The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (33 page)

"Not authorized!" said Bertrand. He and Joyce shared a glance, their conversation with Mr. Anti-Christ foremost on Bertrand's mind. "Then why did they attack? I assumed you stopped them."

"Not me—Bobs. Remember she talked about bulldozers? Yesterday while we were sweeping basements, she had Barry raze a bunch of houses close to the church. They trucked away the garbage up a few streets to block the way. I'll have to show you the easy way in. That's the kill zone at night. Barry left up houses like the one Emile and I were at last night, ground floor windows all bricked in and stuff. We're the little forts protecting the church and we're armed to the teeth, and a damn good thing too. The rippers came down the easy streets that aren't blocked, and Bobs ordered us by walkie to wait until they had pretty much reached the church doors, and then we opened fire."

"Holy crap," said Joyce. "So what went down?"

"They did. We're still picking up the bodies."

"Shit!" said Bertrand. "And they ignored this helicopter telling them to stay away?"

"Yeah, a real military looking thing too, maybe a Black Hawk. For a minute I wondered if they were gonna fire on the crowd or on one of our block houses, but once we opened fire they bailed—I mean left, I don't mean jumped out."

"Wow." Bertrand had been standing by the window, but he sat heavily now. "We have no government if they're letting us get away with bulldozing houses and shooting hundreds."

"But the rippers must be starving." Joyce got up to refill her mug. "If they're ignoring orders from their own boss, if they're raiding a heavily fortified position—like, why aren't they going out into the suburbs and finding people who aren't prepared?"

Bertrand thought of the urban legends about piles of bodies in farm fields. "Could there be that many gone? Millions?" he asked. "Is it that bad?"

"Actually it's getting weirder by the minute." Jeff opened a browser. "I've got a bunch of news items cached that I found yesterday when the power was still up. Did you know Terry shot some footage of you fighting outside church? They put it up on YouTube and it went viral again. Then YouTube took it down, but way too late. It's everywhere."

A grainy image taken from midway up the church tower showed the riot police, the crowds and suddenly Bertrand's five-ton ramming the mobile command vehicle. The camera zoomed on the cop being attacked by the ripper with the knife and pulled back when Bertrand killed him. He was featured more than Joyce as the chief of police charged them, taking all those bullets to bring down. The name Bertrand of Chicago appeared in white print below a still capture of his face, and even Bertrand had to admit that with the anger in his eyes and the shotgun in his hands, he looked fierce. It was followed by a clip of his speech at St. Mike's when he shouted, "Our blood will be spilled, but not to feed the rippers!"

"Who put this up?" asked Joyce.

"One of Bobs's people."

"So she's like totally in charge there now?"

Jeff shrugged. "I kind of thought Father Alvarez was in charge, but he keeps referring everyone to her. She and her dad, they were military history buffs in a big way, and her dad was in the National Guard. But listen, you got to see more. Look at this."

Jeff showed them the
LA Times
website, which featured photo and video of long lines-ups to donate blood, with uniformed soldiers standing guard with M-16s. The headline stated:
Doing Their Part
.

"Holy crap," said Joyce. "They've given up. They're just doing what they're told."

"Not everywhere." Jeff switched to a Texas blogger, who had footage and photos of soldiers fighting soldiers during the day through the streets of Dallas. The city looked more like Stalingrad than a modern city—many buildings smashed, their rubble strewn across the streets.

"What the hell?" said Bertrand.

"Civil war." Jeff clicked through more examples while he spoke. "I did the best I could yesterday to get a bigger picture of what's going on, but it looks like the west coast is under martial law, where people are forced to donate blood for the rippers. That's everything west of the Rockies. In the south, some states have called up their National Guard troops and seceded from the union because the federal government is riddled with rippers. Like, South Carolina says it right on their website, they're even using your word: rippers."

"Really?" Bertrand sat back, turning away from the destroyed buildings and shouting troops on Jeff's computer to look out the back window of Nolan's at a clear blue sky and singing birds.

"Oh yeah, and it gets weirder. This was Wikipedia yesterday morning, then later and then last night before the power crashed. See how the entries for ripper keep getting updated? There was an edit war going on, one side trying to change the definition of ripper to non-supernatural vampire. The other side was trying to change it back to just references to Jack the Ripper and that kind of stuff. The definition finally got locked out by an administrator, keeping the old definition."

