The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (43 page)

"I don't care about legally. It's my body and no one's gonna take me without a fight."

"My dad knows a guy." Rachel stood and stretched. In another time--a month ago--Kayla might have thought Rachel needed to lose a few pounds, but that seemed so irrelevant and petty now. "Dad's decided I need an upgrade from the Taser. He's getting me a Glock. If you want I can get you one too."

Kayla did want, but her weekly allowance from Mom and Dad hadn't been deposited into her bank account yet. "How much?"

Rachel smiled. "Don't worry. You can pay in installments. We're doing it for a few other girls too. Dad says we need to be our own police force here, watch out for each other."

And they did. No one went anywhere without an armed partner, but it turned out this serial killer wasn't just interested in women. Boys started to disappear, and even a few professors. The college president responded by going on a rant about absenteeism. By mid-October rumors began to circulate about a cult of serial killers. Some guy down in Chicago was all over the Internet, talking about rippers--blood drinkers. He said you couldn't believe what you see on the news, and Kayla fervently agreed. Her parents had found Thunder Bay just as dangerous as Sioux Lookout.

"It seems like a house burns down every night," said her mother in a quick phone call. "We've decided we're better off at home, and things seemed to have quieted down since the band council took over policing from the O.P.P."

When Kayla's physics professor didn't turn up one day, she decided to go home. Teaching assistants now taught half of her classes anyway. They seemed as lost as everyone else as to why the campus was in a state of crisis unnoticed by the administration.

But she was too late.

She managed to hitch a ride in a rusting Jeep Cherokee that took her all the way to Sioux Lookout. The driver was young, Ojibwa, and cute. He told her his name was Ted, but she was pretty sure that was just the name he used with non-First Nations.

He was twenty and chatty, his jeans snug fitting and his muscles lean. He'd been out west working on the oil sands projects, but things had gotten weird and his grandmother had asked him to come home.

"The farmers," he said about his journey thus far. "They're burning the fields out in the Prairies instead of harvesting--some kind of protest the newspapers say. Don't know much but it seems stupid to me."

He continued to say, "don't know much," several times during the two-hour ride, but Kayla began to believe he knew quite a bit, and she was really glad he was there when they pulled up in front of the burnt shell of her childhood home.

He let her cry for a while on the front lawn, his hand on her shoulder a comfort, her knees getting wet in the fresh snow as she let the tension of the last few weeks pour out. She was detached, almost watching herself cry. She couldn't stop.

"Sorry," he said finally. "You should come to the rez with me. Gran said I had to be there before sunset. She said that was really important."

Kayla considered saying it was okay, that she just wanted to be a here a bit longer, that she'd stay at the Sunset Motel, but she was angry. Someone was going to pay for this, and she had to be alive to deliver that punishment.

She went with him to the little bungalow in the woods, and his grandmother had clucked and shouted at him and reached high to cuff his head, but she reluctantly let Kayla stay the night on the ratty couch.

The next morning Kayla helped Gran with the dishes while Ted went off to a band council meeting. If Gran spoke English she didn't use it with Kayla. Ted came back with a grim expression.

"We got to go. Most are going."

"Where?"

"Most are heading up north, flying to the high lakes, away from...people."

Had he been going to say white people? He looked embarrassed, guilty.

"I can't go there."

He nodded his agreement. A long chat broke out in Ojibwa between Gran and Ted. It rose to shouting, but never aggressive, just both trying to be heard over the other, both used to talking this way.

"I can take you back to the college," he said finally. A four hour round trip for him.

"I can't ask you to do that. If I could just get a ride into town I'll get the bus tomorrow." Every Monday morning a bus headed down to Atherley with people who spent the week working there or at the pulp mill in Dryden.

"There won't be a bus." He turned and began zipping up her pack for her.

"Well I'll hitch a ride then. Don't worry, I can take care of myself."

But she didn't feel that way. Had her parents gone back to Thunder Bay? She'd checked her phone about a hundred times during the night. Calling her mother, texting her little brother, but there had been no replies. In her heart she knew there was only one reason that little brat hadn't texted her back with some amusing or snarky message, or a least an excited 140 characters about the house fire. He had always loved trying to fit his sentences into exactly 140 characters.

"It's not safe to hitch a ride." Ted opened the door, letting cold air into the little house. "There are people in the day who work for them--for the rippers."

And Kayla knew the world had changed forever. They were talking about them, the serial killers that slashed throats and drank blood, the ones that guy in Chicago, Bertrand Allan, kept talking about in his YouTube broadcasts.

"Thanks. I don't know how I can thank you."

They rode in silence back to the college, the trees frosted with fresh snow, the road unplowed. Ted's Jeep had four-wheel drive, but he rarely used it because it sucked too much gas. "A lotta gas stations closed. It's hard to come by."

She tried to give him every bit of cash in her wallet even though he had refused and even seemed insulted.

"You'll need gas," she said. "Please, you probably saved my life."

He took it in the end just to get her to stop.

"It's probably worthless paper anyway."

He sped away, clearly anxious to get back to his grandmother before sunset.

Kayla found the dorm in a panic, girls crying and packing.

"What's going on?" she said to Rachel, who wasn't crying but was stuffing a pack with clothing.

"We're getting the hell out of here." Rachel suddenly stopped and looked up. "Hey, I thought you'd gone home."

Kayla didn't want to appear weak, but it was too much. She shook her head and bit her lip, unable to speak but successfully fighting back the tears--until Rachel swept her up in a hug.

"Oh, baby. It's okay. It's okay," Rachel said over and over as Kayla wept. "We've got a place to go, a safe place."

"Where." Kayla pushed back from the hug and wiped her cheeks.

"It's a new student residence about a mile from here, but it's built like a fort. I don't know why but everybody already calls it The Keep. The contractor who built it is sending a bus over for anyone who wants to join him--and they've got a lot of guns."

"Good." Kayla pulled out her Glock and looked at it for a moment, sensing the new life that was before her. "I'd like an upgrade to a machine gun."

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Can't wait for Book Two or Book Three of the 1000 Souls? Jump ahead and read:
Vampire Road: Book Four of
The 1000 Souls
, available on Amazon Kindle.