The Undead World (Book 12): Jillybean & The First Giants [An Undead World Expansion] Read online

  Jillybean & The First Giants

  An Undead World Expansion

  Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2018 Peter Meredith

  Kindle Edition

  This ebook is mine, all mine! You can’t have it, but you can read it, I suppose. But if you do, you must review it using all superlatives in your meager vocabulary—unless you don’t like it, then you can bugger off.

  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

  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 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

  A quick note from the author— Ezekiel Cross:

  The role of biographer is far more expansive than most people believe. To the great majority, a biographer is just a fancy word for a well-paid stenographer. It’s thought that they do little more than write down someone else’s life story, with maybe a few minor splashes of poetic flourish thrown in to spice up the more mundane aspects of their subject’s life.

  Ah, if it was only so easy. The true biographer, of which I count myself among a very short list, has to be a great deal more multifaceted than a parrot with a typewriter. They have to play the role of confidant, archeologist, detective, world traveler, psychoanalyst, treasure hunter, confessor, and above all they must be a human lie detector.

  The sad truth is that most people lie, and the number one subject of their lies is themselves. When it comes to the weather or sports or draperies, people almost never lie. They are veritable saints when it comes to these subjects. But ask a person about themselves and they become just shy of being pathological in their avoidance of the truth.

  And that is your average person, whose lies are like glass: transparent and brittle.

  Now picture the herculean task of trying to decipher the words of perhaps the greatest propagandist in history. Queen Jillian’s talent for self-promotion invariably spills into self-aggrandizement on an unheard of scale. What’s worse is that weeding fact from fiction is nearly impossible since so many of the people in her stories have a tendency to die, and those who are still with us are understandably reluctant to pit their memories of events against her completely unequaled ability to level revenge against those she perceives to have wronged her.

  What may be more difficult than unravelling the truth from the lies wound throughout such subjects as the War with the Azael or the slaying of the Black Captain is the excavation of Jillian’s hidden memories. These buried memories are not just of specific events, which can be understandable because of her violent nature, but also of entire blocks of time that, on occasion, encompass months.

  The story that I will relate comes from one those hidden times in the Queen’s life. I first noticed the blank in her memory after I had painstakingly researched and constructed a comprehensive timeline of her life and discovered that very little is known concerning her whereabouts during the months following the war with Azael.

  After she escaped her imprisonment in Estes and killed Augustus, King of the Azael, we know she faced the Witch of Rippling and her infamous “thinking” zombies. From there, she seemed to disappear from history until she had her first encounter with Grannie Annie in the vast emptiness that is Oklahoma.

  It was nearly four months of her life that seemed to have been erased from history.

  To unearth those four months of missing time took me two years, in which I traveled over three thousand very dangerous miles to hunt down clues to what was easily the strangest secret from her past. Strange and infuriating. Had I known what I was getting into when I interviewed her during her second incarceration among the Guardians, I wouldn’t have climbed those many steps to the top of their prison tower.

  Her cell had a single barred window that faced the Pacific. It was mid-afternoon and there was just a narrow rectangle of pure sunlight beaming brilliantly onto the floor. Like a cat, she sat directly in that rectangle of light, her eyes closed. I got the feeling that if she could purr, she’d be doing so.

  “And after the Witch?” I prodded gently. “You were reunited with Ipes and…” I flipped through my notes. “You let yourself be a kid again. That’s what you told me. So, this begs the question: why is it such a blank in your mind? You told me that you named a fish ‘Shedrick’ and that…”

  She interrupted without opening her eyes. “Chedrick.”

  “Okay, Chedrick. That was one fish that you kept in a bucket for an hour, thirty-five years ago. How do remember that but not this great block of time?”

  “Like some people, some fish are simply memorable, Emmanuel.”

  “It’s Ezekiel, your Highness. Ezekiel Cross. But I think you know that.” She smiled up into the light and then finally deigned to look my way. Since our first interview, she had undergone a dramatic change in both her looks and her accommodations. Then she had been queen for the third time and at the height of her powers; now she was locked away, a prisoner of the Guardians. Her signature wild locks had been shaven down to her scalp. Without hair, her eyes looked even larger than ever. They had even stripped her of her usual long black coat and knee-high leather boots. Her current attire was a pink, crushed velvet warm-up suit.

  She looked small, soft and weak. This apparent change was a mistake on the Guardian’s part. She had always been small, soft and weak. Her power had never come from her physicality, and to think they had diminished her in some way with a haircut and a change of wardrobe was laughable.

