The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (32 page)

She buried the frustration that this was a hopeless effort and walked to the nearest machinegun nest. The two men looked up expectantly. “You guys, take your gun and get into that tower.” Kayla pointed to the little bridge tower. “Stay on the ground floor so that they can’t shoot through the roof at you so easy.” She hurried over to the other nest and ordered them to pull back fifty feet so that their position was obscured by the overhead train tracks.

“Tevy, Elliot.” Kayla pointed north across the river at the Merchandise Mart and the office tower. “Can you guys each pick a building and organize some guns up about six floors in those buildings. The gunners should be watching these office towers,” she said, here waving back to the south side of Wacker, “for traitors or rippers. This is going to be a hot wall.”

Kayla turned back to Wacker after they left and walked across the street under the ‘L’ tracks. Her intention was to check the ground-level windows of the stores to see if she could set up a crossfire for troops coming down Wells Street. The decision saved her life.

The scream of the artillery shell and the explosion of its impact came together and continued to echo down the street. Kayla found herself on the pavement, but whether she was thrown there by the explosion or dived for cover she couldn’t remember. The second round came a full minute later, just as she was trying to get her muscles to move and pick her up. This explosion was oddly muffled, as if someone had stuffed cotton balls into her ears.

The shell hit the far side of the bridge, and the whole structure sagged toward the river, like a giant turning in its sleep and settling lower. Kayla’s brain now worked faster than her muscles. They were targeting the bridge. The traitors were going to destroy the bridge, and Kayla was on the wrong side of the river.

She forced herself to run for the bridge tower, the gunners inside it wide-eyed but still manning their gun. “Get back across the bridge,” she yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”

They didn’t need to be told twice. The men in the other nest were dead, tossed about like unwanted dolls, their bodies riddled with shrapnel and a hole in the metal deck only a few car lengths from them showing where the shell had struck.

Kayla was about to run across the bridge with her gunners when she remembered the timing. “Wait! Wait! Wait!” she yelled, pulling one man to a stop. Sure enough, another shot hit the far side of the bridge. They needed a full minute to reload. This was definitely their target, and some of the ‘L’ line collapsed through to the deck.

“Now, run!”

They ran but they didn’t make it. Whether there was a second gun or the traitors were getting faster at reloading, another shot hit the bridge abutment on the northeast side. The whole bridge tipped to Kayla’s right, twisting and bending steel, because the south side still held while the north side collapsed. Kayla lost her footing on the deck and slammed her head into an I beam. She tumbled down to the sidewalk and against the handrail, for a moment nearly going over it into the river. The bridge had twisted over so far that the rail was canted at a sharp angle.

She hung on for a moment, blood in her eyes and her skull pounding from the impact. Another shell struck the bridge, and it gave a metallic groan and sank closer to the river.

Suddenly, a hand caught hers and someone heaved her to her feet, one foot braced on the handrail and another on the sidewalk. Tevy’s face filled her field of vision, blood smearing his cheeks and forehead, and his eyes wild.

“Come on!” The cotton in Kayla’s ears muffled his shout.

“What are you doing here, you fucking moron?” She tried to shout, but her vocal cords didn’t seem to work because it sounded more like a whisper. “Saving me makes no tactical sense. We’ll both die now.”

“I won’t live without you,” shouted Tevy.

What the hell did that mean?

Another shell slammed into the bridge and they both fell into the river.

As the water closed over her head, cold and refreshing for a second, Kayla discovered that her arms and legs weren’t responding to commands, and she sank toward the muck.

Kayla remembered the hands grabbing hers, feet kicking, bodies on either side of her pulling her up to the surface. Elliot’s hair was red again, washed clean of the concrete dust by the river, plastered against his head, his particle mask hanging forgotten around his neck. Tevy’s cuts were washed clean of their masking blood, and livid gashes on his forehead and cheeks looked likely to form permanent scars.

Her arms and legs began to respond to commands, and she kicked and splashed to the shore as far from the bridge as she could manage. Several times she sank, but Tevy and Elliot always pulled her back to the surface. Others helped drag them out of the water, even though the artillery rounds kept plowing into the bridge. She never lost consciousness, although her head throbbed.

