives. We just have to be patient.”

It was half a minute before they heard the rumble and another fifteen seconds before they saw the doom of the Corsair fleet. The explosives that the two platoons had hauled north of Hoquiam were enough to bring down a three hundred foot section of Bainbridge’s reinforced concrete wall. The Corsairs’ earthen dam was puny in comparison and the two-thousand pounds of Jillybean’s C-4 made short work of it.

The dam had been holding back a manmade lake that covered over two-hundred acres and now that pent-up water came roaring down the east fork of the Hoquiam like a faceless monster. It was a towering wall of churning mud, spinning water, and tree trunks that lanced like tremendous spears. It howled and shook the world down to its foundations as it raced past them at seventy miles an hour.

None of the three had ever seen such power unleashed. Neil was laughing, his face dark and mad as a demon’s. He screamed something to Gunner, however his voice was lost as the wall of water smashed into the gaggle of boats at the base of the river with another thundering explosion. Foam shot into the air, higher than a building and came down like a curtain falling.

When the last of the water was only grey mist they saw there was nothing left of the Corsair fleet except splinters, trash and long rags that had once been sails. The men who’d been on the boats were nowhere to be seen. They had been destroyed by the maelstrom. The unearthly violence ruptured their eyes and burst their lungs. Their limbs were torn off and many were sent to the bottom with such force that they were embedded deep in the muck on the floor of the harbor.

Troy forgot himself and whispered, “My God!”

“That wasn’t the hand of God,” Gunner said, grinning behind his mask. “That was Jillybean doing the smiting. It’s clear she hasn’t lost her touch.”

The three stared for a few minutes as the water kept coming and coming. A few giant corpses were swept along as well, and for some reason, that made Gunner sad. They’d been people once.

Letting out a long aching breath. He settled back down behind his rifle. “Now show that pretty face of yours.”

As he sighted across at the lair of the Corsairs, Neil and Troy picked up their binoculars. They were big clunky devices that brought the other bank close enough they could see the eye color of the Corsairs as they stood gaping at the trash floating on the harbor—all that remained of their fleet.

Had Gunner wanted to kill any one of them, he could’ve put a slug squarely through their head at any time. He didn’t care about killing any of them. It was the Black Captain he was after. One shot and the war would be over. “Anything?” he asked.

Every second brought dozens of people to the defensive lines, where they pushed each other aside so they could gawk at nothing. It was a constant shifting of faces that was making Gunner dizzy.

“I see…” Neil began, only to stop with a curse. “Wasn’t him. How about over there next to that oak tree?”

“No,” Troy answered. “He’s got a rifle on his back.”

Face to face, the Captain was both impressive and distinctive, but in a crowd where a third of the people were black and everyone wore dark clothing, he didn’t exactly jump out at them. To make things worse, Neil and Troy had only seen him from afar.

It became something of a farce as Gunner was forced to shift his sights left, right, right, left, in the middle…his head began to spin and the lens grew blurry. “Just find him! Watch how people react to him. Look for his silver guns. Just don’t point out black men over and over.”

The crowd had actually begun to disperse when Neil whispered in excitement, “I got him. Right across from us. Right where Jillybean said he would be. Oh, he just turned around. He’s the one in the middle.”

Gunner centered his rifle and saw four black men surrounded by a crowd. From the back he couldn’t be sure who was who. “Which one? There’s four of them.”

“The one in the middle.”

“Damn it, Neil, there’s four of them. None are in the middle. Christ! They’re leaving. Which one is he, Neil?”

Neil didn’t know. When the Black Captain had been facing him, he had known the face in an instant. It had been handsome, demonic, furious. Now that the four men were in a line and heading up a low berm, none stood out, no silver guns could be seen, everyone was turned away so reactions couldn’t be judged.

“The second man,” he said with all the conviction he could muster. The Captain was a leader, not a follower, at the same time he would have bodyguards: one in front and one behind. “Yes, the second one.”

In Gunner’s sights the man’s head was big as a dinner plate. He had a direct line, with almost no wind. He had to take into account the rise as the man stepped up…the Remington fired and a fraction of a second later there was a red cloud where the man’s head used to be.

“Got him!” Neil cried, leaping to his feet.

Troy pulled him down and held him beneath a bush. “Was it him?” he asked.

Gunner scanned the other faces as they turned back to stare. They were all filled with alarm, all save one. This man had a silver gun in hand. He had dark intelligent eyes and handsome brown features. He was in Gunner’s sights for maybe a second and then he slid down and to the side behind a small gaggle of Corsairs.

“I don’t think so,” Gunner whispered, dropping his head, resting his cheek on the stock of his rifle. “It wasn’t him.”

Chapter 44

Grays Harbor, Washington

Gunner sat slumped over as a few hundred guns started firing and bullets tore up the trees and bushes up and down the river bank. He didn’t flinch. Flinching would have taken energy he didn’t have. It probably would have hurt as well. Just then, everything hurt.

Even though all the fight had gone out of Neil, Troy was still crushing him into the cold earth. “Maybe let him breathe?” Gunner muttered. Troy leaned back, looking stunned. For a moment, Gunner thought he was going to let go with a curse, or whatever it was that Guardians said when they were mad. When it didn’t explode out of him, Gunner said, “I guess it’s time for Plan B…unfortunately. Could you light the smoke, Troy? But first reload me, will you?”

Troy took the rifle, jacked a new round into the chamber and then dashed off to light the fire that would signal failure. While he was gone, Gunner stared in vain down his scope, searching for the Captain. He was nowhere to be seen. “The son of a bitch is probably hiding in one of those trenches like a little pussy.”

“I’m sorry,” Neil said. He still had his face pressed into the mud and when he spoke, it was to a curled up little orange leaf that sat an inch from his nose. “It was one of them and I had to choose.”

“Yeah,” Gunner said with a groan as he laid his cheek back on the stock of his rifle. He needed a rest, afraid that what was coming next would be too much for him. “You did the right thing. Wake me when it’s time to move out.” He was asleep so quickly that he didn’t see the green smoke rising up out of the woods. Green meant they were going on to Plan B.

The single plume of smoke was soon answered by a hundred more drifting up out of the forests north and east of Hoquiam. As soon as these could be seen by the Guardians hiding west of the city, deep pits were set on fire and out of the mouth of each belched terrible clouds of black smoke. Next the Queen’s fleet ran their sails up and began zigzagging north with the setting sun turning their white sails a shifting orange.

The ships, and the fires, and the pits filled with Jillybean’s smoke generating concoctions were all a great deal of fluff since no attack was coming. It was only a vast distraction so that three men could slip into the river a half mile upstream without being seen.

Gunner got an hour’s worth of sleep before Neil tapped him on his hump. “It’s time.” He sniffed obviously as if Gunner couldn’t smell the bitter smoke that had slowly wafted across the dark city and was now sifting through the trees and underbrush.

“Help me up, will…” A burst of distant gunfire cut him off. The three paused waiting for more, each hoping it meant someone had pumped a few rounds into the Black Captain’s back. When nothing more was heard, Gunner muttered, “We stop until we see him dead.”

Troy, his face smeared with dirt, appeared out of the dark and helped to heft him up. He was young and strong, but even he found Gunner’s bulk a strain, and once more he worried that it was a mistake to bring him. He felt the same thing about Neil. He was something of a Magoo-like character: half-blind, embarrassingly forgetful, and apparently skating through life depending on luck. Luck wasn’t going to save them when they crossed the river and made it into Hoquiam—if they made it into the town that is.

Crossing the river was the easy part. For the last hour, Jillybean had made sure to fill the water upstream with parts of trees and dug-up bushes, so that when the three slid down the river on a partially submerged raft under a canopy of artfully arranged branches, it wouldn’t stand out.

It was getting into Hoquiam that worried Troy.

With the smoke, and ships flying every which way, the Corsairs were all on high alert. They would be right there above the river, maybe thirty yards away from the sewer pipe. Would Gunner curse over nothing and give them away? Would Neil forget himself and ask one of the Corsairs for directions? And if they got into the pipe, what were the chances that Gunner would simply die in the tunnel and clog it up with his body? Troy thought the chances were higher than seventy percent. And if they got into the city would Neil manage to blunder into a tray of champagne glasses? It seemed stupidly farfetched and yet this was Neil. Only he could find a way to do something so ridiculous.

Then, of course, they had to get to the launch point.

It was only a mile trek for Troy. For the battered, dying old soldier it was a marathon of pain and exhaustion. He reeled and staggered, his breath wheezing in and out of him as if his lungs had been replaced by a mud-filled accordion.

Troy couldn’t help but wonder why Jillybean hadn’t chosen any two other people? Not that there had been many hands raised for what would be a suicide mission, but there had been a few, and every one of them would have been infinitely better suited for the mission compared to Gunner and Neil.

“We need to talk,” he said as they stumbled into the little clearing beside the river.

In the dark, with her rags and bald head, Jillybean looked more like a boy of thirteen than an ex-queen. “Actually what we need to do is lay him down,” she retorted. “There you go, Gunner. We’ll get you back on your feet in no time.” With a penlight stuck between her teeth, she ran a needle up a vein into the crook of his good arm, hooked him up to a new IV bag, and had Neil squeeze fluids into him. She then brought out two syringes. “One’s for now and the other is for later.”

Gunner cracked an eye. “What is it?”

“It’s my own cocktail. It’ll both keep you going and numb you at the same time. It may also make you jittery. And you will crash after. Use the second one only when you have to.” She stuck the first syringe into his IV and in seconds, Gunner went limp with relief.

