The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (12 page)

Bertrand nodded, because he shared the same concern for his head.

"Oh and third—" Emile's cheeks reddened and he didn't meet Bertrand's eyes. "Jeff's been talking around the club, says you guys are maybe going to form some kind of self-defense group, band together at nights and all."

"Really. He told you that." Bertrand kept the surprise off his face. When did he ever say anything like that to Jeff?

Emile looked Bertrand in the eye.

"Yeah he did. My folks are way up north and my wife took the kids and split for New Hampshire last year, so I'm isolated in this shop. I can't get a handle on what's going on out there, and the papers are no fucking help. So when things fall apart and you guys band together to fight back, you come and get me out of here."

When things fall apart. In his soul, Bertrand had known for some time that this must all come to a head, that there would be a day of reckoning when civilization could no longer function. But part of him wanted to cling to the old world—the safe world where the greatest danger to his life came in the form of chicken wings and beer. He longed for the days when he worried about whether he'd live into his seventies. Now he worried about whether he'd live through the next night.

"We'll keep you posted."

Temptation beckoned in the form of Malcolm's computer. Bertrand had switched to an eight a.m. start so that he could leave at four. Despite this schedule change, the shorter days would eventually compress to the point where he would have to go out while it was still dark, either on his way to work or on his way home. That was Chicago's winter.

Bertrand had been thinking about his own prediction to Emile: that this would all reach a crisis in less than six months, a prediction he'd made two weeks ago. The office had achieved a new normal that could not be sustained: the evening staff grew each day, the call load shifting to a peak near midnight, and only a skeleton crew managed the day.

Destiny was their anchor: sarcastic, witty and preferring to make sexually suggestive comments rather than talk about work or news. She seemed to enjoy shocking Bertrand or making him blush.

Whitlock looked more harried each day as he tried to find daytime temps to fill in when needed, and rumors said that his workouts in the club downstairs had taken on a new ferocity. Jeff spent every lunch with Bertrand at Flynn's, where they compared notes on the latest weird events and discussed theories, which usually revolved around a widespread Satanic cult, although Emile's plague theory still lingered, for the chaos did seem to spread like an epidemic.

Each morning for a couple of weeks, the news opened with reports about another house fire, the occupants all lost, sometimes murder-suicide the suspected cause, but then even those reports ended. Jeff, Joyce and Bertrand had all come across fire trucks and hoses encircling the burnt shell of some home—on different days and in different neighborhoods—but like the Ripper murders, the news media stopped covering these unpleasant events.

Bertrand sat at Malcolm's chair and booted his terminal, planning a little surfing before everyone else arrived, and it wouldn't be wise to do it from his own terminal, since his browsing history would be available if Whitlock wanted to check up on him.

The Chicago Police Department's website had changed a lot since Bertrand had written a paper about it back in high school for a civics class. Back then, he'd been able to see the images of every Chicago police officer ever murdered in the line of duty, and the focus of his paper had been about how many of those deaths had occurred during prohibition, numbering in the hundreds per year. The new website stuck with recent history, only listing all murder stats for the last few years, comparing them year-over-year to show a drop in violent crime.

Bertrand clicked on the murder rate but instead of a PDF of pie charts and bar graphs downloading, it popped up with a 404 error. The page was missing? He tooled around the site while puzzling this glitch. Why were the murder stats missing? Was it negligence or had someone intentionally pulled them off. This called for a little hack.

Bertrand began by looking for weakness in the site, but it was all new and well built, not like the old site from the nineties that had all kinds of backdoors into the server. He would need help with this one, so he went to some of his favorite bulletin boards, ones the F.B.I probably looked for unsuccessfully. You had to know a guy, and things changed almost daily, but Bertrand was one of the guys.

He didn't hack for greed or mischief, but for education and entertainment, so he had access to a number of servers, and he'd been careful to keep that a secret from the owners, slipping in and out without notice just for fun. It didn't take long to find out that someone had already been into the Chicago P.D. server, and they'd made notes that Bertrand understood. So he carefully breached one of his previously hacked servers and carried on from there, intending to destroy the logs when he was done, so that if anyone detected his hack they'd reach a dead end at this server when they tried to trace him.

