The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (2 page)

She went with him to the little bungalow in the woods, and his grandmother had clucked and shouted at him and reached high to cuff his head, but she reluctantly let Kayla stay the night on the frayed couch.

The next morning, Kayla helped Gran with the dishes while Ted went off to a band-council meeting. If Gran spoke English, she didn’t use it with Kayla. Ted came back with a grim expression.

“We got to go. Most are going.”

“Where?”

“Most are heading up north, flying to the high lakes, away from...people.”

Had he been going to say white people? He looked embarrassed, guilty.

“I can’t go there.”

He nodded his agreement. A long chat broke out in Ojibwa between Gran and Ted. It rose to shouting, but never aggressive, just both trying to be heard over the other, both used to talking this way.

“I can take you back to the college,” he said finally. A four-hour round trip for him.

“I can’t ask you to do that. If I could just get a ride into town, I’ll get the bus tomorrow.” Every Monday morning a bus headed down to Atherley with people who spent the week working there or at the pulp mill in Dryden.

“There won’t be a bus.” He turned and began zipping up her pack for her.

“Well, I’ll hitch a ride then. Don’t worry, I can take care of myself.”

But she didn’t feel that way. Had her parents gone back to Thunder Bay? She’d checked her phone about a hundred times during the night, calling her mother, texting her little brother, but there had been no replies. In her heart she knew there was only one reason that little brat hadn’t texted her back with some amusing or snarky message, or a least an excited 140 characters about the house fire. He had always loved trying to fit his sentences into exactly 140 characters.

“It’s not safe to hitch a ride.” Ted opened the door, letting cold air into the little house. “There are people in the day who work for them—for the rippers.”

And Kayla knew the world had changed forever. They were talking about them, the serial killers that slashed throats and drank blood, the ones that guy in Chicago, Bertrand Allan, kept talking about in his YouTube broadcasts. The rippers were humans that had changed, that had millions of strange cell-sized parasites in their blood and their organs, parasites that only allowed them to digest blood. No other food could sustain rippers.

“Thanks,” she said to Ted. “Really, I don’t know how I can thank you.”

They rode in silence back to the college, the trees frosted with fresh snow, the road unplowed. Ted’s Jeep had four-wheel drive, but he rarely used it because it sucked too much gas. “A lotta gas stations closed. It’s hard to come by.”

She tried to give him every bit of cash in her wallet even though he had refused and even seemed insulted.

“You’ll need gas,” she said. “Please, you probably saved my life.”

He took it in the end, perhaps just to get her to stop. “It’s probably worthless paper anyway,” he said before he sped away, clearly anxious to get back to his grandmother before sunset.

Kayla found the dorm in a panic, girls crying and packing.

“What’s going on?” she said to Rachel, who wasn’t crying but was stuffing a pack with clothing.

“We’re getting the hell out of here.” Rachel suddenly stopped and looked up. “Hey, I thought you’d gone home.”

Kayla didn’t want to appear weak, but it was too much. She shook her head and bit her lip, unable to speak but successfully fighting back the tears—until Rachel swept her up in a hug.

“Oh, baby. It’s okay. It’s okay,” Rachel said over and over as Kayla wept. “We’ve got a place to go, a safe place.”

“Where?” Kayla pushed back from the hug and wiped her cheeks.

“It’s a new student residence about a mile from here, but it’s built like a fort. I don’t know why but everybody already calls it ‘The Keep.’ The contractor who built it is sending a bus over for anyone who wants to join him—and they’ve got a lot of guns.”

“Good.” Kayla pulled out her Glock and looked at it for a moment, sensing the new life that was before her. “I’d like an upgrade to a machine gun.”

Silence. Tevy was the best at it, which is why he preferred to go on his raids alone. None of the other kids in the Brat Pack could move with his stealth, and in the Loop, an incautious step on broken glass, or kicking a piece rubble down a staircase, could mean capture and gruesome death.

He ducked under the window so that no one down in the street would see him flit past, and he put his back to the moldering drywall, keeping a wary eye around the whole floor of the office building, searching above the cubicle dividers just in case someone else was up there. A few light fixtures, the fluorescent bulbs smashed, hung perpendicular to the ceiling, and of course the building had no power, but this floor wasn’t as trashed as some Tevy had seen. No one had lived here, built a campfire for cooking, or even smashed the computers at the desks. He should tell the others about this place.

