The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (42 page)

"You would go to hell?" he whispered, his strength clearly not coming back very quickly.

"I am in hell." Bertrand opened the valve on the tank and let the propane gas flow.

"Burning is a horrible way for a hybrid to die." Vlad still did not look afraid, but his fragility gave Bertrand strength.

The mountain shook with explosions. Bertrand looked up at the computer in fear. The camera showed falling rock in the cavern before the camera was destroyed and the screen went to static. Did Joyce get out on time?

"All the scriptures say that those who kill themselves will go to hell." Vlad's voice was a bit stronger. "I believed you to be a holy man."

"I'm not killing myself. You did."

He held up the grenade so that Vlad could see it.

"So I go to meet God," said Vlad. He raised one hand. "Farewell."

"Fuck you."

Bertrand headed for the generator room and the escape tunnel, climbing the ladder quickly and squeezing into the tunnel. He found he could just get enough bend in his knees and elbows to crawl up the tunnel. It was a struggle, and the last orange light of the sun burned his eyes but he kept going, consuming the pain, paying for misjudging Bobs, for thinking he could save the world that he had known.

A shuffle behind caught his attention and he looked down between his legs. A head blocked some of the light from the generator room. Vlad was coming after him.

Bertrand looked up toward the sun and said his goodbye.

He pulled the pin on the grenade and rolled it down the steep slope of the tunnel. The stench of propane told him what would happen next, but still he turned and made one last desperate attempt to climb.

The explosion slammed his ears and the fire baked his feet.

He screamed and climbed, the pain in his legs an agony he couldn't endure.

But he didn't die. He continued to climb. Part of the little tunnel collapsed, and he had to squeeze past rock that was unforgiving. If he hadn't lost so much weight over the summer he would've been trapped there for eternity.

The air freshened, and at last he spilled out of the hole and sprawled on the mountainside, his whole body trembling with reaction as the final orange rays seared into his brain. It was the last time Bertrand would ever see the sun, and it vanished before it could cleanse.

Summer brought thunderstorms that swept in from the west and poured rain on to Barry St. John's tower in the woods, deep in Canada. Summer also brought new life. Joyce gave birth the same way she fought, with focus and anger and short sharp commands to those around her: "Water. Let go of me. Now! Here comes the baby now!"

There was a doctor at the tower, but she was short on anesthetic and was not a surgeon, so she didn't dare a cesarean when one wasn't required.

Weeks later, during the oppressive heat that fed a new thunderstorm, Jeff found Joyce a room on the third floor where the windows could open, and he fixed bars on the outside to ensure rippers couldn't get in to attack, although there had been few this way since the daytime raids Barry had led on the nearby town of Atherly during the spring, dragging them from the basements into the sun. Their detachment of Bertrand's Army now lived here, but Bobs had taken her people back to Chicago. The Erics had dissolved to go and preach their new religion far and wide.

Joyce nursed her daughter as the lightning flashed, the lights of the room off so that they could drift to sleep together, but Joyce was restless tonight, so she sat propped up in her bed and watched the lightning strike closer with each bolt, illuminating the clouds that swept in on them.

She drifted in and out of sleep. A flash silhouetted a human figure, a ripper that clung to the bars of the window, and Joyce opened her mouth to scream for Jeff. Her hand sought the Uzi on the bedside table, but her daughter nursed on, unaware of her mother's panic.

"It's me." The hoarse voice did sound like Bertrand. It had an alien quality to it, as if the vocal chords were no longer used to functioning, yet something struck to the core of Joyce's heart. This was her dead hero.

"Bert! Jesus Christ you scared me. Go to the door and Jeff'll let you in. I'll call him." But she knew this was not going to happen as much as she wanted him to be alive.

"Is she mine?"

Joyce nodded and wept. "Yes. I named her Margaret after my mother. Bert, I wish you could see her. She's so beautiful."

"Like her mother." But the voice held no emotion.

"Bert. Is it really you?"

