The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (41 page)

Tevy, Jeff and Elliot rushed up from behind.

“We’re all set,” said Jeff. “We’ve got almost everybody across the bridge and heading for the river. He’s right. It’s our only hope of slipping away.”

Allan drew his shotgun from the holster at his hip. “I’ll hold their attention here. You go. I’ll make my own way to St. John’s later.”

Kayla knew a moment of hope. Of course, Allan would be nearly impossible to kill. They would get away. She and Tevy would make a life at St. John’s. Margaret would grow up, and Bobs would never be able to touch them.

The grenade was too far away to kill, the concussion hardly ruffling their hair, but its light dazzled their night-adjusted eyes. By the time Kayla could focus, over a dozen men rushed into the corridor, running criss-cross back and forth from doorway to shop window to doorway, shooting all the time.

A bullet tore away a chunk of Kayla’s ear, but she put the pain away for later, firing and firing, trying to stay with a target as it crossed the hall and not get distracted by one crossing the other way. She needed to change mags when they were only a few body lengths away, but the attackers were down to three, and before she could find another clip in her vest pocket, they were dead. The rush had been stopped.

Kayla risked a look to see if everyone was okay.

Joyce lay back in Jeff’s arms, a red hole in her leg, the blood spreading rapidly on the floor. Her face was white with shock. Allan crouched beside her, holding her hand. Tevy sat with an open mouth. Amanda ran up the corridor from the escape route, coming back to help them retreat.

A grenade flashed. Kayla didn’t even have to look up to know what was happening: a second rush, even bigger than the first. That’s what she would do. Right on the heels of the first, not giving her enemy a chance to reload, knowing they were looking to their wounded. The way they all looked at Joyce. Now they would all die.

Except that Kayla was there and knew what to do, because she was the Angry Captain—the soul that understood close combat, could delegate troops to their roles without concern about whether they were friends or lovers. The universe slowed for her as she computed. Joyce had always said that Bertrand Allan was a bullet. He didn’t understand the big picture, but point him in the right direction and pull the trigger and he would do epic damage.

Tevy hosted the same soul as Allan.

Kayla’s soul went into a cold state. There were only assets, not people.

She pointed down the hall toward the enemy that she knew without looking poured from the stairwell. She shouted for all she was worth.

“Bert, Tevy! GO!”

Tevy heard Kayla yell “GO” and he lunged up and over the barricade like a horse that has heard the gun at a race. It wasn’t till he landed on the far side of a desk that he even understood why she had shouted that order.

Red Shirts charged through the door of the stairwell, firing down the hall so frequently that the muzzle flashes weren’t even strobe. The light was continuous. Tevy had two shots left, and the first one went through a man’s eye, blowing pinkish-white brains out the back of his head. The second shot went wide, and he threw his Winchester at this man.

Allan crossed in front of him, tossing Tevy his shotgun in the process. It was identical to Tevy’s and it fit into his hands as seamlessly as if it were his own gun, only it was fully loaded. Tevy had to lunge to the left to get a clear shot past Allan at another man, but before he could pull the trigger a red hole appeared in the man’s forehead.

Pick another target and fire. Make every shot count. Allan crossed in front again and Tevy now understood that the man was trying to protect him, to draw the fire. They raged down the hall, Allan with his Glock and Tevy with the shotgun. Some of the Red Shirts tried to push back into the stairwell, to run from the unexpected fury of their assault. They collided with others and gave Tevy two more easy targets, hitting one man in the side and another in the head, dropping them both with no hope of survival, stopping them dead. They weren’t rippers. There were no parasites in their blood to save them.

Now there was a full on retreat down the stairs, and Tevy pushed against Allan, trying to beat him through the doorway. A grenade landed at their feet and Tevy kicked it, sending it bouncing down the stairs with just enough time to dodge away from the fire door. The blast dazzled Tevy and ended the Red Shirt assault.

They stood side by side at the top of the stairs, not far from the body of Emile.

“Come on!” shouted Tevy down the stairs, taunting his enemy.

“WIMPS!” shouted Allan.

