The Undead World (Book 11): The Apocalypse Origin Read online

  The Apocalypse Origin

  The Undead World

  Novel 11

  Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2020

  Peter Meredith

  Copyright is what means Hands off!

  Yes, I’m talking to you, Buckaroo

  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

  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

  Dead Eye Hunt

  Dead Eye Hunt: Into the Rad Lands

  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

  Tales from the Butcher’s Block

  Chapter 1

  The Courage to Survive

  A note from the author— Ezekiel Cross:

  The following four stories involve a most peculiar girl named Jillybean. If the name sounds familiar it’s doubtless because you’ve heard of her. Everyone has, although most people know her as Jillian Martin. It may be hard to believe that the woman who is savior to some, queen to others, and a murdering tyrant to those who oppose her, was once a little girl, and a perfectly innocent little girl, at that.

  Now, when I say stories, I should note that these are true stories. This is a distinction that is necessary to make since so much fictional nonsense has already been written about her, and spoken about her, too for that matter. As I’m sure you know, Jillian is the focus of almost endless gossip, ranging from fanciful misrepresentation to straight-up lies. Sometimes, it seems as though people talk about little else.

  Having interviewed her at length, I can tell you that she finds the lies about her rather amusing and if one is particularly flattering she will be sure to enhance it in some way. As the world’s first post-apocalyptic biographer, they are an eternal thorn in my side, especially the ridiculous lies of the eye-rolling sort.

  No, she is not part demon, or possessed by one for that matter. She doesn’t drink the blood of her vanquished enemies or use their flayed skin to upholster drums or any musical instrument. Nor does she sit on a throne built out of their skulls, which sounds both appalling and very uncomfortable if you ask me. And let me put to rest the silliest lie of them all: she did not start the apocalypse. She was six years old and only a few weeks into the first grade when the plague of zombies swept the earth, destroying the old world.

  At the time, she had recess to attend and soccer balls to bat about and best friends to collude with, that is to say, she was much too busy to destroy the world.

  I suppose it is somewhat understandable that people believe so many outlandish lies about her when it is considered how frequently she has been able to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Most people attribute her improbably fantastic exploits to her native genius, and, as most people usually are, they are all perfectly wrong.

  Any objective observer, and there are very few of us around these days, would be the first to describe Jillian’s intellectual accomplishments as being largely derivative. Although she has flashes of intuitive brilliance and a memory that borders on amazing, the scientific accomplishments she is most known for, the medicines, vaccinations, explosives and all that, had been thought of or invented long before she was born.

  I’m not belittling her intelligence, I’m only trying to put it in perspective.

  If the time before the apocalypse were properly dissected instead of glorified as is generally the case these days, it would show that intelligence played little part in shaping great events throughout history. More often than not, the world has plunged through waves of unmitigated stupidity and, perhaps because of this, it is rare that geniuses dive into adventures such as the ones Jillian has been a part of.

  As an example, back in the Before, there lived a man named Albert Einstein. He was supposedly very smart and knew all the math there was to know, but intelligent as he was, he was not remembered for his heroism or bravery. He lived through a great war, or maybe even two of them and yet didn’t fight a lick. I’m not suggesting he was shy or a complete chicken, I’m just saying he was a genius, not an adventurer.

  I’m sure you’re thinking that if it wasn’t Jillian’s intellect that made her who she is, then it had to be her infamous insanity! She has not been called the “Mad Queen” for nothing and assuredly it was madness to try to wield armies of the dead as she did against the Azael, to blow up dozens of bridges and boats controlled by the River King, and to stand up to the might of the Black Captain backed only by a handful of peasants, was the definition of lunacy itself.

  It is tempting to attribute Jillian’s greatness to her insanity, but it would be intellectually lazy to do so. The fact is, she is great despite what she calls her “mental aberration.”

  I believe the fairest reading of the past reveals that Jillian became equal parts famous and feared not through her intelligence or insanity but because of one exceedingly rare attribute: courage.

  The audacity she has so often demonstrated, which can easily be confused with, and attributed to, stark raving madness, was in truth, tenacious valor that has few equals in all of history. Time and again she risked her life, not just for her friends and family, but also for utter strangers and sometimes even enemies.

  Yet there was a time when Jillian was a tiny girl named Jillybean and feared the world and everything in it. She was so afraid that she couldn’t bring herself to even step out of her own front door.

  As you might have guessed I had to dig deep into the past, and dare the dangerous continental crossing, to uncover the truth about Jillybean.

