The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (31 page)

Kayla reentered the Merchandise Mart the same way she had left, through one of the holes they’d blown in the concrete block. Again Tevy and Elliot were with her, and this time Amanda was there too. Mabruke stayed close as they made their way down the same stairs as last time.

They stopped at the first landing, guns ready, and Amanda did the honors, pulling the pin from a grenade and dropping it over the railing after a nod from Kayla. The explosion provoked a scream, and Kayla led the rush down stairs, practically having to elbow Tevy out of the way so that she could lead.

She could hear several explosions from other stairwells, indicating that the other assault teams were on the move, too. At the bottom of the stairwell they found one ripper, bleeding but not dead. Kayla’s heart pounded as she fired a single shot through his forehead to keep him down.

A quick peek into the basement corridor proved that there were a lot of rippers waiting for them. Some of them behind a sandbagged machine-gun emplacement, probably even the Ericsian’s sandbags from yesterday.

Apparently they didn’t wonder what the jackhammers had been doing upstairs all morning. Kayla had no intention of a frontal assault that would kill many of her troops, so when Mabruke had told her that he had a working air compressor and enough diesel fuel to run it, she’d decided it was worth the wait. But the Mart was built of poured concrete, and it took two hours to jackhammer in holes for the dynamite, and even then there was no guarantee they had enough to blow a hole in the floor.

There were a lot of risks, but Mabruke had assured them that one thing they needn’t fear was the whole building coming down from their charges.
“This place was built for heavy goods and forklifts, not manikins and dresses. We could only wish the whole place would collapse
.
”

If he was wrong, they were about to die.

Kayla pulled up her particle mask and pulled down her goggles. What would they do when the Home Depots ran out of stuff like this, she wondered, allowing this distraction to supplant the fear for just a moment. She also wondered how long the yellow hard hat would last on her head once the real shooting started.

Mabruke looked in askance, putting his own mask up, and she nodded. He used a hand signal, as if pulling a down on an invisible handle, and it was echoed by others up the stairs. They all plugged their ears and looked at the ground. A few moments later, the floor shifted under their feet and several giant explosions ripped through the Mart.

Tevy charged through the door before she could, rushing into the gray haze of concrete dust. Insulation from piping floated in the air, too, probably asbestos given how old the building was, but Kayla hardly cared. She could die at any moment. Tevy could die at any moment. Ripper bodies, males and females, had been tossed away from the machine gun emplacement. They shifted, some groaned, and Tevy was already busy shooting the strongest-looking with his Winchester.

A ripper lay near Kayla, his back to the wall and his eyes pleading for help as blood dripped from his mouth. Kayla put a single shot into his forehead at point-blank range. The weak light from the ragged hole they’d blown in the ceiling didn’t let down much sunlight, and all of it was indirect and diffused by the concrete dust, but it had the desired effect: those rippers that could run were fleeing. Kayla didn’t know if this was enough light to kill parasites in their hosts and cause the inevitable stroke and heart attack that came with a massive die-off of parasites, but the rippers weren’t taking any chances.

“Go! Go! Go!” she shouted. “Leave the clean up.” That was for Tevy, who was still carefully giving the double tap to any ripper wounded. There were others who could do that behind them, people just as capable.

They followed the floor plan, not having to search for the stair into the deepest part of the Mart. This Kayla expected to find well defended, but the grenades didn’t produce any screams. They ran down into the heart of the building, where pipes and wires and ductwork all came together to find boilers and electrical panels and phone boxes. The rippers had another machine-gun emplacement, but Elliot had a good arm. Kayla took a deep breath to prepare herself. She would live. She wouldn’t be shot. Luck would be with her. This ran like a mantra in the back of her head.

Kayla made sure Elliot was ready, gave Tevy the one, two, three with her fingers, and they charged into the hall, he going high and straight across to the far wall while she stayed low, firing three round bursts to push the machine gunners down before they could fire with aim. Elliot stepped into the hall and flung the grenade. It landed perfectly behind the gunners, and Kayla and Tevy barely cleared the hall and back into the stairwell before it exploded.

