The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors (2 page)

Chapter 1

Jillybean

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Jillybean now lived in a chalk world where everything was black and white and gritty, and where nothing lasted. Nothing good at least.

The first grade had been good, though for her it had been only six weeks long and then the monsters had come and ruined it. Despite that
, she smiled when she thought of those six weeks—they had been a golden time of sleepovers and soccer and chase on the playground at recess. And friends. She had so many best friends: Janice and Becca and Paula and even Billy from across the street, though he wasn't a best friend, just an old friend, since she knew him for like, forever.

And it was a time of parents. The right kind of parents. The kind where the mommy made breakfast in the morning and daddy went to the work every day except for
leaf-raking day and football day, and every night there was a bedtime story, and cuddling, and usually tickling, and always a kiss good night.

But then the monsters came and made it all wrong.

Jillybean's daddy was a fighter...or maybe he was a warrior. She thought the words were similar yet could never make the connection between the two beyond the fact that he was very brave. He dared the streets to get them food, only always he was gone longer and longer and always he came back with less food than before. Once daddy came back all scratched up and bitten, and his eyes were no longer daddy's. They were eyes that were ascared.

"I got bit, Jillybean." Her name was Jillian, but he and Ipes called her Jillybean and she liked it better. Though just then
, with him shaking and crying, she ignored her special name and tried to hug him because that's what he always liked if he got hurt somehow. Only this time he pulled away. "No, don't touch me. I can't risk getting you infected too."

"What are going to do?" her mommy asked. She looked almost as pale as he
did. "You know I can't do this alone."

He slumped at this
, resting his cheek on the cool wood of their kitchen table, and said, "You have to try."

But she didn't. Daddy left, crying and groaning in pain and
mommy went to bed and never left it. Even when the snow came and Jillybean could see her breath right there in the house, mommy just laid in bed and stared at the ceiling, and didn't even eat.

At first Jillybean scooped water out of the toilet tank and dribbled it into her mommy's mouth but that ran out quick
ly. Then she used snow that she let melt. It didn't seem to help. Her mommy died in her bed. She was alive one second, her skin like white paint over the bones of her face and her eyes wet blue gems that sat deep in her head, and then she was dead.

Jillybean didn't go into that room anymore. She spent her nights in the attic, within the walls of a pillow fort she had constructed, curled up in a nest of blankets. In the days of winter she nibbled her way through the last of
the food and, fortunately for her, the early winter turned into an early spring so that when necessity forced her out of her home to scavenge she didn't have to add the element of freezing to death to the rest of her fears.

That first time
she stepped foot across the threshold of her front door had been an absolute horror. Her gnawing hunger had overridden her native wisdom and she had gone too fast, drawing a monster to her when she was barely forty feet from her front door. She had hid under a car and when it came shuffling by, moaning like a dead wind, she had peed herself.

Now four months later she had a way of doing things that Ipes called the "Rabbit" system.

That morning she began it as usual, slinking up to the edge of each of the windows in her home and slowly, ever so slowly peering out to check to see if the streets were clear. The monsters didn't like the sun so much. They hid from it—all except Mrs. Bennet. No, she came out in the daytime and stood in the street or poked about in the remains of her flower garden as though she was looking for something lost.

"I didn't like her none before," Jillybean said to Ipes, giving him a quick glance as she did. The zebra caught the look and smartly kept his lips shut tight; he was in
time out
and as everyone knew, you didn't get to talk in time out.

He had been too...what was the word? "Eager," she answered herself. "That's it. We can't be too eager even if we are hungry." And Jillybean was
very
hungry. "I hope the soup is going to be done soon."

"Ahem," the zebra murmured.

"What? You aren't apose to even make noise when you're in..." She stopped suddenly and blinked, remembering that she had forgotten to move the soup. In the afternoon it sat in the dining room where the sun could get at it and in the morning it was supposed to be in the kitchen catching the early rays. "Oh poop! You should have said something."

I'm not supposed to talk in time out, remember?
Ipes said this with pure innocence in his voice.

"If you're going to be like that, maybe you won't get any
soup today," she said with raised eyebrows and the imperious tone of a mother reining like a queen in her own kitchen. The little zebra dropped its beady black eyes down and she nodded, satisfied.

She then hurried for the soup. It sat in a glass pitcher that mommy had used to make sun tea in. Now it held pine needle soup. The recipe being nothing more that water and chopped up pine needles. She had discovered it by accident, playing tea with Ipes
, Todd, and Teddy-the-bear. Though they had all been there, Ipes took credit for the discovery, which was just the usual for him.

Next to the pitcher was the big spaghetti pot where fifty acorns floated in
water that was a thin yellow. She saw that the water would have to be changed soon, but first things first, she grabbed two of the bitter nuts and popped them in her mouth, one going into the pocket of each cheek—like a squirrel.

That's how she survived. Like an animal. Ipes taught her everything he knew, and for a stuffed zebra wearing a little blue t-shirt that read:
Too Cute
, he was very wise. She ate like a squirrel and, when she went outside, she moved like a bunny, freezing in place at the first sign of danger, scampering under bushes or beneath cars where the monsters couldn't get her.

And always she was fast like a cat. Unstinting speed was the remedy when stealth and luck failed her.