They both heaved for breath, and Tevy marveled that a ripper could be winded. That was important to know. They grinned at one another for a moment and simultaneously remembered Joyce. They ran back for the barricade.

Kayla dropped the mag from her Uzi right after she ordered Tevy and Allan to their deaths and slammed in the fresh mag. She had just enough time to sight a man who would surely kill Tevy. She put a bullet through the Red Shirt’s head.

Tevy and Allan were as awesome as Joyce would have predicted. They raged down the hall like a tsunami sweeping all before them. Kayla fired again and again, always going after the ones closest to Tevy. It wasn’t just that he was her lover. Allan was a ripper and could take a lot without dying. After the grenade detonated, when the crisis was over, she remembered Joyce.

Kayla turned to her, still clinical, still the Angry Captain. The bullet had passed through the bone of the thigh, and Joyce was hiding the intense pain admirably, although she vomited suddenly. But Kayla thought of the description of the escape route: across a bridge, climb down a girder, work through the piles of debris of a burned-out building, swim across the river and climb out. Run a couple of miles up a highway. And Joyce would die anyway. There were no ambulances, trauma units, anti-biotics, or even hospitals. Still, they had people who could carry her. Maybe an amputation on the plane could save her.

Joyce tied a tourniquet around her own leg with Jeff’s help. She used a ruler to tightened the cord, the sling from her Uzi, and then bound around it to keep it in place. It would mean the death of her leg, but it would keep her from bleeding to death in minutes. She looked up at Kayla as she finished. “Get them out of here.”

“What?”

Joyce spoke in short sentences, the pain raising a sweat on her forehead and making her as pale as a ripper. “I’m finished. I’ll just slow you down. Get them out of here now and save Margaret. They would have shot us all in the river anyway if they had figured out we were gone, or they’d have chased us up the highway in their trucks. This way I can hold their attention here until you’re all across. After that carnage,” she said, nodding toward Tevy and Allan as they ran back, “they’ll be afraid to attack. I can buy you maybe an hour. Go!”

But Kayla didn’t understand. They could all make a run for it. They could carry Joyce.

But Tevy did understand.

As he knelt in front of Joyce, he remembered his father shoving him deep into the closet, his mother blowing him a kiss while she was loading Granddad’s old .38 Smith and Wesson. He retrieved that gun from the burnt wreckage of the home of his childhood a month after their deaths. He hugged the burnt skull of his mother for an afternoon until Elliot found him and helped him bury the bones of Tevy’s loving parents in the back yard.

“You’re a good mother,” Tevy said to Joyce.

She understood, and he helped her take hold of her Uzi.

“We can’t leave her!” yelled Kayla.

She didn’t get it, and Tevy only had a moment to educate her. “This is what loving parents do!” Tevy discovered that he wept even as he shouted at Kayla. “This is what they do. They die for their children. They die.”

He grabbed Kayla by the arm and pulled her to a standing position. Elliot and Amanda stood too. They got it.

Allan again sat holding Joyce’s hand. He looked up to Kayla. “I’ll stay with her. Tevy’s right. It’s your only chance of sneaking across the river. You have to go before they try again.”

Jeff still sat behind Joyce, cradling her in his arms. He looked up at Tevy and Kayla. “Say hi to Barry for me. I can’t go anywhere without these two, anyway. I’m staying. Go and toast me when you get to St. John’s. Check the footlocker in my room. There’s a half full bottle of single malt scotch: Balvenie Doublewood. Twelve years old. It’s really good.”

He slapped a fresh mag into his FN, that science-fiction looking rifle.

Tevy had to pull Kayla, but she came with him and they left the Trinity to their fate.

Tevy hoped that leaving the three to die would be the last tragedy of the night, but he got through the Sun-Times building and over the loading docks to discover that Helen had been left alone at the edge of the river, holding Margaret, who wept quietly, because she knew her mother wasn’t with them. She also apparently knew that silence was essential. It reminded Tevy of his last days with his parents, when he had learned that silence meant life.

The Red Shirts on the bridge hadn’t heard people splashing across the river because the gunfire from the Mart riveted their attention. Helen had been left behind in the panic. A strong crescent moon was on the wax, but that wasn’t much light to see by, and Tevy’s eyes had yet to adjust to the dark after all the muzzle flashes and explosions.