No one would hear of her going back into the Merchandise Mart, and Tevy rode with her in the back of a pickup truck to Emile’s blockhouse, where a doctor visited her in a top floor room. He was a little man who clicked his tongue as if it were dry or he disapproved—she couldn’t tell which—while he took her pulse, her blood pressure, and her temperature. He declared she had a mild concussion and proscribed bed rest. She asked for news of the battle, but instead he gave her a glass of water and shut the door.

Tevy visited at dawn. The doctor had stitched the gashes in his forehead and cheek. He spoke of the situation, of how Joyce had taken command of the Mart and the Ericsians, how she had ordered the blocked windows on the south side to stay that way to protect against gunfire from across the river. The artillery had stopped not long after the bridge collapsed, but the water in the river was low and most of the ‘L’ train deck was still above water—certainly nothing anyone could drive a vehicle across, but something Tevy was sure troops could cross.

Kayla listened clinically, detached and professional, but her emotions were a mess. She wanted to touch him. She wanted him to hold her while she wept. She wanted to ask him what he meant when he had shouted that he wouldn’t live without her. Was that just some excited utterance, some lame thing he’d heard in a movie? Some excuse not to leave her to drown?

Instead, she asked military questions. Were any of the other bridges destroyed by the rippers? Yes, four besides the Wells St. Bridge. With La Salle stuck open, that left four crossings to the north. Bobs took that as proof that the rippers were still planning an offensive and Gonsalves and Chen were setting up kill zones. Control of the open bridges had been ceded to the rippers, although their human troops did little to protect them during the daylight hours.

Tevy had to get some sleep, because he would go on a patrol tonight, and Kayla was left to debate what was going on in her head. She cleaned her Uzi, which had stayed with her thanks to the strap. In fact, it and the ammo in her vest pockets had nearly been her death, weighing her down toward the riverbed. But for Tevy and Elliot, she would be dead and rotting in the muck.

She had lunch with Margaret, who had her blonde hair in pigtails again and warmed up to Kayla, chatting contentedly about some of the friends she’d made at St. Mike’s. She had joined Helen’s reading and writing classes. Others from St. John’s not based in the Mart were also at lunch, and several smiled at Margaret’s cuteness, and others winked at Kayla as she pretended to be mom whenever someone from St. Mike’s was around.

Later, Emile stopped by to see Kayla, and she offered to give up her closet of a room to someone else, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Besides, with so many of Joyce’s Raiders now based in the Mart, there was room to spare for once. Dinner was served early in what was the little dining room of the blockhouse, with people eating chicken and last year’s potatoes in shifts. Kayla helped some women from St. Mike’s wash the dishes in an old bathtub out behind the house. The stink of the outhouse not far away spoke of the serious summer heat that now descended on the city.

One of the dishwashers, a much older woman, wore the lightest summer dress, but she gave Kayla a bikini. “These are great in the heat if you stay out of the sun.”

Kayla had loved wearing a bikini in the summer in high school. She had loved the way boys’ eyes tracked her lithe body when she walked along the beach or the poolside, but these days it just seemed obscene. The doctor condemned her to one more night of bed rest, however, so she retired to her stifling room and put on the bottoms but not the top. She now guessed that Emile wasn’t just being nice: no one wanted the top-floor room on a sweaty day.

She was standing near the window when there was a knock at the door. The window was high enough and she stayed back enough that she knew no one could see her from the ground. All she had been trying to do was get a sense of where the gunfire she could hear came from, the sort of lazy back and forth that indicated sniping but not battle.

A light cotton blouse, nearly transparent, hung over the back of a chair and she snatched it and tossed it on lest someone walk in without waiting for her reply. There was no time for a bra.

“Who is it?” she called as she did up the buttons. She stopped two from the top, leaving her cleavage a little exposed in the heat.

“Tevy.”