  The Queen ignored my name but not the question. “Ah, yes, the witch. The Witch of Rippling. Nice hook. I bet you sell a lot of books with that title.”

  “Some,” I allowed. “But people know that story. What they are dying for is something new. Something no one’s ever heard before. Like what happened during that summer.”

  “Hmmm,” she answered
, gently running her hand along the bars, sensuously. “That was a long, long time ago. You know, I think it’s somewhat unsettling that you are constantly asking about my childhood. Do you like little girls, Zeke? Do you like to picture them? Maybe in their underwear?”

  Yes, this is the sort of abuse I have to put up with on occasion…but not from Jillian. She would never stoop to such tactics. This was Eve. I had been talking with her for fifteen minutes and only just caught on. “Since this predates you, Eve, will you let me talk to the Queen, please.”

  Eve gave me a slow smile. “I am the Queen. You know that. You know I proclaimed myself Queen long before Jillybean ever considered it.”

  “That is still in dispute.”

  “By whom?” she seethed. “You? Pssh. Please. Look at you, brave now that there are bars between us. We’ll see how insolent you are when I’m free.”

  “I’m not trying to be insolent. I was just stating a fact. May I please speak with Jillian?”

  “Jillybean,” she insisted.

  Eve made me jump through many hoops before I was allowed to speak to Queen Jillian. As always, the transformation from one to the other was so subtle that even with me watching for it, I didn’t see any betraying tic or even a different cadence in her breathing. The Queen stroked the bars and looked around the room as if she were still Eve.

  This was how the Queen worked. She was always cautious. “Ezekiel,” she eventually said and put her hand through the bars. For the first time I didn’t kiss it. The guard was only a few cells down, watching me closely.

  I asked her the same questions that I had asked Eve and Jillian was understandably reluctant to try to fill in the blanks in her memories. “There’s usually a good reason why I don’t remember everything that has happened to me. Conversely, there’s rarely a good enough reason to uncover those things that my psyche wants to keep hidden. The risk to reward ratio suggests that we let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Are you afraid?” I asked her, attempting to use the question of courage to goad her.

  “No, I’m not afraid. It’s very unlikely that we will excavate some nugget that’ll be worse than anything else that is a matter of public record.”

  She was always so exact that when she strayed from her imprecision even a little, bells went off in my head. “Unlikely? I’m sorry, your Highness, but when someone says the word impossible in conjunction with your name, I have to laugh. To me ‘unlikely’ is almost a sure thing.”

  This made her grin. “I suppose I can take a break from my work.” She gestured at the thirty or so uneven piles of papers littering her cell. “They allow me to do research but no pen to write with. I organize my thoughts better when I can condense them and write them down. As it is I have to memorize an overwhelming amount of what may be useless knowledge.”

  “What are you working on?” I asked, sitting down opposite from her and pulling out a single pen and one pad of paper, which was all I was allowed to bring into the cellblock.

  “The only thing that will keep me alive.”

  I was sure that it was some sort of weapon or device which she could use to disintegrate the bars, and I leaned forward, eagerly. But not too far forward. Neither Eve nor Jillybean could be trusted and if she escaped because of me, I would be held liable.

  “A vaccination for the zombie virus. People will pay out the nose for it. It’ll make me indispensable. Right now, I’m familiarizing myself with Cyrllic script; which is what the Russian alphabet uses. Our good friend Yuri Petrovich not only wrote all his notes in Russian, he also encrypted them in it.”

  She wanted to change my focus. She wanted this to be what I took away that day. Like I said, she understood the value of propaganda better than anyone. “We’ll talk about that when you’ve made progress. Right now…”

  “And how does someone make progress without the simplest of tools? All I’m asking for is a pen. You’ll send along my request?” It wasn’t really a question, it was a threat. She would clamp her mouth shut and not say another word if I didn’t agree. When I finally nodded, her smile returned. “So, you would like to delve into my mind and rummage around a little?”

  This surprised me because it was exactly what I was hoping to do. “In a manner of speaking, yes. What I want you to do is lie down and assume a comfortable position. Yes, just like that. Now close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Progressively relax all your muscles, from head to toe, or toe to head. Try not to smile. Try to relax the muscles of your face…”

  She snorted laughter. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but do you really think you can hypnotize me? Because of my issues, I have firewalls on top of firewalls. Nothing can get out and nothing can get in, especially not a stranger.”

  I was prepared for this. “What about you? Can you get in and out with the information? Sort of like an old-time bank heist?”