“You can’t be serious,” Troy said. “Please choose someone else.”

“I wish I could,” she answered. “I wish I had the luxury of letting three strangers go off to die for us. Nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, I’m cursed with precognition.” He hesitated, not knowing what that was and assumed it had to do with her insanity. “It means that I can see the future.”

Troy glared at her. “Only the Queen can see the future, and even then…” Even then he didn’t know if he believed it.

“Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I see many possible futures. Or at least I try to. I have to out think my enemies. I have to respond to my enemy’s reactions before I act to begin with. Do you understand? If I do A then he will likely do B, but he could C, D, and E. There’s also random events I have to take into consideration. That’s why I have chosen Gunner and Neil over a pair of Guardians.”

Once more he pictured Neil tripping and knocking into the champagne flutes, only now there were a hundred of them stacked in something of a pyramid. “I still don’t see how they would be better…”

“Suppose that a man’s throat needed to be slit from behind. You have one second to decide whether it fits your moral code. Do you hesitate? What happens if a guard asks for mercy and gives up. Do you and your Guardian friends tie him up and gag him or do you smash his head with a brick?”

“Honor would demand that I…”

She talked over him. “Honor demands that you do the right thing even if means letting that cancer of a man live. Honor demands that you let his evil spread, because without honor how would you look your fellow Guardians in the eye? That’s not something Gunner and Neil have to worry about. No one looks them in the eye and all they’ve ever done was sacrifice their bodies for the good of…” Her breath suddenly hitched in her chest and she turned away. “They’ve sacrificed for me and for others and this time will be no different.”

“You don’t know that,” Neil said. “It could be a cakewalk this time.”

Without turning around, she said, “You’re right, Neil. You only die in eleven of the thirteen scenarios I’ve envisioned.” She spun about suddenly and they saw her great blue eyes were filled with tears. “Whatever happens, you are not to throw your lives away. Remember, I am not done.”

Neil grinned. “You have another plan? It must be truly horrible if this one is better.”

“It won’t be needed because you three will prevail. Now, we have no more time. You must go.”

The three tried to climb aboard their camouflaged raft and discovered that it was too narrow. Only Gunner could put his full weight on it. Neil and Troy hung off the sides, trying to peer through the thin screen of branches. Knowing that silence was the key, Jillybean equipped the raft with the last scuba tank left to her fleet. It enabled them to cross the river, and with short bursts they steered toward the drainage pipe that Troy and Neil had used to escape the town.

Its entrance was four feet under water, which was the least of their worries. Easily their biggest concern was that looming not far above the drain was the first line of trenches. They were so close they could hear one of the men scratching his ass.

They knew that any sound they made would be immediately picked up, which made getting off the raft something of an impossibility for Gunner. His hump kept catching on the branches, making them scritch alarmingly. Thankfully, Jillybean had foreseen the problem. A crash of gunfire erupted on the far bank. Bullets began whipping just over head, thudding into the earth or making high pinging sounds as they nicked off the wire. The return fire was inevitable and under the cover of a hundred guns going off at once, the three ducked down beneath the water and squirmed up into the pipe.

Gunner squirmed like a giant slug, filling the pipe with his bulk, making Neil think of the Lord of the Rings for the first time in a decade. He was practically small enough to be a hobbit and he pictured himself as Samwise Gamgee, stealing into Mordor. The similarities were too perfect. The dark was all pervasive and the stench had to be as bad as Shelob’s lair. There was fear in the stifling, black air, and everything was drenched in darkest evil.

He was dwelling on this when he ran his face into Troy’s muddy boots. Gunner had stopped and was gasping in pain.

“It’s just a little further,” Troy whispered.

To Gunner the dark seemed endless and time even more so. They had been seven minutes in the pipe but to him it had seemed like an hour. “Jus…just need a sec.” He was close to passing out again. Fainting, he thought. I’m close to fainting. It was embarrassing. Fainting was for girls and wimps. He took a deep gurgling breath and inched on. And on. And on.

By the time he felt a tiny cold breeze wafting down from the opening, he only had enough strength to make the climb up into the city. After that he fainted and had to be dragged out a piss-smelling puddle by Troy.

“What do we do?” Troy asked. “Do we give him the other shot?”

It felt too soon to Neil. “We wait. He’ll come around.”

Soaking wet and freezing, they sat in the dark, listening to guns rattle, first behind them, and then around the perimeter of the trashy little town. Jillybean had planned this to keep the Corsairs from flooding the area around the pipe with men. Unfortunately, it also made the streets extra dangerous. Squads of black-garbed Corsairs ran here and there, chasing the gunfire. Then, when it ended, they came sauntering back. There was always one or two within sight.

Gunner sat up on his own and looked blearily around. He grunted, “So this is Hoquiam. It’s exactly as nasty I expected it to be.”

“It’s even worse that it had been,” Troy told him. There were more bodies in the streets and more rats in the gutter. The putrid smell in the air was made almost unbreathable by the fear that ran like an electric current along it. Even Troy felt a touch of it. He refused to show it, however. Neil seemed to lack the wit to be afraid and was thus immune to fear, while Gunner, even perhaps dying from a serious wound, was the thing that stalked people’s nightmares. He had lost his mask and the shadows pooling in the holes and ravines of his face made him look even more ghastly than ever.

“We can’t stay here forever,” Gunner said after a minute. His hand was already getting twitchy and he felt drawn-out and thin inside. The drugs were wearing off. “How far is it?”

“Six or seven blocks,” Troy answered. “Not far. If you can’t make it…”

Gunner shoved himself to his feet, growling, “I can make it, choir boy.” He pulled his battered Glock and checked to see if a round was chambered. Satisfied, he re-holstered it. Neil and Troy did the same with their M4s. When they were ready, Troy took point, keeping as close as he could to the overgrown bushes on the south side of the road. When he came to a street crossing, he paused, looked both ways and then darted across.

“What the hell are you doing?” Gunner demanded. “Do you see anyone else acting like that? Just walk normal.” Although he had chastised Troy for not walking normal, Gunner wasn’t really any better. He was still staggering and wheezing. It was all he could do to remain upright.

“Soldiers!” Troy hissed after only a block. A group of six were ambling down the street, seemingly unconcerned that they were in the middle of a siege. Neil took Gunner by the arm and pushed him to the left and down a cracked and buckled driveway. They marched through a bumper crop of weeds, crossed an adjacent lot, and hurried down along the side of a dark laundromat. Its siding had once been stark white; now it was covered in swirls of graffiti. To Neil it looked as though someone had puked up forty gallons of partially digested skittles on the side of the wall.

It was somewhat mesmerizing and he wasn’t paying attention and managed to trip over an old rusting washing machine someone had thrown through a side window.

He surprised a slave who hadn’t heard them coming. She froze in fear, but when she saw Gunner’s face she sucked in a huge breath to scream. “Don’t,” he hissed, his gun suddenly appearing in his hand, faster than possible. Troy stepped between the two, his arms out, afraid that this was one of those moments Jillybean had talked about. Was he going to shoot her to keep her quiet? Would he strangle her with that giant hand of his?

“It’s only a slave girl,” Troy said.

“Yeah? I see that.” He leaned closer and muttered, “What are you doing, Corsair?” Troy gaped at him in confusion and Gunner growled, “Send the bitch packing.”

“Right,” Troy said, remembering that they were supposed to be blending in. They were Corsairs, and Corsairs were mean and cruel. He turned and glared at the slave. “You should go home…woman.” Gunner cleared his throat and spat something black onto the ground. Troy knew it was a hint. “I mean, go home…b-itch.” The word got caught up in his mouth, making Neil snort laughter. It was an awful animal sound. The woman fled as if she thought Neil might eat her—something that had fleetingly crossed his mind.

The second she was out of sight, Troy said, “I don’t know what you were laughing about, Neil. I don’t think I ever heard you curse either.”

“I can curse, trust me on that score,” Neil said, still grinning his gargoyle grin. “Try this on for size: butt-crack. And how about this: piss-face. Fart. Wiener…”

“Stop it,” Gunner grunted, cutting across Neil just as he was getting warmed up. “You can two practice being idiots later. Right now we have to move on.” He pointed westward with the Glock.

Troy went first as Gunner debated sliding the gun back in its holster. It had hurt to pull it as fast as he had, and he worried that doing that once more could cause internal bleeding. He kept it out as he followed after Troy.

The streets were even less crowded the deeper they made it into Hoquiam. They grew strangely silent as well and there was a restlessness to the air. It was a waiting feel and Gunner didn’t know if it was just him feeling it. His destiny was coming closer with every grueling step. He needed his second shot, badly. Every part of him hurt, just as every part of him seemed to be weakening. It was becoming too much to even hold his head up. Even his basic senses were failing. At some point, he found Neil had tucked himself up into his armpit and was helping to carry his weight.

Gunner forced himself to hold out until they were just down the street from Jillybean’s church. “That’s it,” Troy said, his fury making his throat tight. The corpses dangling from its walls were visible even in the dark.

“Hmm,” Gunner said in a phlegmy growl as he eyed the surrounding buildings. Right across from it was a large, square, three-story post office. Its roof was the most obvious spot for a shooter. “Troy, once you set off the explosives, you head up to the roof of that white building. Neil, I want you on the first floor. You’ll be guarding his back. Once the shooting starts, you hold them off down there. If you have to retreat, retreat upwards. I’m going to be in the building cattycorner to yours. It’s got a good view of the front of the church and I’ll be able to pick off almost everyone that may try to flank you.”

And it’s closer and it’s only two stories. He didn’t think he could do any more than two flights of stairs at this point. “Remember. We’re after the Captain. Don’t shoot until you have a bead on him. Everything else is secondary. Any questions?”