The notes from his fellow hacker were great. Bang! He was in! Now where to look for the crime stats? The firewall prevented him from getting any farther than the public site without some serious hacking, but then Bertrand remembered Climategate. Someone on the inside at the University of East Anglia calling himself
Freedom of Information Access
had set up a file of all those climate scientist's incriminating e-mails and left it on the server for anyone to find.

A quick search proved the theory correct. There was a file of crime stats, just in a different directory that prevented the public from seeing it on the website. There would be no need to hack through the firewall. Someone had left them there to be found. Perhaps the police weren't all in lock-step cooperation on this issue. Maybe there were good cops out there too.

Bertrand burned the statistics onto a CD—proud that he was in and out of their system in less than ten minutes. He was about to destroy the server logs for his hacked server so that he couldn't be traced, when he heard the elevator ping, announcing that someone, maybe Whitlock, was arriving on their floor.

Bertrand quickly logged off of Malcolm's computer and headed for his own cubicle. He pulled on his headset and got in the queue, opening up a chat while selecting a call, dual-tasking to clear a minor backlog. Later he tried to call Nolan to tell him that maybe his government conspiracy theories weren't so crazy, but the man didn't answer his phone. Was he down in his bomb shelter?

Bertrand went back to work, but he was distracted from his job several times by the CD that waited in his bag. Why had these stats been pulled from the public server?

Tonight, he would check them out. Someone had wanted them hidden, and Bertrand couldn't wait to see why.

Bertrand had planned to leave work early so that he could get home well before dark, but the call volume kept him late. He was just about to log off when he received an e-mail from Erics—plural—the guy who claimed on his website that there were only one thousand souls and that the seven billion people on the planet shared only a small portion of each soul among many bodies.

Bertrand had to scroll down through the e-mail to remember that he'd asked this guy how he knew it was a thousand souls and not a million.

"We have performed many complicated calculations and personality assessments in order to determine that there are approximately one thousand souls. There is a margin of error that could mean there are slightly more or less, but it is close enough to one thousand souls that I use this as a teaching point. People need round numbers. Why don't you take the test and determine which soul you possess a portion of? I suspect you have a strong soul or you wouldn't have contacted me. Has it gotten denser in the last few months? Do you feel bolder?"

This gave Bertrand pause. How many times in the last few months had he surprised himself with bold statements, the kind that were getting him a reputation as a no-bullshit guy? Why did he always want to fight? Like the time at Goth Knights when he'd had to repress the desire to attack "the boss" against all odds. Only common sense and Joyce's wisdom had prevented him from taking on the man in his own lair.

"I'll take the test," Bertrand wrote back. "Just not today. Must get indoors before dark."

Jeff had agreed to work late and was still in the queue, guiding someone through the software with his eyes rolling to the ceiling. He feigned stabbing himself through the heart with a pen. Bert raised one hand and high-fived him on his way out, thankful that he was done for another day.

But as he rolled north on the train, a restlessness took him, the thought of his basement with the bars on the windows unappealing, even though he'd moved the flat screen down there and turned the wet bar into a mini-kitchen by bringing out an old hot plate that his parents had stored away years ago. It was his night of rest from the gym, Joyce insisting that he take at least two nights off each week to allow his muscles to heal and grow. No exercise machines and no karate tonight.

As the 'L' train rocked its way north, Bertrand tried Nolan again on his cell. It would be more fun to open those crime stats with a friend who was on the same page, but still Nolan didn't answer. Where the hell was the guy? Sunset was less than a couple of hours away, and Nolan would never go out after dark.

Bertrand hurried down the stairs from Armitage station, but on his way to his home, the loneliness took hold. He didn't want to go into that empty house and be reminded that his parents were gone. At Nolan's he could pretend that he still had parents somewhere not far away, and although the guy was a bit scary with his paranoia, he was one of the few people who didn't take Bertrand's multiple ripper theory—the cult theory—with a grain of salt.

