The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (6 page)

"It's tough searching through the weird conspiracy shit. I thought you might have the inside track."

"If I did I couldn't share it with you. Now that's your question, Mr. Allan. Time to go."

The short fence to the neighbor's yard proved no effort even for Bertrand, although he had to help Joyce shove the dog over the fence, who seemed unwilling to jump without serious motivation.

The clapboard house was wider than Bertrand's narrow house and a full two stories—big by downtown standards. Bertrand glanced at the house as they hurried through to the street, wondering if this house, like his, had survived the Great Fire. A modern sliding glass door at the back opened onto a deck similar to the one they'd just left, and a man in a bathrobe stood safely inside the house, the door firmly shut. He held a shotgun, his wide face shockingly pale, even with three days of stubble.

"Stay away!" shouted the man.

"Just passing through." Bertrand tried to sound disarming, as if it were an everyday occurrence to have strangers run through your backyard while news choppers circled overhead.

The man responded to Bertrand's wave by stepping back a pace and leveling the shotgun.

"Let's get out of here," said Bertrand. Joyce only nodded her agreement as they scrambled over the low chain-link fence on the far side and into the street.

They walked to Joyce's condo in silence, one of four in a line of row houses—boxy, modern affairs that probably won awards for the architect in the eighties but now just looked dated.

"Hope you don't mind that I don't invite you in for a nightcap." Joyce didn't look back as she put the key in the lock.

"Yeah. Murder just spoils the mood, doesn't it?" Bertrand considered smacking his forehead. What had possessed him to say that?

Joyce turned back from her door, a smile teasing the corners of her lips but a frown moderating it. "You're a no bullshit guy, Bert. I like that. I'll see you at the gym."

She shut the door.

The first thing Bertrand did when he got home was turn on every light and search every corner of the little two bedroom house to ensure he was completely alone. He checked that all the doors and windows were locked before he booted his laptop, grabbed a beer from the fridge and turned on the TV to the local station, settling into his La-Z-Boy just as the eleven o'clock news rolled with all the dazzling graphics.

Absenteeism at city hall was the lead story, with the reporter interviewing people angry that they were unable to complete basic tasks, like getting building permits or paying taxes. A representative for the mayor's office stood just outside city hall, the street lights on and people hurrying by, some with looks back at the camera. His suit was impeccable and his tie a sharp red. "The mayor would like everyone to know that Chicago is still open for business. We have had some staffing issues over the summer due to the unexpected flu that's going around, but we're working late into the night to clear the backlog. We've extended our hours to include a special session between nine p.m and midnight, so if you were turned away today, please come down now and you'll find us open and ready to serve."

Bertrand put his beer down and opened his laptop. This was weird. Why not lead with the new Ripper murder? A quick check of the TV station's website, the same as the letters on the helicopter that had circled the crime scene, proved that there was no coverage there either—not a word, not even a headline promising more details to follow.

The next item on the news was the stock market's increasingly wild gyrations, but Bertrand was no longer paying attention. He searched "Ripper murders" and came up with results, but they were all a few days old and all from Chicago. He was able to find a reference to a serial slasher in New York, but those articles were also out of date. He was just about to give up when a result got his attention with a tag line that didn't seem to fit the search. It asked: Has Your Soul Gotten Stronger?

Bertrand clicked on it only to find the cheapest graphics right out of the nineties. A starry background made the purple text hard to read, even though the font was large. Cheesy music—the new age stuff you'd buy to soothe children to sleep—played in the background. Bertrand was about to click away, but the first line caught his eye.

"The Ripper murders are the reason you are stronger."

It went on to describe a new religion, one that believed there were only one thousand souls in existence, each soul spread between many humans. "Thus," said the author, "the one thousand became very diluted when the population of the earth exploded—each body containing only a tiny fragment of a soul. But for the first time in history, the process is reversing. Millions are dying, and each portion of the souls of those dying people flee to a living person. If you wonder why your soul feels stronger, it's because it is stronger. It is denser. The portion of your soul that you are a vessel for is larger than it has been for over two centuries."

