The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (24 page)

"Watch this you little bitch!" shouted one. He tossed the Molotov at a car parked in the street. The flame splashed across the hood, setting the car's paint on fire but doing little other damage.

Bertrand wanted to charge. The new light was a danger. Could the teens now see him approaching across the grass, or were their eyes sufficiently dazzled? How close did he have to be to shoot accurately, and how could he tell that they really were rippers, besides the fact that they were out after dark? Bertrand became very aware of his heart rate, a heavy pounding. He looked left to Father Alvarez.

The priest's black cassock, his dark hair and olive complexion made him almost invisible in the dark, but Bertrand knew where to look, and the man was much closer to him than the teens. Alvarez put his fist in the air and stopped.

What did that mean? Bertrand stopped too and put his right fist in the air to communicate the signal to Emile, in case he couldn't see the priest. Maybe Emile knew what this meant, for he stopped his advance as well. Bertrand looked back to Alvarez, who had begun to moved away on a path that would circle down the street, not bringing him any closer.

"See that you little cock tease!" shouted one of the teens on the sidewalk not far from the burning car. "We can burn you and your bum-boy out of there if you don't come down now. I'm getting tired of all this shit."

A young woman—her blonde hair and pale face turned a shade of orange by the fire—appeared at the second floor window, a crossbow in her hands. A tall young man joined her with another one, and both aimed at the speaker.

"Fuck you Wormason!" she shouted.

The two crossbows fired together, one bolt skipping off the concrete and the other zipping into the teen's leg. Both aggressors vanished from the window, anticipating retribution.

The teen screamed in rage and grabbed at the bolt in his leg.

"You little whore! You think the bugs can't fix this?" He yanked the crossbow bolt from his leg, provoking another scream and curse.

A wave from Alvarez caught Bertrand's attention.

The priest carefully pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at the back of the house. This one Bertrand knew from the movies. What did Alvarez want him to see? Shadows moved near the back of the house, and Bertrand understood. There were people in the back yard.

"That's it you bitch," shouted the teen, jumping around as if he'd stubbed his toe rather than taken a crossbow bolt to his thigh. "I was gonna bring you up, give you the bugs so that you could be one of us. Only Terrance up there was gonna be fodder tonight, but not now." His voice dripped contempt on the name Terrance. "Now I'm gonna do you both. You hear that? I'm gonna burn you out and I'm gonna drink your blood!"

His friends shouted encouragement and turned up the heavy metal music, the pounding drums and screeching voices speaking about Satan without understanding evil. One teen brought their spokesman another bottle with a rag, and he lit it.

Now
. They had to act now before the house was set ablaze. Bertrand couldn't wait any longer. He pointed ferociously at Alvarez, forcing every bit of rage he had into his command in hopes that the priest would both understand and obey without question. His finger chopped from Alvarez to the shadows at the back of the house.
Those are your targets
, was his unspoken command. Bertrand looked to his right and saw that he already had Emile's attention. He pointed at him and then swept his hand in a circle, followed by a sweeping motion past the burning car, the flames dying as the paint was consumed.
Go around the car and shoot from there
.

Bertrand put his Glock into the air and then punched forward.
Charge!

He ran at the teens even as the leader stepped onto the postage stamp of a front lawn and prepared to throw the Molotov cocktail high at the gaping window. Bertrand skidded to a halt less than two car lengths away, steadied his aim and fired. The teen dropped and the cocktail broke on the front walk, the flames leaping harmlessly into the air. The other two teens turned at the gunshot, producing handguns and ineffectually aiming them sideways. They both fired several shots at Bertrand, who turned to present the smallest target, amazed at his calm despite the fear, despite the fact that he had nearly pissed himself. He was exhilarated to be fighting, to be doing something. Emile had always warned him against the dumb Hollywood thing of turning your weapon sideways, since there were sights on the gun for a reason:
You might as well spit at them for all you'll hit
.

Perhaps this helped with Bertrand's fear, for instead of ducking he aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. A second boy dropped, and the third, seeing his friend go down, ran for the shelter of the burning car.

