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

  She checked the shadows for movement, vowing that she’d make the gun work if needed. It was just another gun after all, if bigger and hungrier for ammo. Short bursts. She needed to remember to fire short bursts.

  By the time a path had been cut through the downed pine, it was full dark.

  Jeff hurried back to the driver’s side. “Stay up there and hang on tight,” he said before he jumped into cab. Martin and Basil had just enough time to scramble over the tailgate before the truck lurched away and down the road.

  Now Kayla was cold, the wind stealing every bit of heat, but the exhilaration of the ride made up for the discomfort. She aimed the gun ahead and clung to it for balance, her feet spread wide apart. If her safety conscious parents could see her now—her Uzi slung over her shoulder, hands holding a fifty cal, ponytail flapping in the wind, and she was standing in the back of an open truck. No seat belt. No seat. If Jeff slammed on the breaks, she’d be lucky if she went cleanly over the top of the cab and the hood to splatter on the pavement. If she were unlucky, she’d bounced off the fifty cal and die in the back of the truck. Even now, the truck hit pot holes so hard that her feet would come right off the floor.

  But the cold began to outdo the adrenaline, and Kayla worried that she would have to admit she couldn’t take it anymore, but before that humiliation, Martin stood, grabbing the gun. “Take a seat out of the wind. We’re doing shifts, here.”

  She crouched shoulder to shoulder with Basil, her back to the cab and out of the worst of the wind. It wasn’t warm because there was still wind, but it wasn’t the fifty-mile-per-hour wind that streamed over the cab. After ten minutes Basil stood and took Martin’s place.

  “We should be there pretty soon,” Martin said, shouting to be heard over the wind and the roaring engine of the truck. It was only a few minutes later that the truck slowed, the engine gearing down, which prompted Kayla and Martin to stand and look ahead over the cab.

  Three wheels aimed at the sky and one wing still stretched across the highway, but otherwise it was hard to tell that this had once been a plane. Jeff blared the horn as they approached.

  Martin’s fist pounded the roof of the cab. “Shit.”

  But just as Kayla’s heart sank, just as she gave up their mission as a failure, a muzzle flash exploded from the side of the highway, lighting everything for a dazzling moment. A young man—a teenager, really—with a shotgun stood over another man, one with a bloody face and a twisted leg. He sat with his back against the tree, a huge revolver, maybe a .44 Magnum, pointed for the sky. The young man screamed incoherent rage and charged into the forest, pursuing some unseen enemy.

  “Milan!” called Martin.

  Jeff swung the Toyota so that the headlights illuminated Milan, who waved and pointed frantically to the forest to the south with his gun.

  “Was that the guy who was supposed to be with him?” Martin jumped the side of the truck. Basil swung around the fifty cal, preparing to shoot into the forest after the man, just in case he was a ripper.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! He’s human!” shouted Milan.

  Kayla jumped from the truck, her old sneakers and young knees absorbing the impact. “Where the fuck is he going then?”

  Jeff ran around the front of the truck toward Milan. “Stay on the fifty cal! Martin give me a hand. Kayla—”

  “I’ll go get him,” Kayla said.

  “Wait, no.”

  “I can’t lift him, so what the hell else makes sense?” Kayla pointed at Milan as Jeff crouched down to check the man’s injuries.

  “I owe the young man,” said Milan. “Saved my life.”

  Jeff looked up, but Kayla had already made up her mind. This was right. Let the men look after Milan and cover the truck, their only way out of this mess. Let her go and get the other man, the reckless teenager who had obviously gotten carried away in his fight and fury. This was the best division of their resources. Kayla was absolutely sure.

  Jeff nodded. “Okay, but when you hear the horn get your ass back here or I’ll leave you to die.”

  Kayla rushed into the forest, following the path illuminated by the headlights of the truck, weaving between spruce bows and leaping underbrush. She unslung her Uzi as she ran, taking it in her hands and aiming ahead. The excitement buried the fear of the shadows. She was Kayla, a hunter and an avenger, and she had an Uzi with a full clip. The rippers would run from her, she was sure, but that human ahead wasn’t thinking. Shit! She hadn’t asked his name.

