The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse Read online

  Joyce nodded. “Jeff,” she called. “We should pull back out of the woods. They’ll come back.”

  “Got it,” came the reply from farther down the line in the darkness. Orders were shouted and gunfire ceased, and when it did, it was apparent that the fight to the north was over as well. The whole forest became eerily quiet as if even the crickets had been shocked to silence.

  Joyce turned to head back with the others, when Kayla called out, “Joyce, he was here. I saw him again.”

  Joyce turned sharply, stalking back with an angry look that went from Kayla to Tevy. “You’re sure?” It sounded more like an accusation.

  Kayla nodded quickly. “Certain. He took out another ripper, maybe a few.” She nodded in Tevy’s direction. “He almost shot him.”

  “Who are we talking about here?” Tevy looked from one to the other, but neither woman looked at him or spoke for a full ten seconds.

  “No one.” Joyce fixed her gaze on Tevy. “No one, okay?” She turned and marched back toward the buses.

  But Tevy didn’t buy that for a second. He added it to the list of mysteries about Joyce’s Raiders.

  *

  Tevy waited until near dawn and so did Joyce, but she didn’t know that he was watching. He hadn’t had his eyes on Joyce every minute because he’d gone on several more patrols with Kayla and Radu, but Tevy kept tabs on where she was hanging out, which was usually at a makeshift command post south of the buses.

  Kayla’s little team had completed their latest patrol and were grabbing a sandwich from a folding table set up as a lunch counter, the teenage volunteers making the sandwiches as fast as the troops could eat. Since evading the rippers was no longer an option, the generators ran full throttle, and lights on top of the buses illuminated the forest, casting deep shadows. The rippers had not come back.

  “It’s very close to dawn,” said Radu in between mouthfuls, gesturing with his sandwich at the false dawn in the southeast. “This is good.”

  Kayla nodded as she finished hers. “Close, but I can’t wait. I have to go on a little relief patrol by myself, so don’t follow me this time, guys. I’ll be back in a squirt.”

  She picked a dark area with no lights shining directly on it and walked into the forest.

  That was when Tevy noticed Joyce, a bus length to the south, strolling casually toward the trees as if bent on a similar mission, but he wasn’t fooled. There was a purpose here that had nothing to do with the call of nature.

  “I gotta go too,” he said to Radu.

  He reached over his shoulder and drew his shotgun. “I’ll head that way so I don’t bump into her.”

  Now he practiced his quiet step, which he had gotten much better at as the night progressed. Check ground with foot, edge onto soft ground or rock, and step. Faster time could be made over the occasional hump of moss-covered granite. He’d learned to steer for pines and spruces, because even though their dead lower branches would snap if you pushed through them, the bed of needles below was soft and quiet as long as you were careful where you put your feet.

  He might have lost her, for Joyce moved quickly, but near a clearing she halted and started calling in a strangled whisper, “Bert. Bert, are you out here?”

  Tevy pressed close to the trunk of a large pine, his heart pounding as if he’d been running. That name! Surely she couldn’t be conjuring a ghost. He watched Joyce’s form, which was barely illuminated by the lights from the buses. After a few minutes more of her calling to no avail, Tevy gently released his breath. Nothing—no one—was going to answer.

  A hoarse voice spoke from the darkness on the far side of the clearing. “I have to hurry. It’s almost dawn.”

  Quiet as a mouse. Tevy froze, hardly daring to breath. She had conjured a ghost.

  “How did you get down here?” Joyce asked as a figure strode into the clearing, stopping several feet from her in the moon shadow of a tree. Tevy could hardly make him out in that shadow and would not have known he was there if not for his arrival.

  “I drove. You guys did all the work clearing the highway before sunset, and I never have trouble finding a car.”

  Was that laughter?

  “You shouldn’t come with us,” Joyce said. “You know where we’re going.”

  “Yes. I just don’t know why. Everything is going well up here for you. Food, shelter.” The voice had a rough quality, as if the vocal cords didn’t get much use, or the use they did get involved a lot of shouting and screaming.