They turned and rushed back into the corridor to find utter and complete black. The explosion had shattered every bulb, forcing Kayla to make a heart-stopping pause to fish the flashlight Mabruke gave her out of her pocket. There were no holes to let in the sunlight this deep. She made a note that she should have foreseen this problem. She turned the little Maglite on, holding it away from her body.

Muzzle flashes exploded in the corridor, and for a freeze-frame second she could see Tevy charging forward with his shotgun aimed. She rushed after him, but the rippers ran after discharging wild shots, and the next danger was from friendly fire, for other teams had made it down different stairwells.

“The 1000 Live On!” She shouted the Erics proclamation. Others around her echoed her cry, and so did voices up the corridor. She kept an eye on them because the rippers could shout this just as easily, but she was relying on surprise. The rippers didn’t know one group of Loyalists from the others. By the time they did figure this group was from the Ericsians, or even what the Ericsians stood for, hopefully the battle would be over.

“This is it!” Tevy pointed with his light. Its batteries already looked weak, so far past their best-before date as to hardly hold any charge. These had come fresh out of the packaging this morning.

The ceiling was high for a basement, but the room was pretty empty, a warehousing room that had been partitioned off with modern drywall. Once it might have been much larger. At the far side was another machine gun. It opened fire, throwing the room into more freeze frames of light, a pulsing image that made movements look strobbed. The three of them rushed for the cover of a descending pipe and its machinery, but Elliot stopped and flung another grenade.

Kayla closed her eyes so that the flash wouldn’t totally destroy what little night sight she had obtained. A second later she rushed the gun, Tevy and Elliot with her, but this time Amanda was in the lead, having caught up with them from the stairwell. The first shot prompted a cry and she turned and fell. Tevy and Kayla fired, discovering that two rippers still manned the gun, but they were aiming for Elliot as he stooped over Amanda, missing the real threat. Kayla shot one in the chest and Tevy hit the other in the head, splattering blood onto his comrade. Kayla jumped over the sandbags, shouting to vent her fear, relying on Tevy to cover her while she put a second shot into her target, this time between the eyes. The parasites couldn’t rebuild brains.

Behind the gun emplacement was a block wall that had been broken open to reveal an ancient tunnel. She knew from Helen it was from the turn of the twentieth century, but if someone told her it was from several centuries ago, she would’ve believed them. It was lined with brick, in places patched with concrete, arched on the top to hold the weight. Train tracks still ran along the floor, but relatively modern cables and pipes ran along the walls. This must’ve been fantastic for companies wanting to run everything from gas to fiber optic.

Kayla stayed to the side of the tunnel, and it was a good thing she did, because a muzzle flash from farther down warned her that the rippers hadn’t gone far. She backed out and took up a position with her back to the wall beside the mouth of the tunnel. Mabruke came running up, sweat staining his armpits and chest, gray dust clinging to his damp skin. He had pulled his mask down to speak, and his goggles were up on his forehead. Where were her goggles? She didn’t remember taking them off, but she did remember that they had fogged up.

“We shouldn’t go into the tunnel,” Mabruke said. “It’ll be an endless fight.”

“No shit?” Kayla couldn’t keep the contempt from her voice. She would feel better later, but right now she had to let the stress out somehow. “Tevy!”

He nodded acknowledgement from the other side of the tunnel mouth, looking hot in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. Kayla pointed to a grenade hanging from her belt and again counted with her fingers to three. She turned the corner, going high while Mabruke went low, both of them keeping as much out of the tunnel as possible while still able to aim and fire. She emptied her mag, a bit reckless with the ammo, but there were only about ten cartridges left anyway, and she wanted to be damn sure Tevy didn’t get shot. He threw the grenade, proving his arm was nearly as good as Elliot’s. They all ducked back, and the flash and explosion indicated that the grenade wasn’t a dud.

Kayla crouched down by Mabruke. “We’ll keep them back. Can you get your air lines down here so that we can jackhammer up the ceiling.”

Mabruke leaned out just enough to look up at the tunnel ceiling. “It’s hard to use a jackhammer above your head,” he called over the shooting from outside the room. “But we’ll give it a try. Doesn’t look like we’ll have too much to take out. It might bring the river in, though.”