  “Human! Milan’s friend! Over here! Come over here!”

  Muzzle flashes lit a clearing ahead and others responded. There was a firefight going on, but Kayla couldn’t tell friend from foe. She’d hardly got a look at the guy before he charged off. A spruce branch caught her in the face, scratching deeply into her forehead and nearly knocking her from her feet.

  “Shit.” She was too far from the truck now, the headlights not providing enough light this deep into the forest. She slowed her pace, keeping one hand ahead in case of other unseen obstructions and fighting to keep the Uzi pointed up with one hand. It was heavy like this. She tasted blood that leaked down from her forehead. Great. The rippers would love the sight of that.

  Taunting voices came from the clearing.

  “We got you, you little shit. You should’a stayed with your friends.”

  A gun fired, the lightning of its muzzle flash for one moment showing where the shooter hid, low on one knee under the bows of a pine, a shotgun raised. The flash also showed that a low hillock of fractured granite was what kept the trees at bay in this little circle.

  If that was him, he’d just given away his position. Kayla stopped by a maple, thinking the man would die now and her rescue mission would be over. Sure enough, two guns across the clearing cracked out, answering his fire, but their light proved that he was gone.

  At least he had some brains.

  “Did I hit him?” A man ran into the clearing, his clothes muddy and torn, the style from before Vlad—no pocket vest for ammo, just a hoodie and blue jeans. He could have been in her physics class if he weren’t such a mess.

  Kayla had only a second to decide, because the man—possibly ripper—ran unknowingly straight for her, seeking the cover of the very tree she blended with as he tried to see where he’d just shot. Is he the human or a ripper? The human must think he’s alone, so why would he ask the rippers that? And the clothes and the mud all spoke of someone who had been out of human society for quite some time. Kayla pulled the trigger, and a single shot from the Uzi tore into the man’s chest. Dropping him to the ground.

  She bolted away, using the dark for cover. Thank God she’d chosen a camouflage vest this afternoon. More gunfire cracked out, showing her trees and rocks, silhouetting spruce and pine boughs near the clearing edge, and giving her a good idea which direction to run. She saw another clear area ahead, and even though her night sight had been lessened by the muzzle flashes, the moon had risen high enough that she could discern more granite and a shrub nestling into a frost-fractured section. She was about to dare a sprint across this smaller clearing when another figure rushed in from the other side.

  They were less than a couple of car lengths apart, and the rising shotgun indicated that he saw her at the same time as she burst into the clearing and saw him. She raised her Uzi to shoot first, but at the last moment knew she faced a human. He was slim, yes, but it was a teenager slim, not ripper gaunt, and his clothes were too well cared for to have been in the swamps or in the filth of the basement of Atherley College.

  “Wait, wait, St John’s! Not Vlad’s Blood!” Kayla raised her Uzi high above her head as she shouted, turning it perpendicular to her body to make the shape of a ‘T.’ For a moment she thought it was too late, and she braced in panic for the shot, turning sideways but not lowering the gun. At the last second, he froze with the shotgun aimed for her torso.

  The shot would enter under her arm and travel through her chest, tearing holes in her heart and lungs. Ka
yla repressed the urge to dodge and lunge, to run or crouch. She had only seconds to gain his trust and get him out of here, assuming she was right and he was the man she had come to fetch. Instead she sized him up as much as the dim light of the full moon allowed. He wore a multi-pocketed vest not unlike hers, but gray. The pockets bugled with ammunition. He was about her height, and he was panting from his run. That was a good sign. The parasites gave rippers better oxygen uptake, so that they could run farther without rest.

  “Ripper?” It was a question rather than an accusation, but his snarl betrayed the emotion, the loathing, the anger. He clearly wanted to shoot, and Kayla could guess that he was pumped full of adrenaline.

  “No!” Kayla took two quick breaths, trying to calm her own pounding heart, suddenly aware of the sweat staining her armpits. “Come on, you stupid shit. We have to get back to the truck now. We’re from St John’s.”