But Emile had already circled to the far side, his movement hidden by the flames and Bertrand's attention-galvanizing shooting. Even before Emile could shoot, however, a crossbow bolt hit the teen in the back, dropping him in a sliding sprawl on his face along the sidewalk.

Gunshots from the back suggested that Alvarez was being liberal with his interpretation of the Fifth Commandment. Bertrand was about to run that way to help when two men—not teenagers but middle-aged men, balding and pudgy—rounded the corner, one with a sawed-off shotgun presented and another with a handgun held properly.

Bertrand froze for a moment in his panic. Were they humans or rippers? Should he shoot? The shotgun's muzzle flashed. It no longer mattered which side they were on because they were firing on him. Bertrand pulled the trigger, taking the man with the handgun in the chest and dropping him to the ground. The shotgun bearer didn't have time to pump before Emile's shot blew through the man's skull.

His heart pounded so hard in his chest that Bertrand feared a heart attack, and he took deep breaths as if he had been running the whole way here, even though their last charge had been a very short sprint. Emile appeared on the sidewalk past the end of the burning car, his .357 aimed at the teen with the crossbow bolt in his back. He writhed and reached back, fighting to yank the bolt free.

"Don't shoot him yet!" yelled Bertrand, putting on hand out to warn Emile. "We want a prisoner. Don't move, dude!"

A movement by the lead teenager—the one Bertrand had shot first—snagged Bertrand's peripheral vision. He turned even as the teen, still on the ground by the burning fluid, raised a handgun. A rifle cracked and the teen collapsed and didn't move. Father Alvarez stood at the corner of the house, the rifle still aiming at the lump on the ground. It cracked twice more, bullets tearing through the corpse.

"I'd say he's dead this time," Emile said. "And if you don't want to die in about two seconds, kid, you won't move either or I'll turn you over to Father Death there."

"Please, I can't die." He spread out his hands, staying face down in the dying light of the flames that burned low—both on the car's hood and the front walk—as they consumed their fuel. "If I die I'll go straight to hell."

Father Alvarez walked up and knelt close by him. "Not if you repent your sins." He made the sign of the cross. "I can still save you before you die."

The young woman appeared at the window, her crossbow presented and her tall friend aiming over her shoulder in case he was called upon to shoot.

"Whatssup?" she called to Bertrand. "You guys want to come in? I could use the extra guns tonight 'cause the city's really going to rat shit. Lost my base and my partner house last night."

"You can't let us in." Bertrand walked onto the lawn, careful to stay out of reach of the corpse just in case the teen wasn't really dead, and looked up to the window. "We could just be competition for these guys for all you know. Only in the sunlight can you be sure we're not rippers."

She nodded. "Rippers—like vampires—got it. Fair enough, but you should go to ground till sunrise. I don't want you attracting anymore attention this way." She tossed a key to the grass at Bertrand's feet. "That's for the garage behind my house. I fixed it up as a fall-back position, so you'll find it's pretty defensible—bars on the windows, that kinda stuff."

"Thanks." He picked up the key and turned to Emile. "Lets bring that one with us for a chat."

"Hey dude," called the woman. "You better pass some lead through my math teacher's head there and that other creep. I've seen these pricks come back from some really bad wounds, and don't use the fat guy's cannon. Use your Glock."

Emile looked up at her in adoration. "Who the fuck are you?" he asked.

But she and her boyfriend had disappeared.

"She's right, of course," Emile said to Bertrand. "My .357 is loud."

Bertrand nodded. They were already dead. It was not a sin to shoot someone to keep them dead. He went to each corpse in turn—ones that hadn't already died from head wounds—and 'passed some lead' through their skulls.

"Let's go to ground," he said.

Father Alvarez led the way, his rosary dangling from his left hand, which held the barrel of his rifle, leveled and ready to shoot as he headed for the alley behind the house.

The garage proved to be everything she'd promised. It was modern, built of cinder blocks although the roof was a wood-frame construction with asphalt shingles. That could burn. The windows were barred, but the glass was still intact, and Bertrand was glad of that when they got inside, because the pre-dawn chill had settled in, warning of Chicago's approaching bitter winter.