"So they own Wikipedia?" Bertrand stood and walked over to the window. How long ago was it that Nolan had stood here when Bertrand and Joyce had run through his back yard? Three months ago? Nearly four. If they had known then how far the rippers had gone, would they have run for the hills like Barry had planned?

"Not just Wikipedia. They own Google," said Jeff. "Don't even bother searching for your name or ripper or even vampire anymore. They own Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and pretty much any ISP. They keep taking down blogs about rippers, even cached blogs like Nolan's old blog posts. They even took down your buddy Erics's website."

"Skype calls still go through, right?" Bertrand turned back to face Jeff and noted that despite his weariness, there was a light in Jeff's eyes. "You on something?"

"Uppers. Don't worry, Emile says I'll crash about noon and I'll be able to sleep till sunset. I was up all day yesterday with all this stuff and then I was up all night with the shooting. Hey, how'd you guys do here last night? Any action in this hood?"

Bertrand's ears and cheeks burned, and Joyce suddenly looked very hard at her mug of coffee, her cheeks as red as Bertrand's felt. Jeff didn't notice the awkwardness for a moment as he called up another website from his cache, but when neither of them replied, he looked up.

"Oh!" he said, looking from Bertrand to Joyce. "Oh, my bad. Wrong question. I get it. Congratulations maybe? Right? Okay let's move on. No gunfire here anyway. So like Skype's still good when the power's up. I tell you they got the same problem we do when the power's down: communication. They need their cell phones and their Skype and stuff as much as we do. Problem is, I think even they're having trouble keeping the power up when they want it. I can't find anything from the east coast that's been updated in the last two weeks, which makes me think they lost power and never got it up again in, like, New York or D.C."

"I need to get a hold of Erics." Bertrand craved information and Erics had a wide network. "The next time the power comes back up I'll e-mail and Skype him, because I don't even know where he lives."

"One of his captains is at the church sometimes—Marvin, Martin—something like. Father Alvarez isn't above taking their help, but he's not too keen on the Erics people being at his meetings and stuff. Maybe he thinks they're competition. But on that topic, you should see this: the pope has issued a fatwa on your ass."

"A fatwa?"

Jeff pulled up the website for the Vatican. "He doesn't call it that but he might as well. You've been excommunicated as a heretic, and he says you've started a cult to encourage people to drink blood."

"That liar!"

"That's the first thing people do when they're doing bad things: they publicly declare that you're doing whatever it is they're doing. But it gets better, or worse I guess I mean. He's declared the entire Archdiocese of Chicago apostate and excommunicated basically all of Illinois. He's also asking people to pray for the president—who like I said nobody seems to have heard from in the last couple of weeks—and to donate blood to help soldiers fighting insurrections all over the world."

Bertrand sat heavily. "Even the Vatican has been taken over by rippers?"

"As far as I can tell, it was taken over months ago and we just didn't know it. Europe's way ahead on all of this, and I think it's actually falling apart faster there because of it. From what I can glean from the few bloggers who still post, Europe's been without power for a month except for here and there."

"And I'm a heretic. Christ, I'm not even Catholic."

"Doesn't matter anymore. This just got a whole lot worse."

Bertrand looked from Joyce to Jeff. "We have to hunt down Mr. Anti-Christ. He's the head of all this, at least here in Chicago. We kill him and it'll be like chopping the head off the snake."

"Yeah." Joyce didn't look convinced. "That worked so well with bin Laden."

They reached the roadblock just west of the corner of Eugenie and Meyer, although Bertrand had trouble recognizing the neighborhood. The roadblock consisted of concrete road barriers, the kind that can only be moved with heavy equipment, so they abandoned Jeff's Xterra to walk the rest of the way. A half a dozen men and women with rifles and shotguns patrolled the barrier, but they waved Bertrand, Jeff and Joyce along with smiles, nods and one young man, barely out of his teens, even saluted.