  Underbrush cracked near the edge of the larger clearing. Something human-sized ran their way. Worse, to the north and the south more running footsteps could be heard.

  “Okay.” He lowered the gun but still frowned in suspicion.

  “Follow me.” Kayla ran from the little clearing, heading straight for the headlights. She wished for a walkie now, because she’d tell Jeff they were coming and to shut off the headlights, for she and the teenager must be silhouettes, but there was no time. She would have to trust the trees to obscure their shadows and hope that the bank of lights over the cab would dazzle ripper eyes.

  She trusted that he followed and kept up, but she didn’t want the distraction of looking over her shoulder. All of her concentration now was on picking a path to the headlights, dodging to avoid trees and trying not to take too straight a line. It would suck to be shot this close to the truck and the protection of the fifty cal.

  She leapt the raspberry brambles in the ditch and cleared the trees, running into the middle of the highway.

  “Don’t shoot it’s me!”

  She turned to face the forest. The young man, definitely a teenager, leapt the ditch and skidded to halt, turning to stand beside her and face the woods. Kayla fired three rounds back at the forest to force any pursuers to take cover, and he leveled his shotgun and also blasted off a round.

  The horn blared.

  “Get in! Get in!”

  Basil still clung to the fifty cal, and Martin knelt in the back, presumably aiding Milan, but Kayla couldn’t see the bed of the truck from the road. The passenger door stood open, and she pushed the man toward it. God, he better not be a ripper or she had just killed them all. He could shoot Jeff now and take over the truck, their only hope of escape. She pushed in right after him and slammed the door.

  “Go! Go!” Kayla needn’t have shouted. The door had hardly closed when Jeff geared reverse, stomping the accelerator and backing them at dangerous speed up the highway. He slowed even as figures emerged from the woods. The fifty cal roared out above the cab only for a second, but several forms dropped and the rest scrambled for the cover of the woods.

  Jeff stopped and did a U-turn, accelerating north for St. John’s.

  In the dashboard lights, Kayla carefully studied the man. Man? Boy. Was he even shaving? She was now sure he was no ripper, though, for his complexion was fresh and red from the exertion, without a trace of anemia. It was the face of youth, and Kayla suddenly felt old and lined by comparison. He stank from his sweat, but strangely Kayla wanted to take deep breaths of it, almost as if the scent were a way of getting to know him, like small talk.

  “So who’s this?” Jeff didn’t take his eyes off the road, but Kayla had no doubt that his peripheral vision was working overtime, and she noted that his Ruger was in his left hand in his lap, the barrel pointed at the new kid.

  “I don’t know.” Kayla raised her eyebrows. “So, like, who are you?”

  “Tevy Wexler.” He held out his right hand, and it was somehow archaic, as if he were a pre-Vlad middle-aged businessman at a conference. But Kayla sensed that he wasn’t mocking them, that he was serious, that someone had carefully taught him old-world manners. Or maybe he was just an old soul.

  She shook his hand. “I’m Kayla Falco. Please to meet you. This is Jeffery MacLean, a companion of the great Bertrand Allan, and a hero of the Battle of the Cave Mountain.” Kayla waited to see Tevy draw in his breath, to express his awe at being in the presence of a legend.

  Tevy nodded solemnly. “Nice to meet you too,” he said to Kayla. He turned to Jeff. “Bobs says to say hi.”

  Seven - St. John’s Keep

  Tevy let the madness fade as the truck sped up the highway. Bobs would scold him if she found out about that momentary loss of all reason. His ears burned as he wondered what this woman from St. John’s must think of him, for she was right: he was stupid to go charging into the forest after rippers in the night.

  But he had killed one for sure, a lucky shot at close range between the eyes. They hadn’t expected him to follow. They had turned only feet into the forest, intending to shoot back at the truck, and so he had come face to face with his enemy. She must have been a young woman when she had become a ripper, perhaps even pretty, but now she was a gaunt memory of herself, starved for too long of blood, her hair thin and straggly, her eyes bulging at the sight of him. She put up one hand to shield herself even as her other hand raised a rusting revolver. Lucky for Tevy it clicked and didn’t fire, or they both would have died.