  “A bank heist? I’m going to take that as a joke. Why don’t you just say what you really want? You’d like me to attempt self-hypnosis.” I shrugged and jerked out a brief nod; I’d been caught a second time trying to fool the Queen. Instead of being angry, she said: “It’s not a farfetched idea. In truth, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Even the weakest-minded person has to allow the hypnosis to take place.”

  She stared up at the ceiling from her cot for a minute and I actually thought she was making the attempt, however she was only thinking, perhaps still going through the ramifications of what may come out of her mind. Finally, she agreed, saying: “You will not print anything unless I approve it first.”

  “I suppose.”

  Her eyes, still on the ceiling, went hard. “The answer is yes or no. And if you cross me and try to print something that I have not given permission for, there will be repercussions. I hope you know that this cage will not hold me forever.”

  I agreed, knowing she was right; the cell was temporary. No one could hold the Queen captive for long and when she got out, there’d be hell to pay.

  Ezekiel Cross

  ***

  1-

  The Queen remembered the witch of Rippling, Missouri with a shudder, and she remembered the children and the handful of adults she had rescued from her dungeon-like basement with just a touch of contempt, although they undoubtedly deserved more. The fuzzy filter of time shaded their cowardliness and the meek, craven manner in which they had accepted their horrible deaths in a somewhat nostalgic light.

  She remembered freeing them before going out into the chilly wet night and searching for Ipes, and finding him sitting on a chair in a clearing. She remembered hugging him and crying. Then came an odd jump: the tail end of a fine summer with the two of them sitting in a strange house chatting over freshly brewed pine needle tea; the two of them at a playground, squealing with laughter, as they spun on a tire swing.

  She saw them roasting marshmallows, playing tag, and hide and go seek. They put on a play about King Arthur and rode bikes. They explored cool forests and pulled up logs to find salamanders.

  These wonderful memories played through her mind like a movie she had starred in, and it was fantastic right up until the last memory: her and Ipes having a “who can make the biggest splash” contest in a clear blue pool. The pleasant memories ended with a strange flash of brilliant but terrible light. It was an explosion, a massive one, and she saw herself lolling listlessly in a river of black water that was filled with dead bodies.

  “The River King’s barge,” she said in a whisper as a cold tingle ran up her spine, causing her skin to tent with a million goosebumps. “But that was earlier. That happened before the Witch. Where was I after that?”

  The splash again. She remembered the splash and laughing and falling, no, jumping. It was the late summer of Jillybean’s seventh year. The world was full of monsters and death and evil, and the skinny little girl felt that the best way to deal with it all was to jump from a bridge. With a wild laugh, she tucked into ball and flew like a…

  “Cannibal!” she screamed, in a high-piping voice. B
elow her was a rain-swollen steam where minnows shot away in mindless confusion. Above and behind her was a two-lane bridge set just high enough over the water to make the jump scary, but not too scary. She struck the clear water with a great throom! and sunk to the sandy bottom, where she kicked off and broke the surface a second later.

  “How big was that one?” she asked her friend. He was still on the bridge and had no intention whatsoever of jumping in.

  Ugh! First off, it’s cannon-ball and second it was too big. Look at me. Look at my shirt! He furiously held out the edges of the blue shirt he always wore. There were a few drops of water on it. Do I look like an otter to you? Ugh. I feel like one, all slimy and wet. Ugh.

  “I coulda put you up on the railing, you know. You wouldn’t fall in and even if you did, it wouldn’t be like the last time.” The last time they’d been on a bridge like this, a horribly evil bounty hunter had thrown him into water. Although Ipes was just a stuffed animal, Jillybean had killed the man for it. She had shot him without blinking.

  The bullet from her .38 had punched through his chest. It wasn’t a neat little hole and there wasn’t a long teary good bye from the bounty hunter as he slowly slipped into death. No, it was violent and bloody. A huge chunk of flesh and bone had blasted out the back of his shirt. Rib-shrapnel punctured his heart in three places and burst his lungs like two balloons. He was down on his back before he could comprehend what was happening.

  “I bet you didn’t see that coming,” she had said to the bounty hunter, just a hint of a smile turning up the corner of her mouth. He grunted and coughed up blood. And that was good. She appreciated the way his face turned red and how his throat worked up and down as he struggled to find his last breath…

  “No,” she hissed. She shook her head sharply, whipping her wet hair around, trying to strike the image from her mind. That hadn’t even been her, not for reals, and she had promised herself that she was done thinking about it. She was starting a new life and a new life didn’t come with old memories, at least as far as she understood things.