The parking lot on the north side where Bertrand had smashed the command post had been emptied of the wreckage, although the three Greyhound buses now lined up ready for a convoy. The south side of Eugenie east of Meyer was completely unrecognizable from yesterday morning. The nineteenth-century retail building—the ground floor windows bricked in with concrete blocks—still guarded the corner, but all the wooden post–Great Fire houses that had densely filled the block between Meyer and Cleveland were gone. Only chewed earth and some debris such as drywall or a few boards flattened to the ground remained to testify that, for over a century and a half, people had lived there. As a result, St. Michael's—on the east side of Cleveland—now had a clear field of fire to the west, and Bertrand now had a view of the church complex that hadn't existed since the Great Chicago Fire.

The lower windows to the church had been bricked in weeks ago, but now plywood covered the stained glass windows up to twice the height of a human. Two men on a cherry-picker worked to cover the windows higher up.

"Holy crap." Joyce stopped to take in the sight. "Barry doesn't kid around."

"Yeah." Jeff wiped his face with his hand, a weary look indicating that the uppers were wearing off. "He told me he had like four of those big excavators, some bulldozers, all kinds of front end loaders and a dozen or so big dump trucks going until sunset."

"Where did you say they took all the crap?" asked Bertrand.

Jeff pointed south. "It's piled on North Ave, to the west and the east, completely blocking the street and making it hell for anyone to get here, even on foot. It's like a mountain and it's treacherous to climb 'cause it's such a mess. They also piled it on most of the north–south streets, and he's still at it on the east side. Hear it?"

A thud reverberated through the earth, indicating that a machine with hydraulics hammered at a building, but the church blocked their view. Barry St. John himself, a white hardhat on his bald head, came around the corner of the church, heading for the stairs and the front door, when he saw them and changed direction.

"Bert, good to see you." He held out his hand to shake.

"You've been busy." Bertrand gestured to the empty ground to the west of the church. "Weren't the owners a bit pissed?"

Barry shook his head. "The ones that are still alive live in the church now, and we let them into their houses first to get out any food or clothes. That was only about five families. The rest of the houses were cleared by volunteers. Listen, I've been in touch with my people in Canada. Guess what? No one's manning the border during the day anymore. The gates are smashed and everything, so there's nothing stopping us from heading out except the highways, and I'm taking a bulldozer along for that. Word came back that the daytime police roadblocks are gone." He pointed to the buses.

"You're leaving." Bertrand couldn't help making it sound like an accusation.

"Yeah, about forty of us. We're going to pick up Martin's family along the way."

"I'll be sorry to see him go," said Joyce.

Bertrand wondered if she was disappointed to lose the top guys from her raiders. She didn't show it.

"Here's the thing," said Barry. "We were wondering if you guys wanted to come along."

"I can't just leave Chicago like that," said Bertrand, recalling the invitation from Vlad to abandon the city. "There're people in that church that need defending, and there's a real chance we'll see the National Guard coming at us or something like that. I mean, look at what we're doing!" He waved at the empty expanse where the houses used to stand. "We don't have a permit for that, and I suspect the police department's still a bit sore at us for shooting up their guys and all."

"Oh Bert." Barry removed his hardhat and waved in the direction of the Sears Tower to the far south. "Where were you last night? Didn't you see the fires? I think about a quarter of the city burned. They've got a lot of angry neighborhoods to get through before they could ever get at us. People are congregating at churches all over the city."

"It's true, Bert," Jeff said. "There's just as big a crowd at St. James over near your old hood. They're bulldozing houses too."

"They bulldozed my house!" Bertrand resisted the urge to turn and run for Bissell Street. He'd always had it in his head that when things had settled down he would go back there and secure the house, maybe collect some photos of his parents to keep close.

"Relax, relax," said Jeff. "They didn't get that far down and they're working the east side of the church now, so you're okay for a couple of days."

"Point is," said Barry, "anyone who's still alive is going straight for the churches, the synagogues, the mosques—you name it—and they're setting themselves up as little defensive enclaves. It's funny how vampires start walking the streets and suddenly everybody finds the religion that they lost a generation ago. We've actually got quite a population problem here." He gestured with his hardhat back at the church. "Father Alvarez has had to turn away hundreds, sending them on to Holy Name and Mount Carmel; there's even a group setting up shop at the archbishop's residence over on State."