“That would work.”

Mabruke nodded and rushed off. Elliot joined her, putting his back to the wall and heaving for breath. His red hair was totally gray with the dust, and rivers of sweat on his neck were etched in the filth.

“She okay?” Kayla feared the answer.

“Flesh wound in her arm.” Elliot pitched his voice loud so that Tevy could hear from the other side of the tunnel mouth. “As long as it doesn’t get infected, she’ll be fine. I got her as far as the stairs. She told me she could get out on her own and sent me back with this.” He held up a static road flare, the kind truckers would have used back before the apocalypse. “Shall we give it a try?”

Elliot lit the flare and they covered him while he threw it down the tunnel. It landed near a machinegun behind some sandbags about four or five car lengths down the tunnel. Two bodies lay near it.

“They sure have a lot of hardware,” Elliot said. “Tevy and I should go get it. We could use that.”

Kayla nodded in spite of her fear for Tevy. “Go,” she added, aiming down the tunnel and ready to provide covering fire.

The two ran down the tunnel and came back, the heavy gun slung over Tevy’s shoulder while Elliot carried two metal ammunition boxes. Kayla hurried to meet them. “Wait. Set it up here. Can you work it?”

Tevy opened the bipod by way of answer and placed the gun between the tracks while Elliot set up the ammunition to feed.

Kayla hurried back up the tunnel to find Mabruke.

“Look,” she said. “I need Tevy and Elliot to go out to the bridge. Get a squad to move these sandbags down there and operate that gun. It’ll give you cover while you’re setting the charges.”

“The 1000 Live On.” Mabruke gave their fist at the shoulder salute and hurried to shout to his troops.

It seemed forever to her before they had a fresh squad set up on Tevy’s gun. The rippers tried twice to come back up the tunnel, but Tevy and Elliot sent them running with just a few bursts from the gun. Finally, she could have them relieved.

“Guys,” Kayla said as they came out of the tunnel. “Let’s go check the bridge.”

“I wonder what happened to Rad?” asked Tevy as they ran across the warehouse sized room for the exit.

“Don’t you know?” said Kayla. She had forgotten to tell him. “Before we bailed from here he was already healing, so I told him to get out after dark and try to infiltrate the Willis Tower, get info right from their command center.”

Mabruke hurried out of the hallway, directing a squad with air hoses and the jackhammer and dynamite.

“No kidding. Do you think he can do that?” asked Tevy while they waited for Mabruke’s men to pass through the doorway.

“He thinks he can. They’re actually really interested that he’s from St. John’s. He’s feeding them bullshit, I hope.”

Now they hurried up through the stairwells they had fought down, Tevy rushing ahead of her. For a ridiculous moment it occurred to her that he had a nice bum before she pushed such distracting thoughts away. She’d been given another command. She had to prove it was a good choice, that she was worthy and not just because some multiple-choice questionnaire linked her with Joyce.

The sun outside dazzled, already mid-afternoon. Kayla checked her watch. Three p.m. How long had they been fighting their way through to the tunnel? She remembered it as minutes, yet her watch said that it had taken two hours.

The platoon she’d tasked with taking the bridge owned it, and Kayla walked right down the middle over the metal grate of the deck and under the ‘L’ tracks, the shade they provided a relief from a very hot day. On the far side, the two dead tanks still blocked the road, and the Ericsian troops had set up machineguns behind piles of sandbags on each sidewalk.

They stopped in front of the squat tower that must have been for the bridge operators and looked south, but a wall of office buildings blocked any view of the towers farther south in the Loop, like the Willis Tower, where Vlad was rumored to have his command.

Kayla liked big cities even less. The corridors of buildings would provide cover for ambushes every foot of the way. They could never fight their way into the Loop, day or night. Bobs was crazy. Far better to let the rippers throw themselves at fortified positions than the other way around.

“The rippers will attack right after sunset,” she said to Tevy. “I want to make sure that this bridge is tight, and these gunners aren’t going to do it.” She pointed up at the office buildings across Wacker Street. “A single sniper will kill them, let alone some asshole with a rocket.”