  It took me a month to get to Philadelphia, a city now deserted. In what had once been a pretty suburban neighborhood, I discovered Jillian Martin’s childhood home. In the attic was a pillow fort, grey with dust, and pinned to a rusting kitchen refrigerator I found faded, curling preschool artwork. On the door-jamb leading to the basement were a series of small, vertically spaced lines, each with a date written in the dimming grey of old pencil lead.

  And this is where the story of a child’s first tiny steps out of a life of par
alyzing fear begins…

  Ezekiel Cross

  March 23rd 2047

  ***

  “Well, that can’t be right,” Jillybean groused, her hands planted on her non-hips exactly where her purple sweater met her pink jeans. She was staring, with distinct displeasure, at a line she had drawn using all the care and precision her artistic ability would allow. She knew this ability wasn’t what it should have been and blamed it on the fact that her first-grade career had been cut so tragically short.

  Whatever the excuse, the line was an embarrassment. Impossibly, it sat right on top of the last line which had a date written next to it in her mother’s perfect hand of October 1, 2013.

  She tried again. This time she stood against the jam just as straight as she could with her neck stiff, and her shoulders, her chin, even her eyelids lifted in an attempt to give herself that much more height. All for nothing. The second line she drew had only thickened the first.

  She made an angry noise in her throat as once more she stared at the line. “What do you think, Ipes? Is it the pencil? You think it’s busted?”

  Sitting on the kitchen counter was a stuffed zebra of about seven inches in height. Over a bulging, cookie-fed belly he wore a little blue t-shirt that read: Too Cute. His name was Ipes and although he had the beadiest eyes of all her stuffed animals, he had very good vision. Sometimes his vision was too good. He could spot any error Jillybean ever made in a snap. She held the pencil out and he eyed it from all angles.

  Busted? If you mean curved or warped, then no, the pencil looks good. You know what your daddy would’ve said. He would’ve called it operator error.

  She didn’t know anything about what an operator might be, but an error was sorta like a mistake. “Oh hush,” she snapped. Jillybean never liked to be told she was wrong, and certainly not by some silly stuffed animal, and she wasn’t at all ready to admit to a mistake just yet. “If it’s not the pencil…” She went to within inches of the disappointing line and studied it closer.

  “Then maybe…maybe I had bigger hair back then.” Her face was angelic and heart-shaped, seemingly carved out of the whitest, smoothest porcelain. She had huge blue eyes, high cheek bones, baby soft lips and a small, pointed chin.

  Above that perfection was a jungle of bushy, overgrown and neglected hair.

  Bigger hair back then? Ha-ha! Ipes laughed so hard he fell off the counter and laid sprawled on the floor, shaking in mirth. Self-consciously, she touched her wild mane of brown hair. Jillybean’s hair had not been brushed in a month and even that had been an aborted fiasco. Every pass with the brush had resulted in the discovery of new and more painful knots. At one point the brush had become so stuck in a particularly dense snarl that, rather than risk having it become a permanent part of her head, she had cut it out with scissors.

  Ipes had laughed hard then as well, resulting in an extended period in timeout.

  She was just thinking he was due for another spell in the corner when a thought struck her: If she had more hair now than she did seven months before and she hadn’t grown a lick, then… “That’s what means I’m shrinking!”

  This had come out in something close to a shriek and Ipes sighed, I don’t see why this is such a calamity for you. It’s not like you were ever big.

  “That makes it even worser. What if I shrink away to nothing?”

  How Ipes managed to roll his plastic eyes she didn’t know; she didn’t like to think about things like that, nor did she like to consider how he talked without a mouth. Those thoughts made her stomach feel greasy, like she was about to vomit.

  Shrinking that far will never happen…probably…but let’s say it does. How cool would it be if you were my size? Or maybe even smaller! If you got small enough you could ride me like a real…hmmm, horse. The statement had ended on a sour note. Being ridden like a real horse sounded a lot like work and if there was one thing Ipes hated was actual work—and vegetables. He hated vegetables with a passion.

  “Small enough to ride you? I can’t shrink that far, can I?” The idea did have merits and it sounded fun. Still, logic suggested that if she shrunk that far, what was to stop her from shrinking even more? What if she itty-bittied down to ant size? Or even smaller to crumb size? After that there was only speck size, then dust size and then probably death.

  “I need a mirror!” she cried, touching herself all over, feeling her rail thin body start to cave in on itself. Unfortunately, there was only one full length mirror in the house and that was all the way up in her mommy’s room. As always when she thought about her, Jillybean’s stomach knotted itself.

  She hated going in there and yet she was drawn to the room. On most days she would sit outside the door for hours, reading aloud because of the awful silence. Sometimes she would go in and stare and it was always horrible.