"It's me. You won't see me again, but I'll be around. I'll watch over you and I'll watch over her and her children. I'll be your holy ghost."

There was an edge of madness.

"Isn't there anything we can do?"

A slam of lightning outlined a skeletal frame. It was not the chubby Bertrand she had first met at the gym, but an emaciated Bertrand.

"Live. Never give into the rippers. Never be their slaves."

"Never." Joyce wanted to say more, to tell him how much she loved him, but a flash of lightning showed that he was gone.

She wept and nursed and slipped into sleep. In the morning, Jeff told her it must've been a nightmare, but Joyce knew the truth, and she never stopped looking out for him at night whenever the weather was warm and restless.

Bertrand headed south down the highway, heading for the bridge over the Mattagami River gorge on his way to Chicago. He'd searched far and wide around St. John's tower, but the rippers had been eradicated. Joyce would be safe for the summer and the winter. He needed sustenance, and the only food he allowed himself was the blood of rippers. It was a starvation diet, for most of the blood was useless to him, but it dimmed the pain in his belly. Chicago still had a lot of rippers in its far-flung suburbs, so he would spend the winter there, cleansing his city. If his house still stood—his parents' house—he would live in the basement during the day. He was the monster now, but not a monster for humans to fear. Just rippers.

He was not afraid to go home.

Margaret Docker and Melanie Fogel, who patiently taught me the finer points of writing; Mark Alliksaar, a technical instructor and cliché checker; Mark Downie, who guided the storyline; Rebecca M. Senese, beta reader extraordinaire; all of The Fledglings Writers Group, for years of work; Matt A. Baker, a careful editor; Michael Custode, for great artwork on the original cover of
The Book of Bertrand
; Pectopah Productions Inc. for the financial backing and most of all Susan Docker, for insisting that we move ahead.

Most importantly, a thank you to you for reading this book. I wrote a book that I enjoyed to read and it makes me happy that you were engaged enough to make it to the end. I hope you enjoyed it too. I would love to hear from you. Visit me at my blog:
Beyond the Slush Pile
or send me an email at
[email protected]
.
Next time you are on Amazon
, click the "Like" button for my book or if I have moved you to prose, leave a review. Thanks - the 1000 live on!

(The 1000 Souls: Book Two - Release Date: July, 2012)

He had just turned 10 when the world fell apart. At first it was fun because some of the teachers stopped showing up at school. The principal, tall and angry, kept stuffing all the students into the gym to watch movies, promising each day that the next would be normal. Instead, fewer and fewer of Tevy's friends came to school, and one day neither did the principal.

In the evenings his parents spoke in anxious whispers, careful to ensure he didn't overhear, but one word often leaked out: rippers. He heard their neighbor, old Mr. Costa, say to his dad that there were rumors of murders happening all over Chicago, but for some reason it was never on the news. "They don't want us to know," he said, pointing south, in the general direction of city hall, with his cane.

One morning his parents didn't go to work and they kept him home, letting him play
Call of Duty
when the power was up. That had been the other big change: the power failing, the lights going dark, sometimes for hours on end.

He had helped his dad board up the ground floor windows.

"Is there a hurricane coming?" he'd asked, passing his dad another screw.

"Not the windy kind," his father had replied.

Nights became very scary. Sometimes he heard screams and running feet on the sidewalk outside, and one night Mr. Costa's house had burned down with all kinds of people standing on his lawn but none helping. Tevy's mother had pulled him from the window and covered his eyes. He had wanted to scream because he was afraid, but his mother had whispered in his ear.

"Don't let them hear you. We have to pretend we're not here, baby. Please don't cry. We must be silent."

Silence. He had learned that lesson well.

The next night the world did end. The rippers came for them.

The shouting frightened him beyond all reason, and he hugged his mother with all his strength. They were calling rude things with foul language and promising to hurt them all if they didn't come out. He wanted to obey their commands, believing their lies, but his father had known better.

"Stay in the closet," he whispered as he shoved Tevy back amongst the shoes and the coats. "It's like hide-and-seek but you mustn't lose. Do you understand me?"