Instead of a question, Troy whispered, “Heavenly Father, please bless us and bless our mission.” He then drew the Sign of the Cross and sighed.

“Amen,” Neil said. “No questions for me either. Kill the Captain. Protect Troy. Seems pretty easy.”

It was easy, in concept. Gunner was sure reality would be different.

Troy left first, looping around the block to come at the church from the rear. Neil left next, walking straight down the road as if he was without a care in the world. He was actually very hungry. He was in the midst of an entire town where anyone not wearing a collar was fair game. “And no one would know,” he whispered to himself.

Gunner sucked in a deep aching breath and forced open the door to the building, set diagonal from the church. It was dark and cold inside, but not cold enough to preserve the meat that had been left out to rot. Two bodies were laid out on the tile right inside the front door. The stench coming off them would have had a normal man bent over and puking. Gunner barely had a sense of smell left and merely sneered at the dead—they had been Corsairs and didn’t deserve his pity. He stepped over them and went to the staircase.

Twenty-two steps later, he made it to the top. His hand shook and sweat dripped from his brow. “A little further.” He told himself that the second of Jillybean’s shots would be his reward to make it to his position. When he finally made it, his hand was shaking too much for him to punch the needle down into the meat of his thigh. He slid it in nice and slow, and moaned in happiness as he did.

A block away, Troy approached the church and for the first time in his life did not feel the presence of God. The back door made him uneasy and he slipped around to the front where he immediately second-guessed his decision. The bodies nailed to the front of the building were falling apart. They rained sickening, greasy wet drops on anyone who dared to pass beneath them—it was the exact opposite of being doused with holy water.

Taking a deep breath, he dodged under the bodies and came up against the side of the building. Again, he felt uneasy. It was as if the church had been desecrated down to its foundations. It was now a place of evil. Even the front door moaned as if in pain as he stepped inside. “Lord bless me,” he said as a harsh chemical smell slapped him in the face. For half a heartbeat, he would have sworn it was brimstone, the devil’s breath. It stopped him in place until he remembered the strange ingredients that made up Jillybean’s bombs.

Scattered around the dark interior were the vague outlines of boxes and barrels and piles of these ingredients. There were parts of rockets in one corner and in another were pews lined with electronic components. In the exact middle of the church was an enormous, round scorch mark that was so nasty smelling that Troy stepped around it. He squinted, searching the dark for the Tupperware containers which Jillybean assured him would hold the black powder. They would be the easiest to ignite, she had told him. He wasn’t too worried. Judging by the stench, the entire building was a bomb waiting to happen.

He had his own bomb. She had given him a four-pound pipe bomb with a thirty second delay. All he had to do was twist a knob and hit a switch, and time would do the rest. Holding it made his hand sweat, and twisting the knob was like turning on something inside his own body—it made his heart begin to race and thump heavily inside him.

He could feel his heart thudding through his chest and banging against his armored vest, and it only got worse when he saw in front of him the stacks of perfectly rectangular plastic boxes. He was two steps away when he heard something behind him.

“Whatju got there, boy?” There was suddenly a man standing near the altar twenty feet to his right. Just like that, an icy hand gripped his heart and now it felt like it stopped completely.

Hit the button and run! a voice inside him screamed. But would he make it out of the building? A glance to the front door told him that he wouldn’t. Another man much like the first had slipped between him and the exit. They held black rifles which were pointed directly at him.

“I have a bomb,” he told them, his thumb sliding up to the switch; it felt oily, or was that sweat?

“Is that right?” If the man was nervous it didn’t come through in his voice. “This is the place for ‘em. It’s a reg-aler Bombs-R-Us ‘round here. Put whatever that thing is down and git yer hands up.”

“I said, it’s a bomb.” Troy’s thumb caressed the switch. He had to remind himself that the bomb was more important than his life. It would destroy the Corsair’s ability to make rockets and, more importantly, it would summon the Captain. “I think I need to explode it.”

The man by the altar sniffed. “Then you’d blowed yerself up, too. That seems all sorts of dumb to me.”

“You think it’s a real bomb, Warren?” the other Corsair asked.

“Nope. None-a-the bombs are ‘splode-able. The Captain gots all the detonators. So, he just holding some parts. Parts don’t ‘splode.” The man was so sure that he was walking forward, gun pointed as he talked. His friend, who was closer, started to edge in as well.

Troy began backing away, so he could see them both. One part of his mind told him to: Hit the switch. Stop hesitating. This is your destiny. Make it count. The other part of him was afraid.

“I ain’t tellin’ ya again, boy,” Warren said, his voice filling with menace. “Put down the gizmo or I will shootcha.”

Hit the switch. Stop hesitating. This is your destiny. Make it count. It had been a mistake to move away from the black powder. He could only hope that whatever was in the cardboard containers next to him would burn or explode. “Of course. Just going to place it here.” He flicked the switch as he pulled his hand back.

“Good. Now turn yer dumb-ass around. Whatchu got? An M4? That som-bitch looks like new. Tha’s gonn-be mine. Ya hear that, Rawly? I’m takin that gun fer my own and I don’ wanna hear no bitchin’…”

“There’s a light on his bomb, Warren,” Rawly said, speaking quickly, but at the same time annunciating every word perfectly, as if a mispronunciation might set it off.

Warren looked from Troy to the bomb and back again. “Wha’s that mean? Wha’s the light do?”

“It means it’s about to blow up. It’s on a timer. If you know any prayers I would say them now. I personally think the Our Father is best suited for the moment. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”

Rawly prayed after the manner of Corsairs: “Christ! I’m…I’m getting out of here!” He turned, stumbled over a pile of copper wire, jumped up and ran. Warren took only a second longer to conclude that the bomb was real, then he too ran.

Troy could have run as well. He could have dashed out into the street and watched the church erupt in a great fireball. But he would be caught. Maybe he could kill one of the Corsairs, but probably not both or the others that would come flooding in. If he was caught they would bring him to the Black Captain, not the other way around. And that wasn’t the plan.

With the timer ticking down a foot from him, he ripped his M4 from his shoulder, swept it up and began firing at the two fleeing men. They blended so well with the darkness that he could not see what he was shooting at—not until Rawly hauled open the front door. Then Troy had him perfectly in his sights. Five shots dropped the two Corsairs as they crossed the threshold of the church. They fell beneath the crucified corpse of Stu Currans and he dripped his last few drops on them.

Even as they went down, Troy flung aside his rifle and dove for the bomb, his hand smashing down the switch. The light went off.

The Guardian stood panting, looking down at the bomb for half a minute. When it didn’t vaporize him, he calmly picked it up and brought it to stacked cases of black powder. Will the timer start over when I hit the switch? he wondered. If it didn’t he figured he had about five seconds to get out of the building. He flicked the switch and ran from the church in a full sprint. Four seconds was all he had left. It got him out of the building and halfway across the street.

Troy was only just realizing that he had left his rifle behind, when there was a flash of light and a sound like God’s voice. It was impossible to describe the sound since Troy’s eardrums were ruptured as he was thrown off his feet.

A fraction of a second later, the air above him was filled with fire, spears of wood, and bricks spinning by at two-hundred miles an hour. A burning hand lifted him and tossed him into a ditch that had a deliciously cold puddle of brackish water at the bottom. All around him was blazing red light and heat that was so intense that he thrust his head down into the puddle to keep his hair from bursting into flame.

He had no idea how long he was under water. His brain was throbbing, feeling as though it kept expanding and contracting. When it expanded he thought it would break out of his skull, and when it contracted he thought he was falling away into nothing. Neil Martin pulled him out of the water just as he was on the brink of accidentally drowning himself.

“Come on, Troy! Get up!” Neil’s words were muffled and sounded far away.

“What?” he mumbled. The night seemed to have turned to a gold-orange day, which made no sense.

“We have to move,” Neil told him. And Troy was moving though he didn’t know how. He couldn’t feel his legs, or the rest of his body for that matter. The only part of him that had any sensation was his head. It felt huge.

Neil hauled him through the front door of the post office where they both fell over in a heap. “Up. We have to get you up.” He had Troy almost to his knees when he noticed that the entire first floor was filled with a heavy black smoke. It was a dense, blistering hot cloud that pressed down from above.

“Smoke?” Equating smoke with fire was a slow process for Neil. So slow that it wasn’t until part of the building fell in and flames roared across what remained of the ceiling that he realized the building was on fire. “Huh. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Hey, Troy? Wake up. Did you blow up the wrong building?” He had already forgotten that only a minute before he had stopped to stare as the church disappeared behind a wall of flame a hundred feet high.

When the paint on the wall began to bubble, Neil decided that the fire was hotter than most and that it probably wasn’t good for Troy, who was sleeping again. The little zombie sighed out a plume of smoke and dragged his friend out into the bright night. With the fire and the explosion still echoing in his ears, Neil had forgotten their mission and without thinking, he hauled Troy right out into the middle of the street.

He never looked more like a demon than he did just then. His face had blistered and his hair had begun to smolder, and now smoke curled off of him in eerie wisps. The man at his feet looked like he had been mauled by a pack of hyenas.

The Corsairs who came up to see what had happened gave Neil a wide berth and at first didn’t question the strange creature—in Hoquiam, frequently it was best not to ask too many questions. Eventually, Neil realized that he was surrounded by Corsairs.

“Aw, crap. Troy, we have to get out of here.” It was too late for that. The crowd was now a hundred people strong and more than one was beginning to figure out that there was something terribly wrong with Neil.