“Let’s go,” whispered Tevy.

Helen nodded and stepped into the river with the little girl. The water seemed colder to Tevy than before, and it stung all the hurts that he didn’t even know he had earned. It wasn’t until half way across that a new disaster made itself evident. Helen suddenly shoved Margaret at him, the girl bravely not screaming in the panic that she must have felt as her head went under the dark water. Tevy grabbed her arm and pulled her to the surface, rolling onto his back so that he could carry her on her stomach.

“Helen,” he whispered. He shoved Margaret over to Kayla and reached for Helen, finding her hand deep. The cool water closed over his head as he fought to pull her to the surface, but she turned oddly in the current and suddenly her foot kicked into his stomach, separating them forever. He lost her body in the dark. It wasn’t hard for him to understand. Helen didn’t want to slow them down on the highway, and she was very old and couldn’t run. The river took her from him. Another Companion of Bertrand lost to save his daughter.

They ran up the highway, lightning flashes from the windows of the Mart proving that the battle still raged, until it was lost to sight. Milan had started the Hercules’s engines, and once they were on board, he shouted instructions for closing the door. Tevy joined him in the cockpit, the dials space age to him and reminding him of a flight simulator he had intended to learn when he was finished
Call of Duty
. But the world had ended.

During the flight, Elliot, looking pale and frightened, came up to the cockpit.

“What happened?” asked Tevy.

Elliot shook his head. “I dunno. I was just falling asleep and suddenly an army walked over my grave, a total heebee jeebee, but on steroids.”

Kayla joined them, also looking shaken. “My soul just got denser,” she said. “I think Joyce just died.”

Elliot looked at her in awe and looked back to Tevy. “Is that what happened to me? Did it happen to you?”

Tevy shook his head. What could he say? Exhaustion ended the discussion, and they all went back to sleep.

Milan was able to land at Duluth thanks to the radio and Martin Morley on the ground, who engineered a fast and furious effort to provide two long rows of bonfires to guide them into the runway. Milan abandoned the Hercules there. “Webb will court-martial me for this. I must throw my lot in with you fellows.”

They found a bus at the depot, and it only took a day of work to get it running. The bulldozer and the tractor-trailer to haul it took a couple of more days, but they were essential. The run back up to St. John’s was easier than the trip down, although without the bulldozer it would have been impossible. The rippers had stubbornly blocked the highway with cars and trees, usually where the road passed through a deep cut in the Canadian Shield rock so that they couldn’t drive around.

St John’s had changed since their departure. Barry St. John, ever the contractor, had begun a long stone wall around the building. The rippers had attacked one night, perhaps because they heard rumors of the bus convoy and figured that the Keep was weak. They had driven a truck at the front doors and nearly succeeded in ramming it through into the great hall. Only the heavy steel doors and a steady hail of gunfire had foiled the attack. The stone wall would encircle the building and have medieval towers, gun slits, and a double gate with a portcullis as well as iron doors.

“I’d love to make it of poured concrete,” Barry had said to Tevy when giving a tour. “But there’s no operating concrete plants. I’ve had a tough time even scrounging mortar. Had to send crews as far south as Thunder Bay, raiding every concrete plant and hardware store they could find.”

Tevy and Kayla took a room together, and Margaret took up residence with them. She knew who saved her in the river, and she latched onto them. They became her foster parents. Amanda and Elliot took another room. Both couples told everyone they were already married, but they did take the time a week after their arrival to dress in the best clothes they could find and have a joint wedding reception. The forty from St. John’s that they escaped with all came, and Barry St. John lavished them with ammunition as wedding presents. He and his wife took care of Margaret that night. They opened Jeff’s Balvenie and drank a toast in his and Joyce’s and Bertrand’s honor. It was really good. Even Tevy enjoyed it.

Six weeks after their return, Tevy found his shotgun sitting in the middle of the highway. There was no doubt in his mind that it was his, for he knew every groove in the wooden pistol grip, every scratch on the barrel. He had lost it at the Mart, throwing the empty gun at a Red Shirt.