  “Chicago’s in trouble—big trouble,” Joyce said. “If it falls what’ll be left? We’ve lost the east coast and the west, and how long do you think St. John’s can thrive? It can’t get any bigger, and we can’t repopulate the damn country if the rippers control everything.”

  “But Bobs, Joyce. You gotta be very careful of her. She has her own motives, her own plans.”

  “I’ve always known that, even before you, but she’s right when she says that we can’t last without Chicago. It’ll just be a matter of time before the rippers sweep up through Duluth and International Falls, and then they’ll swing down to take out Thunder Bay. When nothing else is left, they’ll come for St. John’s.”

  “Then you can’t be angry at me for following. If it’s that important.”

  “But what can you do down there against an army?” Joyce hefted her Uzi. “A bullet in the right place can kill even you, Mr. Demon of St. John’s.”

  A low chuckle, just a shade manic, came from the ripper, the man, whatever. “I’d heard they called me the demon. I guess I don’t look much like my former self.” He stepped forward out of the moon shadow. Tevy tried to draw in his breath but discovered he had clamped one hand over his mouth and nose in his surprise. Quiet as a mouse. Even when shocked he knew how to stay silent. He relaxed and drew a slow careful breath through his nostrils.

  Tevy knew the man, and while he was gaunter than Tevy recalled, it was definitely Bertrand Allan. His body was clothed, but it was far slimmer than any of the photos that Bobs had posted all over the basement of the church, photos designed to inspire the fight against the rippers.

  “You look worse than ever, Bert.” Joyce’s voice cracked and Tevy frowned. That rugged leader, the one who always seemed angry at him, neared tears? She had seemed so emotionless.

  “I starve. Ripper blood, it keeps me going, but it doesn’t fill me. There’s no bang. Joyce, I’m following you to Chicago. There are unfinished things there for me too. I haven’t been back in a couple of years. You can’t control me.”

  “I never wanted to.” Joyce took a steadying breath—even Tevy heard that from his hiding place. “Just don’t get messed up in the fight. Don’t go charging in like you always do. That’s what got you into this...this condition.”

  “I’ll watch over you. It’s dawn.”

  It didn’t look like dawn to Tevy, but the creature fled before Joyce could even say goodbye. The sobs began slowly, building quietly only to be choked off. She turned and headed back for the highway, wiping at her cheeks as she marched within an arms length of Tevy. If she’d looked his way she’d have seen him, but he was still and quiet and thinking.

  How was this possible? Everyone said that Bertrand Allan, the Savior of Chicago, had died in the fire that destroyed Vlad the Scourge in the mountain. But Tevy had no doubt that he had just seen him, had just seen the man who pulled him from the closet in a burning house. And he had no doubt that the man was now a ripper.

  Bishop Alvarez had been planning to beatify Bertrand Allan, the first step to sainthood. But saints aren’t supposed to still be alive, and they sure as hell weren’t supposed to be rippers. Bobs would not be happy.

  Ten - Chicago

  Kayla had visited three big cities during her life before the end: Winnipeg, Toronto and Chicago. Of the three, Chicago was by far the biggest, densest and had the most to offer. It had also been the most terrifying to a small town girl, and that was before the rippers.

  Kayla knew that it wouldn’t be the sam
e city she and her parents had toured when she was fourteen. Tevy had told them that the rippers took over the city government and the police department first so that the Loop was completely ripper territory. He said they even used to raise the drawbridges on the river during the day—those that still worked—to make it harder for loyalist humans to get in and raid, and difficult for the ripper’s human slaves to escape or for Daylight Brigades to desert.

  But she hadn’t expected the emptiness as the buses rolled through miles and miles of abandoned suburbs. Rusting cars lined the highway, and the side streets were coated with mud, which Tevy explained was actually eight years of fall leaves, unraked and choking the sewers. The streets were remarkably litter-free.

  “Rippers don’t eat chocolate bars,” Tevy said when she pointed this out. “There’s a lot of garbage out there because the city stopped picking it up before the end, but it’s mostly under the mud now.”