“What is it thing?” one man asked. No one knew but they all made guesses.

One dark man had the right answer, “That is a genuine scientific oddity of my own creation.” The Black Captain had arrived, just as Jillybean said he would. He wore his long black coat closed so that his guns were out of sight. They were not out of hand, however. The pockets of the coat had been cut, so even then he had a grip on a pearl handle.

“This is Neil Martin. He’s something of a zombie so try not to let him touch you while you kick the crap out of him.” The Captain was both furious and frightened. Too much had gone wrong. No, everything had gone wrong and he needed to take the focus off of himself. “Thrash him, but don’t kill him. I have something special planned for him.”

It was only at that moment that Neil remembered he had a rifle strapped to his back. Before he could wiggle the strap off, someone kicked him in the side. When he turned, someone else planted a heavy boot in the small of his back, throwing him forward where he tripped over Troy, who was still borderline comatose. Another Corsair tried to stomp his face with a big size thirteen boot, but Neil caught the foot and bit down on the man’s calf.

The man screamed and dragged himself out of Neil’s grasp. Instead of pitying the bleeding man, he was laughed at.

While the Corsairs were distracted, Neil tried to lunge for the Captain, however his gun had slipped and became entangled in his legs. While on his knees, he was kicked in the back of the head, and in the temple, and in the shoulder, and jaw. He was kicked two dozen times until his black blood ran like water and he could barely stand. The orbit of one eye was cracked and the other was so swollen he couldn’t see out of it.

“I give,” he said in a wheezing, begging tone. “I give up. Jillybean told me not to waste my life.”

“You don’t have a life unless I say you do,” the Captain laughed.

“What? Am I just a plaything to you?” Neil demanded. “Am I just a distraction?”

Too late, the Captain saw that Neil was grinning. He had been a distraction. For the Corsairs he had been the perfect distraction. Everyone had forgotten Knights Sergeant Troy Holt. He had been summoning his strength and trying to clear his head. Now he pulled a seven-inch hunting knife and pushed himself to one knee. The Captain was right in front of him, desperately trying to pull one of his revolvers from his coat pocket—they both knew he wouldn’t get it free in time.

Troy had never been quicker. He leapt and lunged so fast he was a blur, the knife only a silver streak.

He was fast, but the bullet that hit him in the back was faster.

A hundred yards away, Gunner gasped, his stomach rolling over. One second he had the Captain finally in his sights and the next, something dark shot in front of him just as he pulled the trigger. “No,” he whispered as he tried to sight in on what he had hit. “God, please no.” Then he saw what he already knew what he would see. Troy Holt face down in the street.

A curse screeched out of him as he fumbled his rifle between his knees so he could slam home another round. Before he could, he felt a touch of cold metal on the back of his neck.

“Hello Gunner, remember me?” It was Mark Leney. “Where’s that crappy old Glock? I bet you want to pull it, don’t you? You want to find out who’s faster now?”

Gunner slumped. He had failed yet again.

Chapter 45

Grays Harbor, Washington

The fire from the burning church could be seen from the hills east of the city where Jillybean stood waiting for the gunshot. When it came she held her breath, knowing that a dozen more would follow it. Maybe they wouldn’t come right away, but they would come. She had known from the very start that the three would have to fight their way out of the city.

Perhaps they’re sneaking out, Ipes suggested.

Or they’re in hiding, waiting for things to cool down, Sadie said.

Maybe they’re being tortured to death right this second, Eve said, breezily. That was only a bullet cooking off. Just admit it, Jillybean. As always, you’ve put your faith in the weakest people possible. A cripple, a thing worse than a zombie, and Mister Goody-two-shoes, Troy “no balls” Holt. I shoulda been running the meat suit from day one. Leney would never have had the balls to stab me in the back.

Jillybean felt Eve’s tug. Her vision shifted and her mind felt as though it was slipping from her brain.

“Not yet, Eve. When I’m done you can have it. I don’t care anymore, just let me finish this.”

Finish what? That was it. That was your last shot. Your people won’t go through with an actual attack. Hell, even Ipes knows that and he’s an idiot.

Hey!

Butt out, fuzzball. This is between me and the know it all. And speaking of which, you’ve been wrong about everything. Your only option is to gas the whole town. You know a threat won’t work. The Captain knows he’s a dead man if he caves to you. He either dies with your noose around his neck or a bullet through the back of his head from one of his own people. Just gas them and be done.

Jillybean sighed, “But the slaves…”

The slaves aren’t even human at this point! Eve cried. You saw those things that the Captain let you have. He gave you a hundred and fifty ‘things.’ They were shattered, frail, vacant-eyed nothings. She spat on the ground. They made Shaina look normal. Lie to yourself all you want, Jillybean, just don’t think you can lie to me. Gassing them has to be an option.

It was an option. The very fact that Eve was there at all proved it. Jillybean had always known that it might come down to laying waste to the entire town and walking away. In no way would it be considered a victory, but it wouldn’t be a loss either.

It would be a victory in my book, Eve remarked. All those moronic bandits would think good and hard about trying to cross us ever again.

Reserve Commander Jennifer Edgerton had been watching Jillybean twitch and mumble to herself this entire time. “Uh, ma’am? Your Highness? Wasn’t the plan to pull back?”

Eve shot her a nasty glare. “Do you mind? If I wanted to hear from a pasty-faced sow, I would have come straight to you, but I didn’t, did I?”

Jillybean turned away, hissing, “Eve, stop it! I told you I’d give you a chance when I was done.” Eve smoldered angrily into the background of her conscious. “Sorry about that, Commander. I was just…” No lie could cover the outburst and Jillybean chose to pretend it hadn’t happened. “Yes, please pull the men back. We’ll know soon enough if Gunner succeeded. Pull back but make sure you keep the fires going.”

She wanted whoever was in charge in Hoquiam to think that they were surrounded.

Alone, Jillybean made her way to the pickup point she had arranged and found the Mary Magdalene at anchor in the mouth of the Chehalis River, out of sight of the grubby little town. A boat rowed her to the ship and once on board she went below and slept in a stranger’s cabin, on a stranger’s pillow. It smelled distantly of lye and a man’s sweat.

As she lay there, waiting for sleep, she pictured Stu Currans. Jillybean pictured him as he looked on board the Floating Fortress when they had first dragged it from the mud. He was tall and tan and heartbreakingly handsome. Despite his age, he had been a man through and through.

“He could’ve been a king,” she whispered. At that, her vision shifted and now she saw him standing across from the Black Captain in the low-ceiling jail, surrounded by dozens of people. He had a gun at his hip—and he had been too slow. Just a fraction of a second too slow. She fell asleep still picturing him.

With a very light wind in their face, and a narrow channel that made tacking a headache, the ship made poor time and Jillybean had hours of deep, dreamless sleep. It was not until daybreak that they caught a good breeze and were able to angle in toward the Queen’s fleet.

Although it was early, there wasn’t a soul still in bed and very few who had actually gone to sleep to begin with. Jillybean was one of the few people within ten miles who was completely refreshed. She came up on deck and saw that the Queen’s ships as well as the shoreline were lined with people. Hundreds of people and not a hero left among them.

Emily’s a hero, Sadie corrected. And Jenn and Deanna have proven themselves a hundred times over.

“Emily is a hero in the making,” Jillybean corrected, “And their people need Jenn and Deanna too much for them to be risked. It has to be me.” She knew already that Gunner had failed. The lack of gunfire was all the proof Jillybean needed for her to know that the Captain hadn’t been killed. There would have been a scramble for leadership. Ancient grievances would have been righted. Somebody would have been murdered. After all, these were Corsairs.

Jenn knew better than to ask how things had gone when Jillybean came aboard The Courageous. Jillybean nodded once to her and the Bishop, accepted a hug from a damp-eyed Emily, and was given a sad grimace from Deanna who loved Neil like a brother. In silence, Jillybean went down to check on her patients, starting with Mike. He was a little stronger.

“I heard the bomb,” he said, gravel voiced. “It was a big one.”

“The size of a church,” Jillybean agreed, listening to his heart through her stethoscope. It was thready but no so weak as it had been.

“I can still help. If you need me. I’ll die for her…and for you.”

Jillybean felt tears coming on. Quickly, she bent down and made a show of going through the surgical kit she had brought. She had been looking for a hero, and here he was, still trying to do the right thing while standing on the worn-down welcome mat of death’s door. She rubbed her sleeve across her eyes before standing. “We’ll need heroes in the future, Mike. Your job is to get better. Don’t worry about what’s happening out there. I’ll take care of this one.”

She bent and kissed him on the forehead and left, searching out the other wounded people. None of the other patients volunteered to do anything but lie there and sleep, and that was to be expected. That was normal. Heroes were not normal. They were rare.

“Queen Jillybean?” It was the lumpy-headed girl.

“Are they here, Shaina?”

She seemed confused. “No. It’s just one person. They had this little boat and we went and got her. The Queen said you weren’t going to like it.”

Jillybean’s heart began to pound as Eve raided her imagination and sent terrible, bloody pictures of body parts into her mind. This one is Neil’s balls, and this is Gunner’s hump. Look inside, it’s a second head…

“Shut up!” Jillybean yelled, stomping her foot. Shaina went white. “No, not you, Shaina. I was talking to Eve. Go on. I’ll follow you.” She followed slowly, so she had time to force her face into the blandest of neutral expressions. Thankfully the Captain’s ambassador carried no body parts. It was the ambassador herself who shocked Jillybean. It was Joslyn Reynolds standing at the back of the boat, as bold as brass, her usual impish smile on her aging features. Her wrinkles were more pronounced and her few grey hairs were now coming in streaks.

