The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (18 page)

Tevy glanced up at the angle of the sun through the stained-glass windows before he headed for the stairs to the basement. “We’ve got nine miles to go in about an hour and a half. It’ll be running the whole time. You any good at running?”

“I’m good.”

He led her down to the common room and was delighted to find Elliot and Amanda chatting on the couch. They looked cozy, and Tevy had to repress a surge of jealousy, reminding himself that it was a sin.

“Perfect,” he said. “I’m going on a run for Bobs. Looking for two volunteers.”

Elliot practically leapt off the couch. “Finally, some action. I don’t think the general likes me very much, because she’s given me shit all to do since you left. Whoops!” he covered his mouth and feigned horror. “I used one of the words.”

“I’m fast.” Amanda stood and met Tevy’s eyes with her own, a challenge. “But why don’t we take the bikes? Elliot and I’ve got a new shortcut out of the cantonment.”

Tevy wondered what else she and Elliot had been up to while he’d been up north. He pushed that thought down as unproductive. Stay with mission. “Let’s go load up, then. Emile’s supposed to give us whatever we want.”

“Wow!” said Elliot. “We are fucked.” Again he held his hand over his mouth in mock horror. “Dear, dear me,” he said in a good imitation of Helen. “Who is that foul-mouthed boy?”

“Don’t mind him,” Tevy said to Kayla. “He always jokes before a raid. Let’s go.”

He led them through the opening in the office dividers and into the boys’ dorm, almost every square foot of space taken up by cots or beds, all crammed together to allow for the maximum number of children. Beyond that a set of stairs ran down to the boiler room, now useless since the natural-gas-fired boiler had no source of fuel. Emile still talked about converting it to coal and rigging the boiler to generate electricity, too, so that the pump motors for the heating system could work. It took Tevy a few years of listening to Emile’s drunken dreams before he understood that it was never going to happen. Emile didn’t have the knowledge or the coal to make it happen.

But the old boiler room did make a great armory and gun shop, one Elliot vowed to take over when Emile got too old to keep it going. Tevy whistled as he hurried down the metal-grate stairs into the bowels of the boiler room. One barred window, high up on the wall even though it was below grade outside, filtered light into the room. Down at a desk in the corner, Emile sat cleaning a handgun with a dark rag. But that wasn’t what had caught Tevy by surprise.

“When did all this get here?’ he asked Elliot. Stacks of wooden and metal boxes filled every available space around the boiler until the furnace itself was lost to sight. Tevy only knew it was there from memory. Guns lined the wall above Emile’s desk and more ran along the stone wall under the stairs.

“Just in time.” Emile looked up from his work and gave a rosy-cheeked smile, one that would have fit Santa if he had a black beard and you caught him drunk in his basement off-season. “I heard you was back.”

Tevy stood in the only open space in the basement, near Emile’s old desk, and turned in a circle with his arms out, waving at the ammunition. “So the colonel finally came through.”

Emile stood and gave Tevy a back-pounding drunken hug, almost unbalancing them both before he pulled back to study him, one hand still on Tevy’s shoulder, Emile’s hooch breath soaking the air around them. “I think you’ve grown. In just a couple of weeks, I think you’ve grown.”

“Sorry to rush,” Tevy said. “But we’re on a run and Bobs said we could load up.”

Emile waved an expansive arm at the shelving near his desk. “For once I can say take whatever you want. I got word this afternoon.” The shelves held row after row of plastic bins, all neatly labeled with black marker on white tape: 9mm, .38, etc. Tevy hurried to the 9mm bin and started stuffing boxes of cartridges into the pockets of his vest. The others crowded around too, grabbing and clutching as if they were a pack of wolves fighting over a corpse. Tevy switched to the 12-gauge bin to load up for his Winchester.

“You kids want a drink before you head out?” Emile held up an old wine bottle, but the fumes were his hooch.

Elliot looked to Tevy hopefully. “It might steady our shot,” he said.

“Maybe,” said Tevy, “but we’re not going to the target range. I need you clear-headed.”

Elliot started reaching for the bottle anyway, but Emile pulled it back. “Tevy’s right and he’s your captain.”

“And he’s no fun.”