  There was less mud as they got closer to Chicago proper, simply because there were fewer mature trees than in the suburbs. But that was changing. Saplings pushed up everywhere: on front lawns, through cracks in the sidewalk, and even in the middle of streets. They surrounded houses, perhaps because the former flower gardens under windows and near front doors provided fertilized soil.

  “How many died in the famines?” Kayla stared out the bus’s window, wiped somewhat clean a few days ago while they were camped at International Falls. They rolled past street after empty street.

  “They say millions,” said Radu, who stood in the aisle and stared out the window, too. Although his seat was in the next row up, he often wandered the aisle, restless and bored with sitting. He shrugged before he continued speaking. “But who is there left to do the counting. It is a mystery, this number. How many are rippers? How many are traitors and how many are dead?”

  Tevy seemed unusually silent, his eyes staring not out the window but at the back of the seat in front of him, as if a disturbing movie played on the blank screen.

  “What do you think, Tevy?” Kayla had learned over the last two weeks of travel that when Tevy was silent he usually had the most useful information to share.

  He looked startled at the mention of his name and glanced out the window before he slumped back into the seat. “I started out as a scrounger, me and the other Brat Pack kids. No food if we didn’t bring it back to St. Mike’s. The rippers cleaned out the grocery stores so they’d have food for their slaves and all.” Tevy pulled up his shotgun from the floor and began wiping the spotless barrel with a rag. “We stayed away from the fridges, ’course. Mostly went into basements looking for canned food.”

  “Yah,” said Kayla. “We used to do that through Atherley too.”

  Tevy looked to her in surprise. “So you saw lots of bodies too I guess.”

  It was Kayla’s turn to be surprised. “No. The houses were just empty unless maybe there was a ripper in the basement.”

  “Guess that’s why you got so many rippers up there in the middle of nowhere. Must have made too many. Down here it’s different.” He pointed at a long street of bungalows, houses with big lawns that would have been considered the home of the future in middle of the twentieth century. “Houses like that, at least one or two dead bodies in better than half of them. They were pretty fresh back then, back when we were starving. Wouldn’t have gone in their houses otherwise.”

  “Holy crap.” Kayla tried to absorb the numbers and then noted the dead look on Tevy’s face, the look of someone with memories too horrible to contemplate, someone who just blocked them out.

  She wondered if she ever wore that expression, like when she remembered the McMansion in Atherley with the sweeping circular staircase in the front hall. The second-floor corridor was open to the front hall, so a railing up there had provided the support for four ropes, one for each of the two children and one for each parent. Did the children willingly hang themselves? The flies coated the bodies so densely, the stink was so intense, that she promptly barfed on the shining wood floor before turning to flee out the door. That was what Tevy meant by fresh, she was sure. Five years later she dared to enter the same house through the back door and ventured a peek into the front hall. Skeletal remains had been scattered around the floors, and the ropes, still with nooses intact, hung empty.

  “We were lucky at St. John’s,” she said. “We farmed the fields around the Keep, and when the rippers tried to burn them the first fall, they found out that a fifty cal can do a lot of damage, and that we don’t just hide in the Keep at night.”

  “We didn’t starve too badly at St Mike’s.” Tevy now watched the dusty storefronts of the street flash past, some of the windows smashed but most not. “We scroungers made sure of that. We went anywhere. But others, the beggars, well, the bishop could only do so much back then.”

  Kayla nodded as if she understood, but she was only beginning to get an inkling of how desperate things had been down here during the famines. What had they done to survive at St. Mike’s? Surely there must’ve been thousands coming to beg for food during the day and shelter at night. How had they kept the peace, kept St. Mike’s from being overrun?

  “How do you feed everyone now?” she asked.

  “There are farmers out there, again.” Tevy returned to cleaning his gun. “They get protection from us, and they pay in food.”

  “But how do you protect them?”

  “We send patrols all through the countryside, sweeping basements and crypts for rippers all the time. We just keep it so clean that the rippers can’t get to the farms to burn ’em. You saw the gate, right? We got those circling a bunch of land up north where all the horse farms and rich peoples’ houses used to be. Rippers can’t drive in, and they can’t cross country in numbers.”