A half dozen guns were pointed at her. Deanna held Emily behind her, partially to protect her daughter and partially to keep Emily from rushing over and knocking Joslyn’s teeth in.

Jenn Lockhart stood directly in front of Joslyn, her auburn hair whipping, and her cheeks the color of cream. She had learned the art of silence and her icy stare was so devastating that even Joslyn didn’t feel she could speak until acknowledged. “He sends us a traitor to bargain with,” Jenn said. “Not too smart if you ask me.”

“It’s a feeble attempt to get under our skin,” Jillybean remarked, coming to stand next to her best friend. “I suppose it’s working a bit. Emily sure would like to kill you with her bare hands, and she is more than capable of doing so. And Eve is begging me to let her strap you to one of my operating tables. She remembers Hoquiam very well. In fact, she learned a lot and can’t wait to try out some of the techniques. She can be quite the artist when it comes to that sort of thing. And I’m inclined to give her a little freedom when we win. You Corsairs deserve all the pain and death that’s coming to you.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Joslyn replied. “If you could have killed us you would have. Instead you resort to assassination. The Captain says you’ve showed your cards, Jillybean. You got nothing left but bluffs.”

“And what do you have? Even less, I’d wager. I’m willing to bet the Captain is hanging on by the skin of his teeth.”

She shrugged away the comment. “What we have are three of your people. They’re all a little nicked up, but still alive. The Captain is willing to make a trade. He’ll give them up in exchange for a cease fire. I’m talking peace. You do want peace, don’t you?”

Next to Jillybean, Jenn sucked in a light breath. Before she could say anything Jillybean snapped, “We can have peace anytime we want. All we have to do is sail away and what can he do? Nothing. We’ve destroyed his mighty fleet. We crushed his armies. Oh, trust me, we want more than just three men. We want your slaves, all of them. I was given the title of Queen of the Slaves and now I want what’s mine. I want all the slaves excluding you, Joslyn. You get to stay.”

“I’m no slave. A slave wears a collar, Jillybean. We still have yours, you know. Ready to be melted down and reworked with something stronger.” Jillybean only glared. “Okay, so you aren’t interested in peace. That seems shortsighted to me, but what the hell? Lucky for you, the Captain has another offer. He was worried you would be too stupid to go for the first so he has a backup. He’ll trade the three of them for you, Jillybean.”

“Don’t do it, Jillybean!” Jenn ordered.

“This doesn’t concern you, child,” Joslyn sneered. “The Captain knows who the true power is, and it’s not a kid playing dress up. Have you seen yourself? All dressed in black like your hero. You look like a wanna-be and the Captain does not deal with fakes when he has the real thing right here. What do you say, Jillybean? You have to know he’s going to do terrible things to them. You remember what he did to you. It’s going to be worse for them. Much worse. Don’t you love your father?”

Jillybean nodded slowly.

Joslyn smiled sadly. “Of course, you do. You would never want anything bad to happen to poor, little Neil. And what about your dear old friend Gunner? Or should we call him by his real name now? Captain James Grey.”

Deanna had felt like a spectator right up until her dead husband’s name was invoked. “Captain James Grey? I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, Joslyn, but so help me…”

“I know, I was just as shocked. That horrible creature was your husband. Ask your daughter. Better yet, ask yourself. You knew him better than any of us.”

Gunner’s destroyed face filled her mind. It was horrible to look on, but what about when he wore his mask? Deanna remembered the one time she had seen him from just the right angle. He’d been handsome. No, he had been more than just handsome, he had been familiar and oddly reassuring, as if she knew she could trust him despite his name and his horrible hump.

“It’s true, mom,” Emily said. “It’s him and he’s still the hero you always talked about. And he still loves you so much it hurts him.”

“And don’t you want that love back?” Joslyn asked. “Underneath all that ugly business he’s still the man you’ve always loved. Tell me you’re not such a shallow creature to let a few scars get in the way of true love.” She left Deanna reeling and turned to Bishop Wojdan. “And don’t you want Troy back safe and sound. He has his entire future ahead of him. And what a future! He’s the kind of a man you can rebuild your world around. The world that Jillybean stole from you. You want it back, don’t you?”

Wojdan nodded despite himself and then made a sour face. “I cannot make that decision, young lady. If Jillybean wishes to trade herself it must be her choice and hers alone.”

Everyone turned to stare at Jillybean.

She had foreseen this exact scenario, minus Joslyn’s presence, that is. The ramifications of trading herself were dire. Escape would not be possible. The Captain would undoubtedly chop her fingers off. Or burn them off one at a time! Eve screamed in her ear. And for what? Zombie Neil? A thing that had once been a man? A boy priest? You know that without you they’ll all die anyway. Even your little queen friend. They’re all going to die.

“I know.” The Captain’s assassins would seek them out. The truth she had always known was that there could be no peace until he was dead.

Then don’t trade yourself.

“I won’t. We have to go with Plan B.” Eve began to grow black and monstrous. She hated Plan B. Jillybean didn’t like much either. “It’s the only option left to us. Or if you have your own plan I would like to hear it. If not, let me be.”

Eve had no plan and slouched back into the darkness, the sneer still imprinted on her face.

“What does Eve have to say?” Joslyn asked, wearing a viper’s smile. “Is she on board? I would love to hear her input.”

“I bet you would,” Jillybean answered, hotly. “She can be manipulated with cheap tricks while I cannot. As much as I love my father, and Captain Grey, and as much as I respect Knights Sergeant Holt, I cannot accept the offer. I do have one of my own that may interest the Captain. I’d like to challenge him to a duel. All or nothing. If he wins, we…they sail away. If I win, I get my friends and the slaves.”

Joslyn looked as though she couldn’t believe her ears. “You want to fight the Captain? With guns?”

“With pistols. His pistols in fact. In Hoquiam, and on the street of his choice. No tricks. No snipers. Just me against him.”

A broad grin slowly stretched across Joslyn’s impish face. “Are you being serious? You can’t possibly think that you can…wait. Never mind. If you are serious then I’m pretty sure he’s going to go for it.”

Bishop Wojdan stared around in frank amazement. No one was jumping in to stop what was clearly madness. The Black Captain’s reputation as a gunfighter was infamous. It was how he built his empire. It was common knowledge and yet no one was saying a word.

“Jillybean…your Highness, you can’t throw your life away like this. I was wrong about you. Yes, you have issues but deep down you have a good soul. This would be tantamount to suicide.”

Jillybean had to hide a smirk. Deep down she didn’t have a good soul. No, if one went deep enough, they would find a soul that was inked black by sin layered on sin. “I appreciate that, your Excellency. This isn’t suicide. I believe I have a fifty-fifty chance of winning and if I can end the bloodshed with one bullet then I mean to.” She faced Joslyn and sighed. “Go tell your boss. I’ll meet him in three hours’ time. I will bring the Bishop as my second. And tell him that if there is any funny business on his part, the next cloud that rolls over your little town won’t be smoke, it will be chlorine gas and yes, it will kill everyone, including you, Jos.”

Her impish smile dimmed at the idea of poisonous gas, especially since she knew Jillybean was capable of making it. With a breath, she rallied. “There won’t be any funny business on our side. It’s you we should worry about. You and your chubby priest will both be searched, so don’t even think about bringing a bomb or gas or whatever.” She turned and snapped her fingers at the Captain of the Mary Magdalene as if she were on a day cruise and wanted a margarita.

She was gone and silence reigned in her wake. Everyone wanted the war over, and if anyone could end it with a bullet it was…not Jillybean. Captain Grey, yes. Troy Holt, maybe. Mike Gunter, of course, but only as long as the duel was fought on the shifting deck of a ship in a storm. Jillybean was not known for her speed, she was known for the power of her mind.

Emily was the first to break the silence. “What do you have planned?”

“I plan to kill him. Does anyone have a pistol with a holster I can practice with?”

Two nearby sailors went in different directions to hunt for one. Emily persisted, “What do you have up your sleeve. You’ve got to have a trick, right?”

“The trick is to be faster than him.”

“And aim better,” one of the sailors put in. He held out a .38 Special in a tired old holster. “It’s loaded by the way.”

While a crowd of people watched her, she buckled it around her narrow hips, remarking, “I could use something to eat if you guys don’t have anything better to do that is.” Shaina ran off for food and the others went back to staring. Jillybean put her hand over the butt of the gun and then tried to yank it out as fast as she could. It came out, but took a full second and a half.

“No really,” Emily said. “What’s the plan?”

Jillybean emptied the gun of bullets, put them in her pocket and held the gun up to the sun so she could look through the barrel and the open chamber. She then switched hands and did the same thing with her left before holstering it again. Once more she paused with her hand cocked at her side. As fast as she could, she yanked it out. If this attempt was quicker, it was hard to tell.

Somewhat clumsily she tossed it to her left hand. “Being faster is the plan,” she said.

“Then we need a new plan,” Emily stated, nodding and glancing around for agreement from the others. “The gas thing might work. They’ll cave. They got to, or…or the other bandits will jump him and take him out for us.”

“And if they don’t?” Jillybean asked, pulling the gun again, slightly faster this time. Emily shrugged. “If they don’t, chances are he’ll try to use his own version of toxic gas against us. That’s why if I fail, I want you to use the gas, Jenn.”

Jenn looked shocked at the idea. “You just made a deal.”

“I said that you would leave, but I’m not the queen, am I? I can’t tell you what to do and I can’t make deals in your name without you agreeing, which you did not do. In my med bag is the formula for making lethal doses of chlorine gas. It’s terribly simple. Use it. It kills in seconds and it’ll be a mercy for those slaves. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to practice alone.”