“Thanks, Emile. I got lots to tell you when I get back.” Tevy led the way up the stairs and out the side door to the street. They had only just started for the field when a dark-haired man walking along the wall of the church caught Tevy’s attention. It was Radu, the Romanian who ended up stuck at St. John’s at the end, the guy who fought so well beside he and Kayla that first night on the road.

“Hey, Rad!” Tevy called. “Up for some fun?”

Radu didn’t take a second to decide. “Yes,” he said. “This would be very good. It’s already quite boring here, and I’m very tired of the sitting.”

Elliot cast a suspicious glare. “He sounds like Vlad.”

“Well he’s not,” Tevy said, before Elliot could put Radu on trial. “And you’re just going to have to trust me that he’s good.”

“Okay, if you say so.” Elliot pointed to Radu’s sidearm and the M16 slung over his shoulder. “At least he’s packing big time. Come on, this way.”

Elliot led the way across the field, the remains of some of the bulldozed houses still evident amongst the weeds: concrete blocks, cement floors, and occasionally gaping basements only half-filled with bricks and smashed two-by-fours. Just after Tevy’s arrival at the church after his parents’ murder, he watched the destruction of the houses on the closest streets, creating a clear field of fire for defenders of St. Mike’s and putting a dangerous obstacle course with little cover as a barrier to rippers.

The Brat Pack, of course, knew a hundred safe routes through this mess of wonton destruction, and on the far side, dozens of bikes—many rusting but some cleaned and greased—waited in a line.

“Which one should I take?” asked Kayla.

Tevy looked up from picking his own ride to make sure she wasn’t joking. “Take any bike. We got hundreds all round the hood. Just make sure it’s a good one, not rusty and all.” He stood up his favorite, a mountain bike with shocks, still gleaming red with only the chrome rusted. It reminded him of the bike he had asked his parents for his tenth birthday, the last year of normal life for him, the bike they had promised to get him when he was a bit older and taller.

He let Elliot and Amanda lead the way, chasing after them, fighting to focus on the ground and not Amanda’s buttocks. Tevy suddenly wondered if Kayla was looking at his backside, a disquieting sensation. Did she like what she saw? Did she care? Why should it matter, since she was so much older? But it did.

Elliot led them to a pile of debris that had been shoved up against the houses of the Meyer Court. The doors, bricks, couches, and wood frames were all that was left of the houses between Cleveland and Meyer, the first block west of St Mike’s. The bulldozed homes now filled Meyer, effectively blocking any wheeled approach or exit—unless you were riding a mountain bike and really knew your way.

A pair of boards, heavy two-by-eights, formed a ramp going ten feet up the side of the pile. Tevy wondered why he hadn’t known about this route, until he noticed the cross boards underneath holding the pair of boards together. Elliot and Amanda must’ve recently constructed this ramp. From a distance it just looked like one more chunk of detritus.

Tevy had to work hard to peddle the bike up the ramp, and it wasn’t until Amanda plunged sharply out of view that he had any idea what to expect. The far side of the pile had a metal garage door on the downhill side, leaning onto the roof of a house that once fronted on Meyer before the pile took up the street. Tevy’s bike slipped sideways on the slick metal before the tires caught purchase on the asphalt shingles. These roofs were long slopes, and Elliot and Amanda had already rushed down, turning onto a garage roof. Tevy turned just in time to see Elliot bounce down onto the roof of a van and from there to the roof of a car parked against it as if it had just been t-boned. From the hood of the car to the ground was an easy jump.

“Look out! Look out!” Kayla’s shout from behind prompted Tevy to let go of the brake. She had crested the top of barrier and was on her way down the garage door, and Tevy was stopped at the bottom. Radu was right behind her, looking wide-eyed and sweating.

Tevy surged down the roof, banking sharply on the garage and taking the impact as he hit first the roof of the van, with the satisfying sound of crunching steel, and then the roof of the car. His heart pounded and he grinned at his fear. One bad turn now and he’d splatter on the pavement. Instead he hit the ground and skidded to a stop by Elliot and Amanda, giving them each high fives.

“That was fantastic,” Tevy shouted, turning to watch first Kayla and then Radu complete the descent with a little less style and a lot more hesitation.

Kayla looked furious. “You people are crazy. One mistake and the mission would have to be scrubbed while we scraped someone’s brains off the pavement.”