The Brat Pack the old folks called them, but Tevy knew that in this world, his world, he was an adult. He sometimes tried to imagine what it would have been like if the rippers hadn’t come into being, if they hadn’t killed his parents and left him an orphan to be raised in the basement of St. Mike’s with the other kids who’d survived their parents’ bloody murders. Adults just five years older told him stories about high school, which is where he would be now if the world hadn’t ended. They said that they used to hang out, study books a bit, and get drunk and smoke weed and fornicate. Father Alvarez and Helen often warned them about the dangers of fornication, how a girl could get preggers and be a burden to everyone, her runt joining the Brat Pack as like as not. Some of the younger kids didn’t think the Brat Pack was that bad, but Tevy was old enough to remember his parents, to remember living in a house where he had his own warm room and all the food and love and attention he desired. Not that Helen didn’t love them all and feed them when there was food to go around, but she was getting pretty old and tired, and she couldn’t spread her love that far.

Voices. Tevy slid down. He hated the cubicle dividers when he was scrounging because they could hide so many enemies, but he loved them when
he
was the hunted. He pulled out his Glock, which was already cocked and ready for action. Some kids had trouble getting enough ammunition, but Bobs liked him, liked the fact that he brought her back the information she craved, liked the fact the he would sneak deep into Chicago’s old downtown just before dawn, when the ripper slaves were still in shelter and the rippers were just heading for their lairs to hide from the sun.

It was risky, sure, but it was a calculated risk. The hard part, really, was getting out before sunset. The humans, the ripper slaves, hunted during the day for offerings for their masters, knowing that each sacrifice of an entire human body meant many less blood donations from their own ranks. There were more and more ripper slaves every day, coming from all over, offering their servitude and donations in exchange for food and relative safety. They called people like Tevy rebels, but he called them bloody traitors.

Glass crunched under someone’s foot. They were on his floor.

Quiet as a mouse
. That was what Tevy was best at, although the few times he’d been on a raid, he’d loved to attack, too. He craved to throw himself straight into a fight, charging at the rippers, shooting and slashing and shouting. It was always such a relief. He hated tension. But today even he knew that attack made no sense, that it would result in useless death. He was right in the middle of the Loop, and there would be hundreds of ripper slaves watching the streets for a reb like him, asking him to repeat back today’s code word, which he didn’t know—yet. Besides, they were still human, even if they were traitors, and Bishop Alvarez had warned the congregation of St. Mike’s many times that killing a human was a ticket straight to hell. Only rippers could be killed without need of confession, absolution, and remorse. So unless there was no choice, Tevy would prefer to save his soul over his body.

He eased across the aisle, careful to stay low, careful not to crunch or kick glass, and slipped under a desk, his knees curled up, his buttocks pressing into the damp carpet, his Glock pointing out. Unless they had a dog with them, he was pretty safe. He listened.

“Oh for Christ’s sake, there’s nobody here.” A man’s voice, older. Tevy labeled him ‘A’ for his report to Bobs.

“I know, I know.” Younger woman—‘B.’ “Have a smoke and a coke and we’ll tell them we searched the whole floor. Who’ll know?”

A lighter clicked and soon marijuana smoke teased Tevy’s nostrils.

“What’s got everybody so freaked out anyway?” A asked.

“An evolved got killed this morning, right in the Loop not a couple of blocks from here. One of those rebs has got huge balls to come down here at night.” B’s comment sounded genuine, and Tevy tried to picture what she looked like. Maybe she had raven black hair, a nice figure that fit that nice young voice. Would she really like to see his big balls? He pushed the thoughts from his mind, fighting to will the erection down. This was no time for that kind of thinking. He needed to focus.

He hadn’t felt brave before dawn when the ripper had rounded the corner in front of him. It was too far from sunrise to use the gun—that would’ve drawn rippers from blocks around. Luckily, Tevy saw the ripper first, and this gave him a chance to close the gap between them quickly, drawing his long hunting knife as he charged. The ripper barely had a chance to get a word out when Tevy’s knife went into his throat. As he expected, the ripper, a younger guy and probably new to being a blood drinker, grabbed at Tevy’s right hand, trying to pull the knife out. The ripper never saw the small knife in Tevy’s left hand, the knife that he drove under the sternum and up into the ripper’s heart. It was over in seconds, Tevy’s heart still pounding as he wiped the polluted blood off the knives with the ripper’s sleeve.