She found a cramped little cabin and began to practice the same motions she had on deck. The flourishes, the way she held her coat, the way she became confused as to which hand to use, were all as important as pulling the pistol as fast as she could. She did indeed have a plan. One that was both simple and exceedingly dangerous.

It depended on her being able to fool, not just the Captain, but also a thousand onlookers. She gave herself a one in five chance of success.

The hours dragged. Each second felt like it dripped from a slow-leaking faucet. Shaina brought her a blackened fish. It was so burnt that it was impossible to tell what kind it was. Jillybean’s stomach wouldn’t have been able to hold it down anyway. When the white flag was raised across the harbor and Shaina came down to remind her how great she was and that it was time to go, Jillybean stuck out her hand. It trembled. After a deep breath, she walked slowly up to a solemn deck. There were no smiles, there were only lingering hugs and quiet goodbyes.

The first two were from Deanna and Emily. Even frightened for her, they couldn’t help appearing radiant and golden. “You’ll get them back, won’t you?” Emily whispered in her ear.

“I’ll do what I can.” Jillybean had to peel the girl off of her.

Deanna gave her such a fierce hug that it cracked her back. “You and I are going to have words when you get back,” she warned. “You should have said something to me years ago. It wasn’t fair to me or to Emily.”

It wasn’t fair to eight-year-old Jillybean, either, but when did anyone ever take her feelings into account? Now’s not the time for a pity party, she scolded herself. “When I get back, you can yell at me all you want, but don’t yell at him. What he went through…what he goes through every day is already a torture to him.” Deanna’s pretty face fell as did her arms. She stepped back.

Jenn was last. She held one of the black and gold flags that Jillybean had reigned under. “Run this up when you’ve won.”

“You sound certain. Did you see a sign?”

The Queen took a deep breath and looked around. “It’s a beautiful day. That’s all I’m looking at. Good things can happen on a good day. Don’t you agree?”

Bad things can happen as well. “Yes, I suppose they can. This’ll be easier if I know you’re going to be tough. Use the gas. I left a formula for it in one of the books I gave you.”

Jenn was just in the process of making another protest when she drew in a sharp breath. “But that was weeks ago. You couldn’t have known that all of…Wait. You knew? You knew this was going to happen? How?”

“I knew today existed as a possibility. I knew Mike was something special, just like I knew you were as well. I knew Gunner would not fail his daughter, and I knew Deanna would make the hard choices. And I knew nothing could ever stop my Neil. I knew my Corsairs would turn on me. It wouldn’t have been just Leney, either. It’s why I traded myself. I also knew the Black Captain would overestimate both his men and himself. And I knew I could very well be right here, right now.” With the weight of the world on my shoulders.

“That’s impressive,” Jenn said, in awe. “And do you know what’s going to happen when you get across?”

Jillybean took a shaky breath. “I know you may have to be strong and do the hardest thing imaginable.”

Jenn could only nod, her eyes dropping. Jillybean gave her only a fifty-fifty chance to use the gas. It was one of the reasons why she was taking the Bishop. “Your Excellency. I like your vestments today.” He was in full regalia: white cassock, gold robe, purple sash.

“It’s only proper. I will pray for you.” It was something he took seriously. He started as soon as they stepped aboard the Mary Magdalene and did not stop until they made it to the other side of the harbor.

Jillybean tuned him out, just as she tuned out the feel of the cold water filling her boots up to her calves, as she stepped out of the row boat, and nor did she feel the hands of the Corsairs run up and down her body as they searched her.

The bishop got the same treatment, which he suffered in silence.

“You really gonna do this?” one of the Corsairs asked her. A nod was all he was worth. “Hell, you really are crazy.” The other one said much the same thing. Jillybean ignored them. Her mind was busy going over each motion she was going to make. They had to be precise. While her mind was busy, her eyes flicked about, taking in every aspect of the city. Just as Neil and Troy had, she noticed the change that had come over it. She would no longer describe it a sprawling, filthy lair. No, it was now a concentration camp and every Corsair was both guard and prisoner.

They were marched north, not to one of the schools where there were open fields, or to one of the wider streets where people could stand twenty deep on either side to watch the show. They walked to a narrow lane with barren trees lining both sides. The houses along the road were squat little things, low ranches for the most part and where there were two stories there were Corsairs in the upper floors.

The Black Captain was taking no chances. He was not going to be lured out in the open where another sniper could take a shot at him.

The pair found him leaning on the hood of a rust-brown Tercel that was only a few winters away from falling to nothing. In front of him was Mark Leney. Grinning, Leney came forward. “I would say you’ve made a big mistake, only it’s way too late for that.” When she only looked past him at the Captain, he took a big breath and clapped his hands together. “Alright, this one’s for all the marbles. First I gotta frisk you. Yeah, I know, you just been frisked. It’s the way of the west.”

“And I will frisk you as well,” Bishop Wojdan said.

Leney gazed at him in amusement. “Sure, why not? You’re surrounded by a thousand guns, but let’s worry about me. Are you also going to frisk the Captain? Because I’m going to warn you he’s armed.”

Wojdan looked embarrassed. “I suppose not, however, I should check for body armor.”

Neither frisking uncovered anything and Jillybean walked up to the Black Captain. He bowed from the neck up, a whiff of cologne coming off him. “As always, your Highness, you are utterly unpredictable. Who could have foreseen this? You asking to resolve our differences with an old-fashioned wild west shootout. Especially after what happened to poor Stu. Shot down right in front of you. Scared you, did it?”

“May I see the guns? I’d like to choose one if you don’t mind.”

The coat he wore was long and black, very similar to hers. He drew it back from behind with his left hand and then, quick as lightning, he snatched an ivory-handled .44 caliber Colt out with his right. For a moment it was pointed right at her heart, its barrel shining like white fire. He turned it up and emptied the chamber before he offered it to her butt first.

“And the holster. I want to check both. You’re right handed?”

“I can shoot equally well with either hand,” he answered as he undid the buckle of the holster and handed it over.

She strapped it on and slid the Colt snugly back in place. It was a big gun and when she gave it a draw, she fumbled it. “It’s a little different from what I’m used to.” She tried the same move he did, pulling her coat back. When she snatched the gun out, she aimed it right at his grinning face and dry fired until the cylinder had gone all the way around.

“And that’s about as close as you’re going to get to actually killing me,” he told her. She switched the gun to her left hand and fired again into his face. He only shook his head. “Do you really think you have a chance? You’re playing a game here. I know it, because I know you. Supposedly, you’ve thought this all out. So, what is it? Do you have a spy in the crowd who’s going to do your shooting for you?”

“No,” she answered and handed him the empty gun. “My plan is to shoot you myself. Right now I want you worrying, and wondering, and trying to guess what I’m up to, which is exactly what you’re doing. And now you’re wondering what I’ve done to your gun.”

He had just opened the cylinder to inspect it. She laughed at him and held out her hand. “The other one please.”

“You don’t need to see the other one. This one is fine.”

“You’re already afraid. You’re thinking I have duds stashed up my sleeves. Or I’m going to put a metal pea down your barrel. Or I have a drone high overhead ready to…”

He almost looked. Everyone in the crowd looked up, but he didn’t. He stared right into her eyes. “You didn’t say ‘Simon Says’.”

“A drone at a thousand feet is a speck. Lucky for you I don’t have one. Let’s see the other gun.” Slowly, watching her the entire time, he dropped the shells from the pistol and handed it over. “And the holster,” she said.

“Why are you prolonging this? Is the cavalry coming to save the day? Is that what you think is going to happen?” She only grinned a Cheshire Cat grin as she buckled the holster in place with the pistol tucked under one arm. She then tried a fast draw, once more snapping the Colt in his face. He pretended to yawn. “You’re getting boring. Or are you afraid? Perhaps we should postpone this for a few weeks.”

She switched hands. “No. I’m just about warmed up. You see, I don’t think you’re as fast as you think.” She snapped off a few more rounds at him before tucking the gun up under her chin as she went to unbuckle the holster. “Stu surprised you didn’t he? I saw that look on your face when he got off that shot. If his aim had been just inches…”

He snatched the Colt from under her chin. “I’m starting to think I’m not dealing with the real Jillybean, and guess what? I don’t care. I’ll kill whoever you are.”

“And I don’t think you’re ambidextrous. I think you are a tiny bit slower with your left hand and that’s all the edge I’m going to need.” She put out her hand for the right-handed holster. He handed it over but hesitated giving her the pistol—he still believed she had secretly monkeyed with the guns somehow. It was the way she had acted. The obvious distractions, the way she made sure to lock his gaze so he couldn’t see what her hands were up to.

“You should be scared,” she told him, speaking loud enough for everyone to hear. “The trap is already in place. The toxin-laced needle is n the holster. The contact poison is on the grip of your gun. Will it just paralyze the hand or will it go right to your central nervous system and freeze you in place? That’s what you’re asking yourself. What did she do? Is there really a drone so high that no one can see? Is there a shooter in the house down the street? There has to be, because she would never challenge me one on one.”

He looked down at the twin Colts and she wasn’t wrong. He knew she had done something, or was about to do something. For the first time in his adult life he was afraid to strap a gun on.

“Is this really the man you fear,” she asked the Corsairs. “He’s afraid to fight a girl.” She shot him a quick look. “Now I’m goading you to fight. Does that mean I really want you to or do I want you to chicken out? What were you saying about postponing this for a week?”