Once inside they found the garage to be even more of a bunker than Bertrand had thought. The garage door looked normal from the outside, but from the inside more of the amateur bricklayer's work was evident. A head-high cinderblock wall had been hastily constructed on the inside of the rolling door, again with little regard for neat mortar. If anyone succeeded in prying up or smashing through the garage door, they would simply find the new wall.

"She built this as a trap," Emile said as he looked at the wall. "The rippers would pry up the garage door thinking they were about to find a bunch of hopeless dweebs, and instead they'd find this wall and a couple of people firing crossbows over the top. She's just great! Give these kids some firearms and training, and I'll give you back a couple of captains."

Father Alvarez had more immediate concerns. He went to a bench of tools at the back and searched in the gloom by the light of a match. First he found a candle and lit it. Then he pulled a coil of rope from the wall and turned to their prisoner. "Please get in the chair."

The teen trembled with fear or cold. "What are you gonna do?" He was freckles and clear skin, pushing twenty with sandy hair cut into a faux-hawk. A tattoo of a snake rose up from his shoulder and licked under his ear—all the toughness and gangsta attitude had evaporated.

"You are sick." Father Alvarez pointed to the chair. "I will hear your confession."

"I don't wanna die. Please Father. I'm not Catholic. I don't need no confession. Can't you just let me go?"

"Get in the chair." Bertrand pointed his Glock at the teen's head. "Or I put you down right now."

He sat and Alvarez secured him, hands behind his back, ropes around his chest. Emile closed the pedestrian door of the garage, shaking at the bars someone had screwed over its window. "Not pretty but good and strong," he said.

"You have to cover the windows before sunrise." The ripper looked as if he might weep. "Otherwise I'll die."

"You already are dead." Bertrand found a large plastic paint pale—the five-gallon size—and pulled it over in front of the prisoner so the he could sit facing him. "What's your name?"

"Ted. Ted Walcott. Please don't kill me."

"I'm not going to kill you, Ted. But you need to tell me everything. Start with why you chose to attack this house tonight—why here?"

Ted looked left at Emile, who had taken a seat on another paint pail, but found an unsympathetic expression. He looked right to Father Alvarez, who had pulled up an old wooden chair splattered with paint, and found pity, which didn't seem to make him feel any better. He again faced Bertrand.

"Harrison, Steve Harrison—the guy she stuck first with her crossbow—he had a thing for her, see? I mean like she's hot but she never puts out, and she was a grade above in our high school but then she got into college and we didn't, so I guess her nose turned up even more. Then the boss said we each had to evolve someone every night, make a quota you know, and Harrison thought of her. Like that wasn't really the rules, 'cause we're supposed to find people who can adapt to the change—you know, people who want to live forever no matter what you gotta do."

"Murderers." Bertrand resisted the urge to immediately shoot Ted.

"No, no, it's not like that." Ted leaned back in the chair, apparently sensing Bertrand's anger. "See like it's just for a little while that we have to, you know, take people out to survive. But when things get reorganized, when the new world order gets going, we won't have to kill anybody anymore because you guys will be in camps and stuff and will be donating blood, right? So we get this blood like at a blood bank and nobody has to die."

"You'll put us in camps!"

"No! I mean yes but it'll be for your own protection. Some guys don't adapt well see, even after the evolution. They go rogue and don't join with the rest of us brids, but just go hunting alone all the time—so see, it would be good for you guys to be in the camps. We can take care of you and all."

"It'd be better for us if you stopped making people into rippers."

"Rippers? You mean brids? We're not rippers."

Emile leaned in, looking like he wanted to hit Ted. "The fuck you aren't. What were you gonna do to that little girl tonight and her friend?"

"Hey dude that little girl is a freak, man. Harrison and some buds caught her parents in the alley like a month ago and fed on them. I mean, I know it's wrong and all but you gotta feed the bugs or it's just torture. So we figure she'll want to join and all, but Harrison says we gotta give her a few weeks so that she's not too pissed at him for doing her mom and dad."

"No shit," said Emile.