"Okay this is crazy," said Bertrand to the room. He was about to close the tab when the next line galvanized his attention.

"Have you had a sudden panic attack recently?" the website's author asked. "Have you found yourself apprehensive for no reason, culminating into a surging heartbeat and unfocused terror, only to have it all end suddenly leaving you oddly stronger? These are the tell tale signs that someone whose body contains a portion of the same soul that your body contains has been murdered. When a person dies their soul portion should gently merge with the entire soul, a little bit entering each living human host. But in the case of a sudden and violent death, the soul-portion flees to the nearest human vessel containing a portion of the same soul. This increases soul density rapidly. That is why there are physiological side-effects.

"The Ripper murders are so numerous and violent that many soul-portions must flee to living hosts."

Bertrand sat back and shook his head. Just coincidence that this nut-bar was describing a simple panic attack and ascribing ethereal causes. The guy even called himself by a plural: Erics, saying that he was only one of many host bodies for his soul, thus the plural. It didn't seem to bother him that the other host bodies weren't necessarily named Eric. "I use the plural as a symbol of the multiple bodies that contain my single soul.

Bertrand snorted and was about to click away, but his curiosity got the better of him and he found himself typing into the "Contact Us" form. "How do you know there are one thousand souls and not one million?" He sent the message and closed his laptop.

The TV news was now dealing with the power outages caused by absenteeism at major power plants and whether this was an unannounced work-to-rule by the power workers union in advance of fall contract negotiations. Bertrand shut off the TV.

Why didn't the news cover this evening's Ripper murder? Why send a news chopper and vans full of reporters and camera guys but not report it?

Bertrand headed to his fridge for more beer but put the bottle back without opening it. He wanted answers. He wanted to prove to himself that the evening had not been some weird nightmare. There had been a crime scene, and Bertrand decided to go back and check it out, verify the police tape and the reality of a man's brutal murder in the absence of news coverage. He didn't have a gun, but there was a sheathed hunting knife in the basement, and Bertrand hurried to retrieve it. He slid it under his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans. Was he carrying a concealed weapon now? But Bertrand didn't care so much about the law—he had to go out tonight. He stood before his front door for a moment, summoning up his courage before he opened the door. Strange events had caused a strange reaction. He was afraid of the dark.

Bertrand had planned to walk north on his street, but the neighborhood seemed far more alive than it had during the day. A couple kissed passionately under a street light about a stone's throw away, and Bertrand didn't want to disturb their tryst, so he turned south instead. But at the intersection with Armitage, a half-dozen rowdy teenagers threw beer bottles at passing cars and shouted obscenities. Surely someone would call 911, but in the meantime Bertrand knew they were out of control and to be avoided.

In fact, the whole city seemed to hum more than usual for a quiet summer night, and the traffic noise of fast engines, car horns, booming music and distant sirens all blended together. Distant shouts mingled, some just raucous, like those of the teenagers, but others sounded frightened, maybe even like distant screams.

Time to be invisible. Time to do the unexpected. Bertrand crossed to Needleman's house, surprised that someone had set a
For Sale
sign on the front lawn and replaced the screen door. Needleman had heirs? Bertrand couldn't recall Needleman having any visitors from friends or family. The front door proved to be unlocked, perhaps because the mysterious heirs didn't have the key and had correctly judged that there was nothing worth stealing. Bertrand crossed through the house quickly, relying on moonlight and his knowledge of the geography of his own house, the mirror of Needleman's, to guide his steps.

The back screen door had not been repaired, so Bertrand opened it slowly, careful not to dislodge the remaining shards of glass and announce his presence. To whom? Bertrand eased the door closed behind him and walked down the steps and stood under the 'L' tracks. The weak street light in the alley on the far side of the tracks did little to illuminate under the 'L,' thus leaving Bertrand in darkness. He was invisible. Now if he could just be silent.