  Her mommy had died in bed. On the day Jillybean’s daddy had gone away and never came back, her mommy had gone up to her bedroom, shut the door in Jillybean’s face, climbed in bed and waited to die, doing nothing but staring at the ceiling. It had taken a long time for her to die. In poor Jillybean’s mind it was days and days, and very probably months, as she slowly went from being her mommy to being a human scarecrow.

  Then one day her mommy breathed out and never breathed back in. She was alive one second, her skin no more than white paint over the bones of her face and her eyes like wet blue gems that sat deep in her head, and then she was dead.

  Things had been horrifying before that: monsters eating people and guns going off and screams day and night, but when her mom died everything became a zillion-billion times worse.

  Six-year-old Jillybean was utterly, terrifyingly alone. Her world became a nightmare within a nightmare. She grew so frightened that her heart began to skip beats and bounce around in her chest, and the inside of her head became black and there were dreadful sounds coming from deep in that darkness like there was something huge and alien and evil living in her mind that was trying to eat its way out.

  That was when Ipes had started talking to her like a real person and everything was better—not the best of course, but so much better that she never questioned her friend and how he could talk and move about with only fluff for his insides.

  Still, she didn’t like going into her mommy’s room because what if her mommy started talking just like Ipes?

  Just stop being silly. Your mommy isn’t going to talk and about all this shrinking business, it’s a common fact that no one shrinks that far. I think. You’re probably just not getting all your nutritionals. Remember your mommy used to always say stuff about eating all your dinner so you can grow big and strong. You just need to eat more.

  Thinking about eating, hurt her stomach even worse than thinking about her mommy sitting up in her bed and staring at her even though she didn’t have any eyeballs left.

  “We don’t have no food. How am I oposed to eat without food?”

  It’s ANY food and there’s always food. You just have to find it. That meant leaving the house and going out into the world where all the monsters lived. She glanced once at the window and then hung her head.

  “I don’t wanna. I’m ascared.”

  Ascared? Of what? A few monsters? Oh please, they’re nothing. And you know what? I’ll be with you. I’ll teach you all about the really important things. Everyone knows zebras are the smartest animals in the world. It’s in the stripes. Not only are they slimming they also add extra super stripe-power to our brains. You see it’s all in the…

  His endless prattle wasn’t working this time. If she’d had the guts to leave, she would have run straight out of her house and never looked back the first time her mommy had moved. A few hours after she had stopped breathing and had grown cold and stiff, her mommy had sat up in bed.

  But she hadn’t sat up like a normal person would. She had sat up with dreadful slowness as if invisible hands were bending her in half an inch at a time. Then Jillybean watched in horror as one of her mommy’s arms curled up and around h
er back with a sickening stretching sound. Then the other arm pulled all the way over in front of her as if she were trying to choke herself with it. And her eyes! One had been cocked wide and the other sagged low, protruding like an over-easy egg, looking as if at any moment it might fall plop out onto the stained…

  That was all Jillybean remembered. The next thing she knew she was waking up in her bed with Ipes in the crook of her arm.

  Your mommy was like that because she wouldn’t eat, Ipes said, there in the kitchen where everything was light and pretend cheerful. You don’t want to be like that, do you? That’s why you have to go outside and search for food, but don’t worry, I’ll be with you every step of the way. When he wanted to, Ipes could change his voice, making it go deeper so that Jillybean could swear he sounded a lot like her daddy.

  “Okay,” she said in a whisper. She didn’t head right away for the front door, however. That would’ve been silly. After all, this was her first expedition—a word she mistook for adventure—and it wouldn’t be smart to go out unprepared.

  She went to her room, skirting the hopscotch grid in the hall which had originally been drawn in chalk, but as that had faded from use and her stick of white chalk had worn down to a nubby little thing, she had dared to use a magic marker on the floor. Her mommy would have been furious, if she weren’t dead that is.

  Once in her musty and rarely used bedroom she went to her closet where her backpack sat in all its fading glory. It was brilliant pink and had, once upon a time, been the envy of the first grade since it was a Power-Puff backpack. Back then having a backpack such as that was a lot like having a million dollars and a sparkly tiara.

  Ipes went in one of the mesh pockets on the side of it, where he had a good view and could act as look-out.

  Next, she glanced around her room, wishing she had a sword of some sort or at the very least a carven walking stick as tall as she was, one that could shoot flames or lightning, like she had seen in a cartoon movie once. She missed cartoon movies. The TV hadn’t worked in a very long time.