Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Read online

  Eddie couldn’t feel his body. Ungovernable fear turned him completely numb from head to toe. This had to be the Corsair who had given him the vial and the razor blade. This was the man who could destroy his life. This was the man who could send him and Gina to the gallows and ruin Bobby’s life before he was out of diapers.

  The twisted man looked like he would enjoy it, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “I’ll do it, I swear. Just don’t hurt my family.” Eddie fled without waiting for the man to reply. He had his instructions and he would follow them to a T if it meant never having to see the man again.

  Chapter 2

  Standing in the doorway of his house, Neil Martin bent and picked up the razor blade. The sharp edge was wet and black as oil, the rest of it gleamed in the starlight. He stared at the blade, with slowly blinking sky-blue eyes. His mind was moving at an even slower pace and it took longer than he would later care to admit before it hit him.

  “Someone’s trying to kill me. Jeeze…lou…ise.” His chest was suddenly very tight, like someone much bigger than himself—and most men were—was squeezing the breath out of him.

  It was a stunning concept to think there was an assassin somewhere out there in the dark, probably watching him, and more than likely, quietly laughing. Did the assassin have a gun? Was he even then peering through the scope of a sniper rifle? Neil could easily imagine the crosshairs centered on his chest, which only made his lungs constrict even more.

  Twitchy as a squirrel, he started casting useless glances into every dark patch surrounding his little bungalow, looking for the killer. As it was night, there were many places an assassin could hide, especially if he was done up in proper ninja-wear, complete with a samurai sword, which was how Neil pictured him.

  It was, of course, preposterous, but so was the idea that anyone would want to kill him. It was crazy. He was a nobody. In fact, nobody tried harder at being a nobody than Neil Martin. Ever since coming to Bainbridge a decade earlier, he had purposely faded into the background of life on the island.

  Few people knew anything about him and even fewer knew the things he was capable of. Most people thought of him as the weird little guy who controlled Jillybean. She was weird and he was weird—it seemed like a good pairing. But beyond that, he kept to himself and didn’t bother anyone.

  In other words, he was a harmless, sweater-vest wearing man who wasn’t a threat to anyone. So why would someone take the risk of trying to kill him? That was the question that kept him rooted in place, his panicked mind spinning in slow useless circles.

  A distant part of him knew he should be flying into action, but that was the nature of panic. It almost always led one to do the wrong thing, the counterproductive thing. Instead of racing inside to clean the wound, he wasted precious time picturing ninjas stalking him in the shadows, at the same time as imagining himself as the most innocent man since Ghandi strapped on a pair of sandals.

  “What if they have the wrong guy?” he whispered, grasping at the thinnest of straws. “Or the wrong girl?” That straw was far thicker. What if they were after Jillybean? With the night and being bundled against the cold, Neil guessed that he and his adopted daughter were somewhat similar in appearance. They were roughly the same height and each was blue-eyed and pale.

  If someone was after Jillybean, Neil didn’t need to strain his panic-stricken mind to guess why. Revenge. The one word was no solace to Neil. Revenge was a form of insidious insanity. From first-hand experience, he knew that someone hell bent on revenge could not be reasoned with. Fear and love meant nothing to them. All that mattered was their unbridled hate. The last time someone plotted revenge against Jillybean, dozens of people were killed in the crossfire.

  He could still remember how the nerve gas had contorted their bodies into grotesque twisted shapes, and how their faces were such a dark purple that they looked black. The images were so horrible that his fear was quickly turning into a full blown panic attack.

  Pain lanced deep into his chest and he began to struggle to breathe as a new thought struck him: What if that wasn’t zombie blood on the razor blade? What if it had been the liquid form of VX Gas?

  The idea was ridiculously farfetched, but that didn’t stop him from standing there uselessly gazing back and forth from the razor blade to his cut hand, his mouth hanging open as he waited for the nerve agent to twist his body into a pretzel. When it didn’t, he actually let out a frightened, semi-relieved chuckle. As bad as the zombie virus was, it was nothing compared to the horror of the nerve gas. That moment of relief finally got him moving.