She debated making him wait so that she could get more appropriately dressed, and yet part of her wanted to know more about him. Would his eyes track her? Did he have any physical desire for her? The room was gloomy enough in the sunset that she wouldn’t to feel too naked.

“Come in.” A spilt second after she said that she regretted it. How was she supposed to stand here, like some model or manikin displaying summer fashions? She turned back to the window to hide the awkwardness, the feeling of being on display.

“Hey,” he said.

Kayla turned from the window trying to look like it was natural to be so scantily dressed. She had to fight to keep her expression neutral. He wasn’t wearing his pocket vest with the ammo, just a light cotton t-shirt that showed off young muscles, the kind a man gets not from the gym but from real work, like carrying water or ammo, less defined and yet stronger.

He stopped in the doorway, hooking his fingers into the belt of his jeans, looking carefully at her face. “It’s hot.” His eyes flicked briefly down her mid-section and back up and he shifted his stance.

So he did like her body. He was too polite to stare, but Kayla was sure he wanted another look, and it gave her confidence. Instead of seeking some way to be more discreet, she found herself turning to look out the window again, one hand rising between her breasts to secretly undo another button. It wasn’t that she was going to sleep with him or anything, but for the first time since the apocalypse she wanted a man to want her, to crave to touch her.

But when he stepped up beside her to look out the window, the touch of his elbow on hers gave her a thrill, and the scent of soap and his fresh sweat was oddly arousing. He had washed before coming to see her, and now that she thought about it, he had also made a rough attempt at combing his hair.

“You’re feeling better,” he said.

“I was fine yesterday. I just needed a bit of sleep, you know. Aren’t you on the line tonight?” She looked out over the city but couldn’t determine anything that was going on down south. It was too far away, and the church blocked most of her view.

“Joyce told me to take the night off, to check on you.” Tevy shifted feet. “Do you want to sit down?”

Kayla looked over, surprised at how panicked he sounded. He glanced at her and even in the gloom she could see his blush. For a second he looked down at his own body and back up to the window. That was a mistake, because it prompted Kayla to look down at him, to see what had drawn his attention and caused him so much embarrassment. She almost missed it, because she rarely looked at a man’s groin. A distinctive bulge explained the panic. He had a hard-on for her.

In any other man, this would have pissed her off or repelled her, but today she just wanted to know more about his lust. Was this just a teenage-boy reaction? How often did he see a woman this scantily clad? Perhaps this arousal wasn’t just for her body.

At least he was trying to hide it. No wonder he kept shifting his feet, trying to find some pose that would minimize his erection. Kayla decided to spare him further embarrassment and sat on the bed. He sat beside her, not too close, and folded his hands in his lap, obviously unaware that they drew her attention back to the source of his embarrassment.

“How old are you anyway?” she asked. A sudden breeze from the window cooled the sweat between her breasts. Her top was open more than she thought, and she must be showing a lot of cleavage, but his eyes were fixed on a painting that hung on the opposite wall, a Norman Rockwell style of a light house and a small boat with two children, a boy and a girl, fishing.

“I turned eighteen while we were on the way down from St John’s,” said Tevy in answer to her question.

“Why didn’t you tell us? We should have done a birthday party or something.”

“Cake on the bus?” he looked over, met her eyes for a second, noticed her breasts and looked back at the painting.

The fact that he wouldn’t look at her, that he was too polite, only made her want to draw his eyes. If he had sat there staring at her breasts, she would have either tossed him from the room or put on her ammo vest.

“I guess not,” she said. “But we could have at least shared a drink with you. It’s weird that you wouldn’t be allowed to drink on your eighteenth birthday back in the old days.”

“Don’t like it much anyway. Elliot and I got into Emile’s hooch one night, but it just made me sick. I can’t even stand the smell now. God, it’s hot up here.”

“Why don’t you take off your shirt?” The words were out before Kayla could stop them. What would he think she was suggesting? “I mean, if you’re going to visit, you might as well be comfortable.” Kayla hated the word
visit
, because it sounded like something her mother would have said.

Tevy looked at her again and swallowed. “That would be great if it’s really okay?”