So Bertrand walked right past his little clapboard house and headed for Webster Avenue. It wasn't dark yet, so he decided the open sidewalk was safe, but it wasn't the Sheffield neighborhood he remembered. People hurried along the sidewalks and cars raced through the streets, litter chasing. Since when did his neighborhood have so much litter? Where were the Madvacs and the street sweepers? Where were the cops that usually laid the odd speed trap to remind drivers to slow down?

But the people fascinated Bertrand the most. Their hurry wasn't that of commuters rushing to pick up kids from daycare or get dinner. Instead people looked over their shoulders to ensure they weren't being followed. They avoided eye contact with Bertrand. Some ran, even though they were burdened with bags or high heels or too much weight. These weren't fitness freaks like Joyce and Jeff. These people hurried to beat a deadline far grimmer than any boss could hand out. They were fighting the sunset.

Bertrand stopped in front of Nolan's house, the gray clapboard well-maintained, the house far larger than Bertrand's but still humble compared to the monster homes far out in the suburbs. Thomas Nolan was a bit crazy when it came to his fear of the dark, and Bertrand worried that he had caught some of that craziness, that paranoia. But the house next door still had a
For Sale
sign on the lawn, the one put there by the cops.

A car with two men in it sat not far down the street past the
For Sale
sign, looking for all the world as if they were on a stakeout. Bertrand turned away from Nolan's house, his heart rate picking up. Was Nolan right after all? Was the government after him for knowing they were in on the Chicago Ripper murders? Had Nolan's blog got him in trouble?

Bertrand wanted to challenge—to do something—so he headed straight for the car. It was still daylight, and he was a law-abiding citizen if you discounted the Glock he had tucked under his jacket near the small of his back. But the car pulled out as he approached, the driver hurrying away, but not before Bertrand got a good look at him. He had only met that man once before—on the night he and Joyce had discovered Stan's blood-soaked body. The car's driver was the investigating detective: Somebody Sinclair. Maybe Michael Sinclair?

What was he doing here on stakeout and who was the other cop with him? Did they have a clue about the neighbor's murderer? Were they hanging out because they finally believed Nolan's ravings that it was the supposedly dead wife who cut the guy's throat? Were they waiting to see if she returned? Why didn't they want Bertrand to see them?

He turned back to Nolan's house and climbed the four stairs to the porch, pondering these puzzles. The doorbell chimed when he rang, but there was no angry voice over the intercom demanding his name as usual. Bertrand tried again a few more times, and finally used his cell to try phoning Nolan, but the phone rang on. Bertrand could even hear the ring through the front door.

What the hell? Nolan was never out after dark, and while not yet sunset, he had a stated preference for getting home a couple of hours early. Bertrand walked back down the stairs to the sidewalk, glancing up and down the street to see if there were any witnesses, but all was quiet, like the hush before the storm.

The red brick wall proved far less of a challenge for Bertrand than it had on that summer night when he'd been forced to chase Joyce and her dog into the neighbor's backyard. The workouts had paid off, slimming Bertrand's waist and strengthening his muscles, but he still had a stubborn beer belly. Yet, he had never been so fit, felt so strong.

He literally hopped the little chain-link fence from dead neighbor's yard to Nolan's yard. All was quiet at the back of the house, and Bertrand's hope that he would find Nolan frying a few burgers on his barbecue ended—it was covered and cold to touch. Bertrand peeked in the window and noticed something unusual: the two-by-four that Nolan usually used as extra security to prevent the screen door from opening lay on the floor by the window, the unfinished yellow of the two-by-four a garish contrast to the finished wood floor.

Nolan must be out. But another thought struck Bertrand as he turned away from the sliding door: why would Nolan leave by the back door when he could leave the extra protection of the two-by-four in place and leave by the front. This made no sense. Wait a minute. Nolan's sliding door had been from the eighties or nineties, something that didn't have modern triple-pane glass of these very new sliding doors.