The intensity of his father's actions, the fear in his eyes, the pleading of his words warned Tevy not to argue. He had always known that his parents loved him, but from that day forward he understood that loving parents lay down their lives for their children. Like his parents.

The last time he saw them alive his mother was loading a revolver and his father was holding a hunting rifle. His mother blew him a hurried kiss. The closet door closed. Then came the shouting and breaking glass, and a whoosh accompanied by a wave of hot air and the stench of gasoline. Guns fired and his mother screamed curses at someone, language he had never before heard her use.

He wanted to leave the closet but he remembered his father's last words. He wanted to scream but he remembered his mother telling him how silence could save his life. He clamped his hand over his mouth and wept, but he didn't scream. He didn't make a sound.

But the dull roar of a fire, the choking smoke, would soon kill him. He had to leave the closet. Suddenly there was a lot more gunfire and a lot more screaming, but not from his parents. Then his mother spoke her last words.

"My son!" she shouted. "In the closet! Please--" Her voice choked off wetly. It wasn't a normal sound.

The closet door yanked open, letting in a billowing cloud of gray that stung his eyes and made him choke. A strange man on hands and knees reached for him. Had there been a halo around his head?

"Come on!" He grabbed Tevy's arm and yanked him from the closet. "I'm here to save you."

Tevy climbed onto the man's back as directed and hung on around his neck as the house cracked and groaned from the flames. They spilled out onto the front porch and the man stood, scooping Tevy into his arms and running from the house. It was the first time Tevy had seen dead bodies--real dead bodies--not like his grandfather in the coffin at the funeral home. These bodies had chunks of their skulls missing or bloody holes in their chests. They were skewed at strange angles and had nightmare inducing expressions on their faces.

"We've got to get him to St. Mike's," said a woman with a machine gun. "What about his parents?"

The man, his savior, shook his head.

The woman turned in fury to shoot one of the corpses on the lawn.

Tevy understood. The world as he knew it had ended forever. But he remembered to be silent, so he bit his tongue as he wept and buried his face in man's shoulder, breathing in the stink of a sweating saint.

She had worried about homesickness when she showed up at Atherley College, but by the second week she was more concerned about where she could buy a gun. Her roommate, Ashley, had gone missing, and there was talk of a serial killer hunting around the campus. The police said they shouldn't worry, that Ashley had probably just succumbed to the strain of college and headed down south to live on the streets of Toronto or maybe even Chicago.

Neither Kayla nor the other girls in their student residence believed that for a second, and they all found it disconcerting that the police were downplaying Ashley's disappearance.

"Frigging cops have no clue," Rachel said. She was in her third year and a lot older than Kayla, who wouldn't turn eighteen until December. "Last time a girl was assaulted was in my first year, and they practically locked us all down for a month until they caught the asshole. This time they tell us to go about our business as usual? I got this."

She showed them all the Taser her dad had sent. "Get some protection girls, and I'm not talking about condoms."

But Kayla's parents were committed pacifists even though Sioux Lookout, the little town where they lived, made a lot of money from tourist hunting and fishing. The town was so far north that the only way to go farther was by plane, and she already missed the sound of those little aircraft taking off early every morning to fly campers up to the high lakes. She considered dropping out and going home, but her mom suggested she stay at the college.

"Something's going on in town," she said on the phone. "There've been a lot of house fires. Your father and I are thinking of taking Kevin and heading down to a hotel in Thunder Bay for a few days."

That frightened Kayla. Why would they take her little brother and abandon the family home just when an arsonist was loose in town? What about their teaching jobs? The news reports didn't mention the problems in Sioux Lookout, but they didn't mention Ashley's disappearance either.

Kayla found Rachel in the common area reading a textbook, her dark hair tied back in a tight ponytail.

"I need to buy a gun," said Kayla.

Rachel looked up from the book and her expression showed approval rather than surprise. "That's pretty much impossible to do legally now." She slapped the book closed.