But what helped her the most was she was smart like a zebra. Ipes was always going on about the inherent and unrecognized genius of the zebra, which was funny since he was always getting in trouble. And yet he did teach her things. Once when Mrs. Bennet had treed her like a dog, Ipes had suggested throwing acorns at her for fun. It was hilarious watching them thunk off her noggin or drop into her open mouth, but when Jillybean missed once and the acorn bounced off the Henderson's car to go bopping down the street, Ipes was quick to point out how Mrs. Bennet had gone after the sound.

Now Jilly
bean kept marbles in her pocket just in case she needed to distract one of the monsters.

That
particular spring morning, which was the finest she could remember, Jillybean plunked the soup down in the windowsill and stared out at the world with a hunger that pine needle soup wasn't going to satisfy. "Do you know where my backpack is?" she asked Ipes, forgetting that he wasn't supposed to talk in timeout.

I could help you find it if I wasn't in the corner,
he said.

Jillybean made a noise in her throat. Ipes was the best finder. It couldn't be denied. He knew everything just like
daddy. Back before, daddy had known everything while mommy had known how everything was supposed to be. They had been a great combination.

"Ok, fine
,” Jillybean said. “You can come out of timeout. But only if you stop teasing Todd about being slow, and if you help me find my backpack."

Ipes walked...waddled really, out of the corner, saying
, Todd's a turtle and everyone knows he is the slowest thing on four feet.

"Yeah well, you meant he was slow in the head, and that's just mean."

If the dunce-cap fits...
Ipes started to say but Jillybean's blue eyes went to angry squints and he quickly changed the subject.
Your backpack's on the porch where you left it. Are we going scouting some more? I hope we find some cookies. I'm dying for cookies.

The little girl carried her zebra to the porch and after a cautious minute of gazing all about she bent to get her school bag. It had once been a fancy, brilliant pink
that had been the envy of the first grade since it was a
Power-Puff backpack
, but now it was scuffed and growing tattered. Ipes went in one of the mesh pockets on the side, where he had a good view and could act as look out.

Jillybean needed all the help she could get. The world was dangerous for a fifty pound girl who didn't know the first thing about weapons
or monster fighting. She slipped down the stairs of the porch and crept through the tall grass to the back fence where there were two broken slats. She squeezed through, confident that no monster could ever follow her.

A kid monster could,
Ipes mentioned.

This stopped her just as she was about
to begin the dangerous part of her trek. "Do they have kid monsters?" she asked.

They have
daddy and mommy monsters, so...

The thought made her stomach go wacky and her downy brows came down in consternation. "I guess there could be kid monsters. I don't ever want t
o see one, that's for sure." Shaking off the idea she made her way, sly as a fox, through the Gunderson's backyard. She didn't bother with the shabby two-story home; it had been picked over long before. Instead she went along the overgrown bushes that ran nearly to the edge of Highview Drive.

She'd been in every house on
Highview Drive, even the ones across the street. Her destination that morning was the next street over, Springfield Road—a very daring undertaking for such a tiny girl. Springfield was a major road. It was four lanes wide and always had gobs of monsters.

Like the tiniest commando, Jillybean slunk from bush to tree and then to a parked car and then...

Monster on your left
, hissed Ipes.

She slunk back
behind the car and put both of her hands up, palms facing out, looking for the "L" that would tell her which way left was. Only when she had her sense of direction did she nudge herself high enough to see the monster over the hood of the car; it had once been a policeman, though now its blue uniform was rags across its grey body.

"Should I chance it?" she asked Ipes. The zombie was turned partially away and it would be fifty-fifty whether she would be seen.

It's always the ones you don't see that are the most trouble,
Ipes told her
. Use a magic marble.

Though she had only a few left, it was a good plan with so many lanes to cross. She took out one of the marbles, kissed it to activate the magic and chucked it as far as she could, hoping that it would land beyond the monster
—it didn't.

Still it was close. The marble struck once
behind the monster with a loud glass "clack" sound and then before the monster could turn the marble was past it and bouncing a second time and a third. The sound of the marble on the street was loud in the dead air and, out from the shadows, a few more monsters went after the little glass sphere like dogs chasing a ball.

Now for the hard part. With her heart
whomping in her thin chest, Jillybean darted across the road at full speed, racing for a parked jeep.

That was close,
Ipes said when they were safely across the street and sitting just in front of a fine old two-story home. After only a second she started forward again, but he tapped her on the back.
What are you doing?
he demanded.
Don't go for the front door where everyone can see you.

He was right of course.
If she went that way she would be seen up and down the block, so instead she went around the side to the backdoor.

Listen first,
he warned as she opened the door inch by inch.

Monsters rarely stayed quiet for very long and in a house it was easy to hear them move
or moan, but she knew this already and didn't need to be told for the hundredth time. "You're the one being loud this time," she said, placing her balled fists on her nonexistent hips. "And beside I already...knew...that...what is that smell?" she asked.

It's food!
Ipes cried happily as he wiggled in excitement.

Someone was cooking meat and the aroma
, stretching along the air, was like a magnet. She left the house and hurried across its backyard to a chain link fence and saw another suburban street. Across that was a cookie-cutter home that resembled its neighbors so much that it was like an ant among ants. The two things that set it apart was the black Humvee sitting in its driveway, and the thin trail of smoke turning in the air above the chimney.

There were three
monsters on this street and because of the smell they were moving about restlessly, looking here and there for the source. Jillybean started forward.