  Neil scooted inside and slammed the door behind him—it rattled in its frame. For some reason, the cheap lock and the thin door made him feel even more vulnerable. He ran for the Walther PPK that he kept in his nightstand and with it clutched in his mangled left hand, he went around his house pointing it at every corner and twice nearly shooting the same coat that hung on a hook near the downstairs closet.

  Within minutes, he had every light in the house blazing and had locked doors and windows that had never been locked. Only when he had turned his cottage into the world’s flimsiest fortress did he look again at his bleeding hand. The cut was small, less than an inch long, but it was deep and bled freely.

  “That’s a good thing…I hope.” Perhaps the flowing blood would wash out some of the germs, he thought. He was grasping at straws again. No one knew if cleaning a wound like this did anything to save a person, but it didn’t hurt to try. He flung himself down the hall to the kitchen sink, where he held his hand under scalding hot water. When he couldn’t take the searing pain any longer, he grabbed the bar of soap and scrubbed the laceration as hard as he could stand it.

  After a minute, he rinsed his hand under the same scalding water. “Son of a motherless goat, that’s hot!” he cried.

  His hand was now a vibrant pink, except where the blood trickled. For the moment it was still red, but would it remain that way? Would it turn sludgy and black, and flow like a stopped-up sewer pipe? “Why the hell did I use soap?” he cried, flinging the bar away. No one had ever trusted soap to stop the zombie disease. Some said bleach might work and others swore by kerosene. Still others thought that the only chance a person had in a situation like this was immediate amputation.

  Neil’s eyes shot to the knife rack where the largest knife he owned was a serrated bread knife; as bread was rare even on Bainbridge, he’d had precious little opportunity to use it and there was a line of rust along the edge. The knife was out of the question due to the simple fact that he was too much of a wimp to cut off even the tip of his pinky, let alone an entire hand.

  He decided to go with the bleach. All he had under the sink was Ajax—and it stung. He wasn’t the most physical of men and it showed as he had to hold back another scream and tears leapt into his eyes when he poured the white powder over the wound. “The pain means it’s working,” he told himself, making up the “fact” on the spot. Despite the tears, he was desperate enough to scrub through the pain.

  Five minutes later, his eyes were as red as his hand, and the wound was as clean as he could make it. Now he could do nothing but wait for the fever and the rancid sweats; the mind-numbing pain and the nightmare deterioration of the self.

  There was a chance that none of that would occur.

  Twelve years before he had been the first-ever recipient of the zombie vaccine. Guinea-pig was a much more accurate word than recipient since he had been given a trial version of the vaccine against his will. The “test” that followed: being bitten by a real-life zombie, had also been against his will.

  One might assume that a person who’d been vaccinated against the virus wouldn’t have anything to fear at all, and Neil had lived for years happily believing that he was immune. Jillybean had ruined his blissful state of ignorance by casually mentioning that vaccinations weren’t necessarily foolproof.

  “Sometimes viruses mutate,” she said in that infuriating way of hers in which she made a smart
person feel stupid. “Sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, depending on the pathogen. It’s almost a guarantee that you’re going to need a booster shot at the very least.” She had gone on, as she always did when it came to science, going into what seemed like needless detail, but he hadn’t really been listening. Missing those details felt like a big mistake at that moment.

  He found himself staring at the small cut, half-expecting the edges to begin turning grey and for it to start bubbling out black pus. It was so disconcerting that he covered it with a band-aide—a Mickey Mouse band-aide. He had found a big box of them under the sink when he had moved in years before.

  Now the overly happy face of the mouse was a little disturbing. He tried to put the cut out of his mind, but it nagged at him even as he began worrying over the assassin again.