Elliot shrugged at Tevy, his meaning clear:
you invited them, you explain
.

Tevy nodded. “Let’s roll.”

A metal gate hung open, and the laneway it provided between the townhouses was their route to the next street over, where Elliot turned right to peddle fast for Eugene Street. It was at the intersection that Tevy pointed east and shouted over his shoulder to Kayla, “That’s why.”

Hundreds of people pushed through the narrow opening in the stone wall that blocked Eugene, a flow of humanity that was going in one direction: into the cantonment of St. Mike’s, where the high school and the block houses would be refuges against the night and the rippers. Tevy hoped it would be obvious to Kayla that trying to push out through the gate against that mob would have resulted in bruises and lost time, assuming they got out at all before dark.

“What are they doing?” Kayla rode with Tevy now that they had a clear street with only a few humans hurrying in the opposite direction, many of them on their own bikes.

“They’re going home.” Tevy pointed at the sun, which hung low on the horizon. “Isn’t it like that at St. John’s? Out to forage in the morning and rush the hell back before dark?”

“I don’t know,” said Kayla. “We don’t have so many people, I guess. I’ve never seen a crush at the gate anyway.”

“Welcome to the big city.”

They had no breath for talking now, though, as they peddled hard to keep up with Elliot, who seemed to feel he was a tour guide as well as the point man. He shouted things like, “It’s down that way to Bertrand Allan’s old house,” and later, “I lived up there.” When they went under a rusting metal bridge he pointed up and called, his voice echoing, “That was the ‘L’ train line. The brown line.”

Tevy wondered what the city looked like to Kayla. The cars rusting on either side, many parked as if their owners might return one day. The Old Town storefronts increasingly gave way to late-twentieth-century plazas with parking lots fronting the street instead of stores. The windows had years of grime to prove that not enough people were left even to smash them, although a few were missing. He and Elliot had taken out their share with rocks until Bobs caught them and told them to stop. “Glass might be valuable one day,” she had said. “The rippers sure don’t like it.”

Under the Kennedy Expressway, they all whooped and hollered, the echoes off the concrete far better than under the ‘L.’ Now they were on a four-lane road, again cutting northwest at a sharp angle through the rest of the city’s organized east-west roads.

Elliot loved to yell things like, “Hey, someone’s parking in the bike lane,” pointing to an SUV on flat tires at the side of the road. Tevy had forgotten that those white lines and painted symbols of a cyclist ever meant something. They always rode right down the center of any street, keeping a wary eye to each side in case some ripper trap was set up near a building to snare them or damage their bikes to make them easier prey after dark.

They neared the Harrison High School, one of Tevy’s favorite buildings along the way because he would have been a student there if the rippers hadn’t destroyed his world. The building consisted of three large wings surrounding a grassy quadrangle. A low metal fence bordering the street made up the forth side of the quad. The wing closest to them looked more like a church than a school, with tall windows and a peaked roof of red tile. The orange brick of the school had stayed remarkably pristine, perhaps because there was little car exhaust to dull it. Tevy sometimes came over to walk the dim halls or through the quad, imagining what it would have been like to attend to this school. This would be his graduation year, and he’d heard that it would’ve been three seasons of school festivities and drunken parties, culminating in a summer of debauchery at lake houses and campsites.

But just as they neared the first wing, Elliot turned back to shout again, but not as a tour guide. “Tev, someone’s being clearing for gunfire. Uh-oh.”

Now he pointed to the ground floor windows of the high school, newly bricked in and sealed from the sun. The quad that Tevy sometimes walked had sprouted a lot of young saplings over the last seven years, but they had all been slashed down and left to wither and die, their new spring leaves already brown, proving that this change happened recently.

They were looking at a new ripper fortress, the first that Tevy had seen north of the Merchandise Mart, and far into Loyalist territory.

Elliot veered away, riding on the opposite sidewalk and close to an older building, a two-story brick affair from early twentieth-century Chicago, the shops clearly abandoned long before the rippers, overtaken by economic depression rather than the ripper apocalypse. Amanda and Tevy followed, even though keeping distance from this new fortress didn’t really matter. The rippers couldn’t look outside, not yet, because it was still half an hour from sunset.