He headed north, weaving a path around cars parked under the 'L', slipping briefly into the alley whenever his way was impeded by a fence, but returning to travel under the 'L' as soon as possible. A train roared overhead, allowing him to run, the slap of his running shoes buried by the noise of wind, steel wheels and electric motors. He slowed back to a stealthy walk after it passed. Only once, when a window clicked open in one of the houses that backed onto the 'L', did Bertrand wonder if he'd lost his mind. What if someone saw him skulking along like this? Would they think he was crazy or worse, a criminal?

But Bertrand felt safe under the tracks, off the main routes and invisible from prying eyes—dangerous eyes. He remembered the words of the young officer, Gonsalves: "We can't protect you anymore." If teenagers could drink beer in public and throw the bottles at passing cars with impunity, he was certainly correct. There was a breath of anarchy in the summer air.

When Bertrand reached Webster, he had to turn right to get back to the crime scene, and that meant he had to walk a short distance on the sidewalk like a normal person. He had walked only a few paces along Webster when he was presented with the first puzzle: the street was clear and open for traffic. Where were the police cars and the news vans? Okay, maybe the news people had moved on to more exciting crime scenes, but shouldn't there be at least one police car parked on the street, keeping an eye on the crime scene while it was processed?

But the street was empty, and the parked cars sat waiting for morning and their owners. No police cruiser lurked among them. It got stranger as he approached the house: it was dark. Where was the crime-scene tape? A square sign on the front lawn caught Bertrand's attention, and he hurried forward because he couldn't believe what he saw, until he was close enough that even in the streetlights he could read it:
For Sale
.

"What the—" Bertrand let his breath out in a gush. Just like Needleman's, only there couldn't have been time to alert the next of kin, contact a real estate agent and list the house, even if the police had somehow processed the crime scene in record time. Bertrand slowed to a stop in front of the house, but he didn't want to linger until someone came along and noticed his bizarre interest.

What about the back door?

Bertrand opened the latch of the gate and made his way to the brick wall, scaling it just as awkwardly as before, even though he didn't have to rush this time. He crept along to the backyard, staying close to the wall of the house to hide in its shadow. Was he out of his mind? What would someone think if they saw him, a fat computer nerd creeping along in the dark? Would they assume he was a thief or just plain high?

He peeked around the corner, expecting to see crime-scene tape and perhaps a bored police officer guarding the broken window, but the deck was empty. Only the two chairs that no longer tipped against the patio table—the ones he and Joyce had occupied—proved to him that he had been there just a couple of hours ago. He moved into the backyard proper, climbing the steps to the deck in disbelief. A new sliding glass door now sealed the back of the house.

Who had paid for that and how had they found a company willing to come out so quickly, so late at night? He tried to peer through the new window, but the heavy drapes were drawn and the house was dark. Was there still blood on the floor?

Bertrand considered calling Detective Sinclair, considered asking him why the police were hiding the fact that this house was a crime scene. But what would the man say?
Can't talk about an on-going investigation
.

Bertrand went out of the yard the way he'd gone in, scrambling over the brick wall, but he just couldn't go home. He had to confirm that this hadn't all been a twisted nightmare. He didn't have Joyce's number, or he would have called her to ensure he hadn't lost his mind. But even if he did call her, what would he say? Do you remember that guy with the chunk of his throat cut out? His house is for sale—maybe it'll be a good deal after the blood is cleaned from the floor.

The neighbor's house presented an option, but he was unsure about ringing the doorbell of a man who had presented a shotgun earlier, for no apparent reason. Yet, the man had seemed more terrified than crazy. Perhaps he had seen the murderer. Had he already talked to the police?

Bertrand walked slowly up the front steps to the clapboard house, summoning the courage to press the button under an intercom speaker. Odd for a house to have one like this, and it looked brand-new.