He couldn’t postpone now. He would look weak. He couldn’t afford weakness, but at the same time, he knew she had done something. He knew it as a complete and utter fact. Her smile told him so.

“Did you know I was expecting us to end up right here?” she asked. She looked up and down the block, in truth seeing it for the first time. “Well, to be honest this was the third place on my list. During one of my escapes I mapped out the streets and I figured we would be right here.”

“You’re lying.” It felt like a lie.

“Then why haven’t you given me a gun? Everyone’s waiting. Pick one and give me the other. Come on, let’s do this.” She strapped on the holster and once more put out a hand—and it was steady as a rock. She even turned it over for him to see that there wasn’t a quiver in it. “If you won’t give it to me, give it to my man. You trust a bishop, don’t you?”

When they first came up, the Captain had got a chuckle out of seeing the portly priest in his gold robes, fear sweat in his thin hair, his wormy lips set in a grimace of fright. Now he saw the man in an entirely new light—anything could be under those robes. And was he even a bishop?

“Leney will load the guns,” he said, thrusting them at his second. “Your man can watch.” The Colts were on the hood of the car, shining beautifully. The Captain poured the rounds into Leney’s hand and then buckled on his holster. All the while Jillybean stared into his face. She was daring him to lock eyes with her—so he would miss something. What? His eyes shifted to where Leney was sliding the fat bullets, one at a time into each cylinder.

Once he was done, he spun each cylinder then snapped them closed. Jillybean gave him a wink and cold sweat broke out down the Captain’s back. Leney had been the first man to turn against him and the first man to turn against her—had that been a fake? Was he still loyal to her? He claimed to have captured Gunner and saved the Captain’s life, but was that true?

“Let me see that gun,” the Captain said in something of a whisper. He took it gingerly and looked it over. There was nothing wrong with it. So why is she smiling? Why’s she so confident? What is she up to? She always has a plan. This was a mistake.

“Are we going to do the usual twenty paces?” Leney asked, making him jump. It was obvious.

The look of murder in the Captain’s eyes was also obvious. What if I just shoot her? Who would care if I broke a rule? I break rules all the time. Deep down he knew he couldn’t shoot her out of hand. She was nothing but a girl and if he murdered her there would be talk…and there already was talk. And there was also the chorine gas. Was that real? Could she do it? Yes. There was no denying it.

“Here, I’ll take that,” Leney said, gently taking the gun from the Captain’s hand.

“Make it ten paces,” Jillybean said, with that damned “I have a secret” smile still on her lips.

Once more she was putting his courage to the test. At ten paces even a blind man would hit a target more often than not. A ripple of unease ran through the crowd. Their leader, once cold as ice, once the baddest man on the planet, was afraid of a girl. His deep dark skin had always been as dry as velvet, but now there was a sheen. His eyes had always held mocking mirth, but now they shifted back forth. His hand had always been steady as a rock, but now he fumbled with his buckle. Gone was the whiff of cologne and in its place was the sick smell of fear.

“It’s about time,” Jillybean said, she put her arms out at shoulder height and began wiggling her fingers. “Here’s your chance to kill me like a real man. Face to face. No tricks.”

It was exactly what he had said to Stu Currans right before their duel. The Captain raised his arms as well and stared across at Jillybean as Leney sunk the .44 into his holster. The weight of it should have been reassuring, except it felt too heavy. It felt as if…

Jillybean interrupted his thoughts. “What am I going to do with you afterwards, Leney?”

He had been about to holster her Colt and now he looked alarmed and cast a quick peek at the Captain. “All you’ll be doing afterwards is decorating the pole I shove up your ass. You’re going to be the star of a one-woman parade.” Ignoring Bishop Wojdan completely, he showed her the full cylinder, snicked it shut and rammed the gun down, making her tilt heavily.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said to the Captain, “I won’t do that to you. Your body will be burned with all the rest.”

The Captain noted that she hadn’t said: If I win. He didn’t say anything, he only slowly began to lower his hands and bring them in.

She mirrored him. “Would you like to hear what my trick is?” Though he remained silent, he was desperate to find out. She let the seconds drag out before saying, “I’ve been playing you. This is all a head game. There are no needles or snipers or drones. I just wanted you to feel fear before you died. I wanted you to feel what he felt.”

“Too bad it didn’t work,” he replied, faking confidence, faking his usual devil-may-care smile, pretending that his heart was pounding so hard he could feel it’s thrum in his sweat-slicked hands. He didn’t believe her. Yes, she had been playing head games but only to distract him. There was something else in her…

His eyes went wide as he saw in the lower half of his vision her right hand drop to the butt of the Colt at her hip. The move was so casual, so slow. Like a snake with a wounded bird, she had been trying to beguile him with her astonishing blue eyes. And it had worked! He was a fraction of a second behind her as she pulled the big .44.

She had gotten the drop on him, but he was deadly fast. He had practiced this move thousands of times and had killed nearly a hundred men in duels just like this. His body took over. His reflexes were like lightning. His hand was a blur as he went for his gun.

Jillybean did not hurry. She knew that hurrying would cause mistakes and despite all of her precautions and her trickery, she couldn’t make even the slightest mistake. Her hand went to the butt of the Colt, it closed on the grip and she yanked it out in one smooth motion. She fired too fast, however and her first shot whined off the pavement in front of the Captain’s feet. She fired again, the bullet passing next to his left hand as he clawed at his holster.

At first, he thought that he had been the one to go “too fast” if there was such a thing. His hand had gone to the grip but as he went to draw the Colt, it hadn’t come out as it should have. It was stuck! She or Leney or the stupid fat priest had done something, not to the gun, but to the holster!

“No!”

Her third shot punched a hole straight through him just below the left side of his ribcage. He stumbled back while she marched forward, pulling the trigger over and over. The screaming lead pounded into him hot as the sun. The last three shots all hit center mass. But he did not die, not yet.

He lay on the pavement, staring up at her as tiny ghosts slipped from the bore of the Colt—his Colt. “You…cheat…” he whispered.

“I certainly did.” She had pulled off a feat of sleight of hand in front of five hundred people with the knowledge that if she’d been caught they would flay her alive. Earlier on the boat, she had slit the pocket of her long black coat and had tied a thumb-sized cellophane baggie on the inside of the leather with a single thread. Inside the baggie were black-dye, water and Cyanoacrylate—the powder form of super glue.

All she had to do was drop it into the holster and keep him talking while it set around the barrel of the Colt.

But she couldn’t have him talking now. “Finish him, Eve,” Jillybean whispered. Hideous laughter erupted and her world began to swim in darkness, but she didn’t let her mind go completely dark. Jillybean wanted to be there when the Captain died. She deserved that much. She stood back and watched as Eve raised the heel of her black leather boot and brought it down on the Captain’s face, breaking his jaw in two places. She could have made his death quick by going straight for his throat, but this was Eve. She was going to make it last.

Epilogue

The Courageous, Grays Harbor

“Neil will always have a place among us,” Knights Commander Troy Holt said. In spite of the pain, he stood as straight as his shining spear. His back was a deep purple where Gunner’s bullet had crashed into his armor, but honor wouldn’t allow him to complain. “He may not look like a Guardian…” He caught himself too late. “Sorry, your Highness. He may not look like a knight, but he has the heart of one. No one can doubt that.”

Troy had been a Guardian for half his life and knew it was going to take some time to get used to the new name: he and his brothers in arms were now Knights of the Queen and Cross. It had a nice ring to it.

“Ha!” Neil cackled. “My heart is black, rotted and worm infested. Speaking of which, when’s my next shot?” He really did have heartworms and was getting “dog shots” every three days. Three had become something of a big number for him and he could never remember which day he was on.

Jillybean had been looking out over the harbor at nothing in particular. The smoke from the funeral pyres, which had filled the sky for days, were now only a grey haze above Hoquiam. When the knights had swept in to take control of the city, they had discovered so many, many dead bodies. Most were little more than moldering bones with scraps of flesh curling about them. There had also been a terrible number of fresher, maggot-ridden corpses. Too many slaves had been quietly strangled by their masters during the first days after the Corsairs had surrendered. Strangled so they could keep their master’s evil secrets.

It could have been worse, she told herself. Hundreds had died but thousands had been saved.

“Tomorrow,” she told Neil. “Don’t worry, I have your shots packed. Your flea powder, as well.” He cackled happily at the joke. He liked any joke that he understood, funny or not.

“I don’t see why he can’t come back to Bainbridge with us,” Emily said, once again. It was her constant refrain. She wanted everyone to come back to Bainbridge to be one massive family, and she couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to.

Many of the freed slaves did indeed want to. They liked the idea of running water, electricity and the safety of the high walls. But there were some who did not like the inherent weakness of its government. They knew that Deanna would not be governor forever and the council system had proven to be weak.

Their other choice was to go south to Alcatraz. Although it was thought to be a somewhat bleak hunk of rock, its young Queen was said to be able to see the future. She also had hundreds of dashing knights pledged to serve her, and she possessed the only fleet on the Pacific coast. For the slaves either choice was something of a dream come true compared to the nightmare they’d been living in.

“I will come back,” Neil told her. “I promise. Once we have my cure and I get back to being deadly handsome, I will zip back across the country on a rocket.”

“And you’ll bring back Aunt Jillybean?” Emily raised a soft golden eyebrow, striking a pose that made her look like a slightly smaller version of her mother.