  The tremble started, his knees shaking against Kayla’s and Jeff’s on either side in the cramped cab, his torso shuddering uncontrollably

  “You okay, buddy?” asked Jeff, shouting over the sound of the engine.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine—just adrenaline and all.” Tevy gripped his knees as if he could fight them to stillness. “Happens to me after a fight when I’ve been all pumped up.” What must the woman—what was her name? Kayla, that was it. What must she think of him? A fool? A coward?

  “Why’d you run into the woods?” she asked.

  Tevy was tempted to say that it was to drive the rippers far from the truck, to give them time to load Milan into the back, but it wasn’t true and he hated bullshit. “I lost my head. Things were pretty hopeless just before you guys got there, and I guess I... Like, I gave myself up for dead. Then you got there...” Tevy struggled for words and finally shrugged. “Just needed to kill some rippers and they were running away.”

  He looked over at Kayla, hoping for understanding, but her expression in the dashboard lights was angry. She was older than him, he was sure of that, way older, but there was something about her face, the curve of her chin and the set of her jaw that caught his attention. He resisted the urge to push an errant lock of hair back over her ear, to wipe the blood from a forehead scratch off her plump cheek. Sweat glistened from her skin, and a bead ran down her long neck into her collar despite the cool. She must’ve run pretty hard to catch him.

  She met his gaze.

  “Next time, control yourself,” she said. “You can’t go around thinking about getting back at the rippers. You have to think about beating them instead, and dying isn’t beating them, no matter how many of them you take with you.”

  She was right, of course, so Tevy didn’t respond, but he found himself more aware of her than ever—the touch of her knee on his, the scent of her sweat, the way she cradled her Uzi between her legs.

  Suddenly, a new fear took hold. How could a woman so much older than him be causing that reaction? God, not here, not now. Bishop Alvarez would say that this was a time to pray, that you could cheat the body’s lusts by immersing oneself in the rosary. Emile once gathered all the boys close to Tevy’s age and warned them that their bodies would sometimes behave badly, that it wasn’t their fault, and all they had to do to behave was think about cleaning guns and killing rippers.

  Tevy reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the box of shotgun cartridges. He made sure the safety was on and began reloading. This not only calmed his lusts but calmed his trembling. By the time he w
as done, he could see the tower of St. John’s and that took up his attention.

  It was nowhere near as tall as the Willis Tower, a tiny fraction of the height really, but all twenty stories had lights. It was as if this building had appeared from his childhood, just the way condos and office towers used to be all lit up before Vlad, before the power plants died and before the darkness of their age.

  “Whoa.” It just escaped his lips, and as they got close he had to lean toward the dashboard so that he could look up through the windshield.

  “What?” Kayla studied him with a frown.

  “So many lights. It’s like before—before Vlad.”

  “You don’t have power in Chicago?”

  Jeff answered. “No, they don’t, not the humans anyway.”

  “We have some.” Tevy knew he sounded defensive but didn’t care. “Emile keeps a generator going at St. Mike’s, and St. James and some of the others got some too. We just use ’em for the outside lights at night, though, so the rippers can’t sneak up in the dark. Sometimes Emile runs a cable so we can turn on the TV and watch DVDs, but only on Saturdays.”

  “Welcome back to the twenty-first century, then.” Jeff drove around the black tower to the back, and a large garage door rolled up magically as they approached, releasing the blinding light of fluorescents.

  Jeff brought the truck to a stop in the middle of a garage crammed with trucks and cars and tool boxes and hoists. There was barely room to squeeze into a parking space, especially since several people with guns stood around it.

  “We’re good,” called Jeff out his open window as soon as he’d cut the engine, but he re-holstered his gun and didn’t get out. He and Kayla put their hands in the air instead. Tevy got the message and put his shotgun down on the floor of the truck and put his hands up.

  A balding man, round and comfortable, with what little white hair he had hanging to his shoulders, approached with a stethoscope. “I’ll start in the back with Milan. I’ll get to you when I can.”