  Across the Kennedy Expressway, Kayla had seen the gate, a medieval-looking checkpoint with a stone tower on either side of the road and a double iron door that the bus could just get through when open. The rest of the highway was blocked by a thick stone wall, anchored by two more towers, one on each shoulder. At night, rippers would have to scale walls three stories high to get up to the garrison that defended the gate, and Tevy had pointed out the machineguns on the top of each tower. A wrecked transport truck, a shell burnt down to its axles, lay shoved aside just south of the gate. Everywhere there were signs of battle.

  A ripper truck, Tevy had said. Tried to ram the gate but didn’t figure on the rocket.

  “But how much land for farms do you have?” asked Radu. “How many do you feed?”

  Tevy shrugged. “Everybody in Chicago who does their part. Not so many of us at all anymore, not after the Third Great Famine.”

  Kayla tried to recall her economics classes and found herself fascinated by the market. “How does Bobs decide who gets food and who doesn’t?”

  Tevy looked up at her, apparently to see if she was serious, judging by his expression. Her cheeks warmed with embarrassment, but that only made her angry. It wasn’t a stupid question.

  “Soldier’s rations for me, but there’s the bounty on rippers too. Every confirmed kill gets you some extra pay. If you can’t fight, you just have to do something useful.”

  “But what if you can’t do something useful?”

  Tevy looked genuinely puzzled. “Like if you’re too old or too wounded?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “If you got wounded fighting the rippers, we fighters take of our own, share our rations. If you’re old you need your family.”

  Kayla wondered what her socialist parents would think of this harsh environment. “What if you don’t have family?”

  Tevy shrugged. “I guess you head out of the city and scrounge.”

  Radu also looked uncomfortable. “So you have no beggars.”

  “No beggars. Bobs says they’d drag us down. Bishop Alvarez wants to set up a monastery though, one that can take in the useless.”

  The words burst from her lips before she could stop them or moderate her tone. “Holy fuck, you peopl
e are shameless.”

  Tevy looked up, surprise showing in his eyes. “What? We’d all be dead if we didn’t stay strong. And they kept all us orphans, didn’t they? A lot of the other churches didn’t, not unless their parents were in their church. I saw other kids scrounging in the early days, kids not from the Brat Pack at St. Mike’s or any other stronghold, kids with nowhere to go. Ripper snacks. Some of them made it, most of them didn’t. We were lucky to have the bishop take us in and watch over us.”

  Kayla decided not to fight about this ruthlessness. She craved to know more about how the city still worked. “So who owns that gate we passed. Does everyone take orders from Bobs?”

  “We got the biggest following if that’s what you mean.” Tevy looked proud now. “Over a two hundred block houses follow Bobs, more than any other church in the city.”

  “But what do the other churches do for food?”

  “They either got their own farms or they buy food from us when there’s extra.”

  Kayla still couldn’t understand the payment system. “How do you pay without money?”

  “Ammo. Bobs will trade a lot of food for ammo. If a church has got no ammo, they can send troops to our army, and then they send their rations, what they don’t eat, back to their families. Or a church can join. St. James joined with us last year.”

  “How do they join?” Kayla wanted to return to Barry St. John’s benevolent dictatorship more than ever. This place was simply medieval, and Tevy didn’t even see it. She had to remind herself that he was seven, nearly eight years younger when the world ended. Maybe this just didn’t seem so strange to him.

  “Join?” Tevy had finished cleaning the shotgun and put it back in the leather holster. “Simple. Just convert to the Chicago Catholic Church and agree to join Bobs’ army. It’s all good. About twenty churches joined us so far. We’re all Christian, after all.”

  “What about Muslims or Jews or the Ericsians.”

  Tevy nodded and looked thoughtful for a bit. “Uhm, never thought about it. I just figured they wanted to stay on their own. I mean the Ericsians, they don’t need to join. They’re way organized, maybe even better than us. They got block houses and their own farm country out on the Prairies. I think there’s a lot of them, but they don’t come to Chicago much, only one fort that I know of over at Wright. Used to be a college.”