  Was he still out there, lurking? Perhaps ready to finish the job with his sniper rifle? Neil’s imagination began to get the best of him as he pictured a black-garbed assassin with deadly eyes, hoisting a long, sleek rifle to his shoulder and peering into a high-tech scope. The imagined scope could easily see Neil’s heat signature through the thin walls of the bungalow.

  And if it could see through the walls, it made sense that it could shoot through them as well.

  Neil wasn’t proud of what he did next. With a stifled cry, he dropped to the ground and crawled behind his bed. He didn’t crawl under it, which for him was a win. For three minutes he lay there expecting to be shot before it dawned on him that the assassin didn’t need to shoot him at all since he had been infected with the razor blade.

  “Jeeze louise,” he grumbled, getting to his feet. He felt stupid and frightened and sick to his stomach. And embarrassed. He had never been a tough guy or a hero of any sort, but he had lived through his fair share of dangerous situations and had, quite literally, laughed in the face of death.

  That had been years before when he was still young. Now, he was forty-six, middle-aged, with a hint of a gut and grey in his hair. His mettle hadn’t been tested since Jillybean and he had fought their way out of a bandit chieftain’s lair—lucked their way out of it was probably nearer to the mark.

  Luck had always been Neil’s gift and he’d had need of every ounce of it to get out of that fight alive. Whenever he thought about that night, he cursed his luck. He had lived while another man, a much better man, had died. It had been his best friend, Captain James Grey; the toughest man Neil had ever known.

  Sometimes Neil felt as though he sucked the luck from people around him, but now he was alone and for the first time his luck had failed him.

  “I’m going to die,” he said to the empty house. It was as strange to hear as it was to say; even stranger was the calming effect the realization had on him. Nothing he or anyone could do was going to change the fact that his death was only hours away. “Maybe only hours away.”

  Saying that didn’t feel strange, it felt like a lie.

  “So, what do I do?”

  He knew what he wasn’t going to do and that was sit, trapped in his own home. There was an assassin on the island and he had to be dealt with. Neil glanced down at his gun and only just realized that there wasn’t a magazine in it; he’d been running around with an empty gun. “No one needs to know about that,” he whispered, hurrying up to his nightstand for ammunition.

  Once he was properly armed, he slipped out the back door of his house and stood in the dark, gun in hand, waiting for his night vision to kick in, and for his breathing to slow. Although he told himself that getting shot would be a mercy, his body just wasn’t buying it. His hands were trembling so badly that the gun would be next to useless if he had to use it.

  The emptiness of the night calmed him. The cold and the lateness of the hour were keeping most people inside; Neil was alone as far as he could tell. This was entirely what one would expect if one was thinking straight, that is, and Neil finally was. The assassin would have lurked somewhere close by just long enough to make sure Neil cut himself. Then he would have zipped out of there.

  But to where?

  His mental image of the assassin was of a stranger dressed in black. A stranger wouldn’t hang around the island so that meant… “The docks!” he cried. He almost took off at a run, but then remembered how sadly out of shape he was. “A bike is faster, anyway.”

  Five minutes later, he came huffing up to the small man-made harbor. He threw down his bike and pulled the Walther from his coat pocket. “Who’s on duty?” he demanded. There were always two guards and the night harbormaster. Neil knew McGuinness wouldn’t come out of his shed unless forced to.

  The guards were Todd Karraker, who always wore a splash of vibrant red with every outfit because he thought it made him stand out, and Steve Gordon, whom everyone called “Flash.”

  “Who is that?” Todd asked, coming forward, his rifle still strapped to his back. “Is that you, Neil? What’s wrong?” Even with the dark he could see the gun in Neil’s hand and the wild look in his eyes.

  “Has anyone picked up a boat in the last twenty minutes?”

  Todd shrugged and shook his head at the same time. “No. Why? What’s going on? You don’t look good.” Not that Neil ever looked good, Todd thought. His face was a mass of scars from some long-ago accident. There were plenty of rumors whipping about how he had gotten them, but no one knew for sure.