“So what’s with all the new rations?” said the woman with the young voice - ‘B.’ “I haven’t eaten this well in over a year. Are we being fattened up for something?” She was trying to sound tough and flippant, but Tevy could sense the tension.

“Not for donating, if that’s what you’re worried about” A’s gruff voice failed to hide his own doubts. “Word is we’re finally going on the big push. Units coming from all over next month to hit all the rebel posts up north, especially that bitch at St. Mike’s.”

“Like you would know.” But she sounded interested.

“I do know. I got a quarter-master buddy. He’s says the warehouses have never been so full—food, ammunition, guns. Even you must’a noticed all these new troops around, the ones with the red shirts with the lightning bolt. They come up from as far away as California. Just talk to them and you’ll see cause they all sound like surfer dudes. This ain’t the mayor running things anymore, not even the governor, not even the president. They say he’s back. Vlad himself.”

Tevy had often wondered why Bobs’ kept sending him back into the Loop. Some of the Brat Pack said she was trying to get him killed, but he never believed that. She liked him, always said he reminded her of the man who had saved her life.

“Soldiers talk,” Bobs had said. “Just keep listening and one day you’ll hear something really valuable, something that’ll change the world.”

And she was right. Vlad is back. Could that really be true? Bertrand, the Savior of Chicago, had killed Vlad at the Battle of the Mountain. Could this ripper above all other rippers have survived that fire? Even if this was some imposter or some impossible rumor, the news of a big offensive sounded very true, and it fit with everything else Tevy had seen in the last few weeks. Now he just had to get back to St. Mike’s with the news, without getting killed.

Boots clumped down the far stairwell and a door creaked, the debris that blocked it toppling with a metal bang and a smash of breaking glass.

“Blood dawn! Blood dawn!” shouted A and B together.

“Red sunset,” replied a man’s deep voice. “Put your guns down. Have you searched this floor?”

Tevy decided that this guy was a commander. The tone of his voice was arrogant and sure.

“Yeah,” said B, her tone deferential. “Nobody here.”

“Then move on, Sergeant. Head down to the third floor and continue your sweep, and don’t let me catch you smoking pot again and looking for somewhere to screw. They need full supply donors at the tower.”

The boots clumped back into the stairwell, A and B’s footsteps following close behind. But Tevy wasn’t fooled. He waited, listening with great attention to every sound, interpreting, measuring. Outside, troops marched in a column, maybe a hundred. In the distance a tank engine revved for a minute and shut down.
Just running the engine to keep it from seizing up
. A bustle rose from the city, busier than he’d ever heard it. There were way more people in Chicago’s old downtown compared to last week.

A crunch of broken glass underfoot. That always gave them away. Who had snuck back onto his floor? Tevy guessed the commander, who wisely knew the floor hadn’t really been thoroughly searched and was hoping to catch him unawares. Paper rustled and soft footfalls on moldy carpet teased Tevy’s ears. Were these sounds real or imagined? Tevy held his breath. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t here. That was his mantra, his way of quelling the hero that wanted to charge out shooting, to kill the traitor and then run for the river.

Suddenly the boots pounded across the room, stopping at the far stairwell. This commander was good, trying to frighten Tevy out into the open. More silence, probably as the commander listened himself.

“Aw, fuck this.”

The boots clumped down the stairwell, but still Tevy stayed put and dozed through the afternoon until his stomach growled—dinnertime. He crept out from under the desk and very carefully holstered his Glock. He was going to pose as a traitor, and traitors didn’t walk around their own territory expecting a fight. He headed down the stairs.

Now was not the time for stealth. Tevy strode out into the late afternoon sunlight as if he owned the city, heading right down the middle of the sidewalk, fearlessly walking out into the street if smashed bricks or other debris from a burnt out building blocked the way. He had to dodge a few cars, and cops on motorbikes that still patrolled, but no one spoke to him. Troops in red shirts, the Daylight Brigades, marched down the center of the street in four lines, looking far too tanned for early June in Chicago. Tevy counted as he walked past in the opposite direction. You could sense their urgency. All these humans had to be safely secured by sunset, because not all rippers obeyed the commands of their central authority, even one as powerful as Vlad—if it really was Vlad the Scourge.