For Jillybean, neither Bainbridge nor Alcatraz was a true option for a home. In the north, she had always been considered dangerously insane. She was something of a human pit-bull. She had been chained by loneliness, and ignored until the citizens decided that it was okay to unleash her on their enemies. To the people of the south, Jillybean was just plain dangerous. She had driven the Hill People from their homes with fire simply to show them how weak they were, she had crushed the Santas under her heel without effort, she had destroyed the Guardians’ wall with god-like insolence, and she had turned the Corsairs into her personal storm troopers to make herself queen.

Yes, people were glad that she had saved them from the Black Captain, but they were even more glad when it was rumored that she and Neil were leaving to find a cure for his “minor skin problem” as he referred to the zombie virus coursing through his veins.

“She’ll come back,” Neil told Emily. “Trust me. She’ll come back if only to see how big her zombies have gotten. You will remember to feed them every day?”

Emily groaned.

“What this?” Deanna demanded, jumping up from the soft bench she had been sharing with her husband. “Who’s going to be feeding what zombies? You’re not talking about those…those monsters in Jillybean’s school, are you?”

“It’s for science,” Emily stated with a little smile for her mom. The smile turned to a glare when she looked back at Neil. “And it was supposed to have been a secret. But it’s okay, mom. It’s perfectly safe. And Aunt Jillybean says it’s good for me to be around zombies. It’ll make me less afraid in the future, you know because I’ll be used to them.”

“By that logic, we should keep Corsairs around as well,” Deanna said. She shot a look at her husband. He was suddenly very interested in a not so interesting cloud. “Were you in on this, too, Grey?”

She called him Grey as she used to, something he was having trouble with after so many years of being a nameless freak. Out of habit he checked the mask that covered half his face before answering in a guilty voice. “Who me?”

“Do you see anyone else named Grey around here?” Emily raised her hand and received a glare of her own.

Grey grinned, happier than he could remember since the first time he had held his daughter. “I just want her to be ready. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that anything can happen. We should give her as much leeway as possible, but I want her chained to a rock when this ship pulls away. I know you want to go with them. I see it in your eyes.”

The lure of stowing away in The Courageous had been growing in her as the day of departure loomed, but after her last adventure she was able to resist. “I’m happy to go home. The truth is I miss my bed, and I miss mom’s grilled cheese sandwiches.”

The talk turned to food and everything they would eat when they were home and not fighting for their lives every second. Grey missed bread; Deanna wanted an apple pie; Troy wanted lamb chops; Mike, who was still only able to eat soft food, wanted anything he could sink his teeth into, and Neil hungered for any meat as long as it was still warm and bloody; he kept the last part to himself.

Bishop Wojdan, who had been queasy ever since Eve stomped the Black Captain into a sickening stew, wanted only a salad. Donna Polston said she wanted to sip tea in front of a fire when she really wanted to sip a martini in front of a fire, preferably with a handsome man. Shaina Hale misunderstood the conversation and said she liked cats, especially the small ones.

“Kittens,” suggested Emily.

“Yeah, them. They’re my favorite.”

Only the Queen remained silent. She had taken one thing of Joslyn Reynolds to heart and she no longer only wore black. Now that they were not at war it made sense to wear brighter colors. As well, she was tired of wearing only pants. She figured that a queen shouldn’t just be allowed to wear dresses, they should be required.

On that morning she wore an ankle-length powder blue dress. It came in sharply at the waist and flared only gradually at the bottom. She accented it with silver heels of moderate height and a silver jacket that came to her midriff. In the old world it was easily a thousand-dollar outfit, in this one it had to be dusted off.

She kept silent because she feared she would beg Jillybean not to go. Jenn had been nothing before she had met Jillybean. She had been an outcast in her own community. Only Jillybean had seen her for what she could be. When Jillybean looked at her, she had seen a queen. Jillybean wasn’t just her best friend, she was her only friend. She was the only person who understood the loneliness of being a queen.

“It’s time,” Mike whispered, nudging her. He could sense the tide turning by the smallest ripple.

Jenn stood and straightened her dress, stopping the conversation. “It’s time.” Everyone stood and formed a line to say one last goodbye. Jillybean was hugged and Neil shook hands; he wore a single glove for the occasion. Jenn was last.

“My queen,” she said to Jillybean.

“I’m nobody’s queen.”

“Will you settle for being my sister?”

Jillybean had not expected this and it took her back. “But my last sister…”

“That was your last sister. I will be your new sister and if we’re lucky maybe we will find a third or maybe a fourth. Just remember that no matter what happens out there, you’re still loved here. You always have a home with me. No strings attached. No questions asked.”

A rush of happiness suddenly filled Jillybean. It made her face feel hot and tears sprang to her luminous eyes making them look like bottomless blue pools. There had been too much death and too much misery, and she had been the reason for much of it. Whether it was for the greater good or not, it still hurt. It still had filled her with darkness.

Even after she had slain the Black Captain, when others had found happiness, she had been alone. Alone except for the endless patients she saw, and alone except for Neil, who spent his days doing his best not to eat people. It wasn’t the same.

Now she wasn’t alone. Even if she was leaving forever, she wouldn’t be alone.

She grinned, feeling young for once. “You know if we’re really sisters then Neil would technically be your dad too.” Jenn snorted laughter. Jillybean stuck out a pinky. “If you want to make this official, you have to pinky swear.”

“Do we cut each other or is it spit?” Jenn asked, confused, holding out her little finger.

“You’ve been spending too much time around Shaina,” Jillybean said, grabbing Jenn’s hand and hooking her finger. “You can’t undo this by the way. You’re now officially Jenn Martin, Queen of the Southern Coast.”

“No offense, but I like Lockhart better.”

“So do I.” Still clutching that little finger as tightly as she could, Jillybean turned to Neil and told him, “My new name is Jillian Lockhart. What do you think about that?”

He hadn’t been paying attention. He had been looking at Shaina and the thought: she’s as skinny as a chicken wing, had set off all sorts of illicit images inside him. Stifling the guilt and the new pang of hunger that came with it, he glanced at the two girls. They wore matching smiles, laughter in their blue eyes. “You two could be sisters. Anyone ever tell you that?”

The End.

Author's Note:

Thank you all for taking the time to read my stories. I certainly hope you’ve enjoyed them.

I will be starting a new series set 150 years after a zombie apocalypse/nuclear war. With the zombies trying to hide among the general population and politicians declaring the threat is finally over, special teams have to take the creatures out without anyone catching on. It promises to be fun and bloody!

If you would like to read along, chapter by chapter as I write the story you can. All you have to do is go to my Patreon page (Here) and support my writing. The tier levels are exceedingly generous with freebies running from autographed books, video podcasts, free Audible books, signed T-shirts, and swag of all sorts. At a high enough tier you will even get to meet me in person as I take you and three friends out to dinner.

Patreon a great way to help support me so I don’t have to go back into the coal mines…back into the dark.

Another way is to write a review of this book on Amazon and/or on your own Facebook page. The review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement an independent author has available to get his work known. I would greatly appreciate it.

Now, that you’ve gone to my Patreon page and left your review—thank you very much—I would love for you to take a look at the series that is the genesis of the new story: The Apocalypse Crusade.

Forget what you think you know about zombies...

Forget the poorly acted movies and the comic books. Forget the endless debates over fast and slow walkers. From this day on, all that crap will fade away to nothing. America is on the precipice of hell and not for a moment do you believe it. You have your cable and your smartphone and your take-out twice a week and your vacation to Disney Land all planned, and you tell yourself you'll drop those ten pounds before you go.

But you aren't going anywhere.

In one horrible day your world collapses into nothing but a spitting, cursing, bleeding fight for survival. For some, the descent into hell is a long, slow, painful process of going at it tooth and nail, while for others it's over in a scream that's choked off when the blood pours down their windpipe. Those are the lucky ones.

But you will live, somehow, and you'll remember day one of the apocalypse where there was a chance, in fact there were plenty of chances for someone to stop it in its tracks and you'll wonder why the hell nobody did anything.

At first light on that first morning, Dr. Lee steps into the Walton facility on the initial day of human trials for the cure she's devoted her life to; she can barely contain her excitement. The labs are brand spanking new and everything is sharp and clean. They've been built to her specifications and are, without a doubt, a scientist's dream. Yet even better than the gleaming instruments is the fact that Walton is where cancer is going to be cured once and for all. It's where Dr. Lee is going to become world famous...only she doesn't realize what she's going to be famous for.

By midnight of that first day, Walton is a place of fire, of blood and of death, a death that, like the Apocalypse, is just the beginning.

What readers say about The Apocalypse Crusades:

"DO NOT pick this up until you are ready to commit to an all-night sleep-defying read!"

"WAY OUT WICKED"

"...full of suspense and intrigue, love, both innocent and romantic, hate, both blinding and unnatural, non-stop action, and a very real gripping and palpable fear.”

PS If you are interested in autographed copies of my books, souvenir posters of the covers, Apocalypse T-shirts and other awesome Swag, please visit my website at https://www.petemeredith1.com

PPS: I need to thank a number of people for their help in bringing you this book. My beta readers Joanna Niederer, KariAnn Morgan, Kari-Lyn Rakestraw, Doni Battenburg, Monica Turner, Shamus McGuigan, Victoria Graves Haugen, Mindy Wilkinson, Ginger Dailey, Corrina Marie, Virginia Morrison Keim, Susan Hanek Troelsen, Mindy Grindstaff—Thanks so much!

Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

A Perfect America

Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1

Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2

Generation Z

Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead

Generation Z: The Queen of War

Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned

Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved

Generation Z: The Queen Unchained

The Sacrificial Daughter

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five

The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

The Punished

Sprite

The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

Jillybean’s First Adventure: An Undead World Expansion

Tales from the Butcher’s Block

Table of Contents

- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42
- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Epilogue