  Neil touched his face with his mangled left hand. He was missing his pinky and had only a nub where his ring finger should have been. “It’s um…it’s um…I just need to know if anyone’s picked up a boat. Anyone strange.”

  “No, no one strange. It’s only been the usual night fishermen and the last one was Renee. She left at like seven or something like that. They’ll be trickling back here soon enough. So, um what’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure except, maybe, someone got on the island. I want you to lock this place down. I don’t want anyone to leave no matter what, and I want every boat searched when it comes in. Got it?” Todd, now looking good and nervous, nodded. Neil turned to go but stopped. “You better take that gun off your back.”

  Todd blanched. They’d had intruders on the island before, almost all of whom were smugglers or immigrants who didn’t know the right way of going about things. The smugglers were stripped of their goods and escorted off the island; always without violence. This was the first time the harbor had been locked down and judging by how pale Neil was, something bad had happened.

  Neil left the harbor and biked to the Governor’s residence. It had been only an hour or so since he’d had dinner there, yet the house was dark and silent. He had his gun out as soon as he stopped the bike. This time he laid the bike carefully on its side, its back wheel turning lazily. It had suddenly occurred to him that maybe he hadn’t been the only target of the assassin.

  He crept around the mansion, his fear once again ramping up. This time he was able to control it, which was a good thing for the Governor’s bushes threw off shadows that resembled crouching, nefarious-minded people. As he went around the perimeter, he very carefully checked the doors for razor blades.

  There were none, which was more of a relief than he realized. When he finally came back to the front door, he was sweating through his clothes. “I guess it’s just me they were after,” he said, just before he rapped on the door. The sound echoed inside the high-vaulted rooms, making the place seem completely deserted. For just a moment, Neil’s blood-pressure spiked. Then a light turned on somewhere in the house and the soft, delicate sounds of a girl’s bare feet came to him.

  It was Emily, the Governor’s daughter, and Neil’s goddaughter. She was twelve and fatherless. Her dad had been none other than Captain Grey. In many ways, she was her father’s daughter. She even moved like him.

  “Like a ninja,” he said to himself, with a smile. The word ninja made him think of the assassin and the smile faded. He could still be out there with his razor blades and his zombie blood. “How many other people is he targeting?” There was no way to know, but at leas
t Deanna and Emily were safe. Their doors were clear. He hadn’t checked the windows, but they would only be a danger if opened from the inside.

  And what were the chances they would choose to open a window right then? No. If the assassin had gotten inside, he would have trapped the door…the inside of the door.

  Neil suddenly froze with the soft patter of footsteps coming closer. They were right on the other side of the door.

  Chapter 3

  “Don’t touch the door!” Neil shouted.

  There was a pause in the pattering steps. “Uncle Neil? What’s wrong?” The pause was short-lived. Emily was coming closer, worried about him. He could picture her reaching out and…

  Neil did the only thing he could think of, he threw himself at the door, hoping to break it down. Doors were replaceable—not by him, of course. Neil had a good deal of trouble just working a can-opener, and wasn’t much better with hammers and screws, and such.

  Replacing the door turned out to be unnecessary. It was his shoulder that was in need of service after he slammed into the door, bounced off it, and fell down the steps of the porch.

  “Uncle Neil? What was that? What’s wrong?” she asked again. He could tell by the timbre of her voice that she had stepped back. He could also hear Deanna hurrying down from the master bedroom.

  Jumping up, he went to the door and shouted through the crack, “There’s been an…incident and the doors in your house may not be safe. Keep your mother away until I can figure something out.” By that he meant something better than dislocating his shoulder. The window was an obvious choice of egress—maybe too obvious. “I’m being stupid,” he muttered. The assassin probably wasn’t a genius. This thought had his mind straying to Jillybean. If she had been behind this, Deanna and Emily, and maybe half the island would have already been infected. “Now I’m being more stupid…or is it stupider?”