“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.
Something dropped from the roof of the building and draped over Elliot, catching up his bike and tossing him off. Amanda ran into him, and the two crashed to the ground. Tevy braked hard, but the back brake on the bike failed while the front brake pulled the bike up short, tossing Tevy far over the handles and onto the tangled pile that was Amanda, Elliot, their bikes and the heavy net. Something, perhaps a handle bar, punched hard into his back, knocking the wind from him and sending waves of pain through his body. Had he broken a rib? Shouts and screams brought him back to the present. The net over Elliot warned Tevy that this was no accident. Someone threw it. Not a ripper, because it was before sunset. A human. A traitor.
A boot kicked Tevy in the ribs on his left side. He rolled frantically to get away.
“Stay down, Reb.” It was an older man’s voice, a rough man with a drawl that wasn’t from Chicago. “If I bash your brains in, an evolved can still have you for dinner before you die. We don’t need you to be thinking.”
But they did need him alive. The traitors couldn’t shoot him for fear of losing the very blood they were trying to get for their masters. That meant he didn’t have to do what they said. When the boot appeared close, the man standing over him with the club, Tevy moved, turning his Glock and firing straight through the bottom of the holster and into the boot.
The man screamed and Tevy rolled farther, turning his roll into a crouch and standing while on the move, the pain from his ribs minor compared to the panic of the moment. Elliot, still tangled in a net, fought and screamed, and his M16 was yanked from him by one of the traitors. There were easily half a dozen of them. Amanda wrestled with one now, a big brute of a man with a gray beard and a mean laugh, as he fought to pin her to the ground. Radu was also caught in a net and surrounded by several, but Kayla was free, a bloody knife in one hand while she kicked the shreds of a net off her right foot. On the ground beside her a man held his stomach, gasping and struggling to hold in the blood.
“Shoot!” Kayla shouted at Tevy.
He drew the Glock and pulled the trigger, but his aim was high, going over the heads of several of the men, but it had the desired effect: except for the ones fighting with Radu, they all turned on Tevy, weapons aimed.
“Don’t shoot him!” shouted one man.
Tevy ran up the street, cutting an arc toward the sidewalk so that he would be moving but not going farther away. Kayla yanked her Uzi free of the net and fired at the men with single shots. The brute over Amanda gasped and fell on her. Elliot’s knife slashed at his net. Several men shot at Tevy, and his muscles stiffened, expecting the impacts that didn’t come, because he was too fast. But being a moving target cuts both ways. He shot wildly in their direction as he ran, but he fired high, not wanting to hit Kayla by accident.
She was the real threat to the traitors. Three men died from her bullets before the others realized that Tevy was not the one killing them. They turned on her now, but it was too late. Elliot was free, retrieving his massive Ruger from the sidewalk near his bike and firing with deafening explosions, his feet planted far apart to help him keep his balance from the recoil of the heavy revolver. Amanda lunged from under the dead brute, her vest coated in his blood. She had drawn her sidearm in the process and shot the man closest to her through the head.
Tevy stopped and leaned against the brick of the building, breathing deeply, as if he’d just finished a hundred-yard dash rather than three car lengths. He took aim at the only traitors still standing, the ones behind Kayla, who now ran across the road carrying a netted and limp Radu. But it was too late. Tevy couldn’t shoot without fear of hitting Radu.
“Shoot, for fuck’s sakes!” Kayla dropped the clip out of her Uzi and pulled a fresh clip from a vest pocket. “Shoot, Goddamn it!”
Now Tevy understood the danger. The nearest door to the high school stood wide open, and other humans waited in the entrance, guns drawn but not firing. Elliot and Amanda opened fire, and Tevy fired another high shot, trying to scare them into stopping by hitting the brick a
bove the door. But they weren’t cowed into surrendering. He should shoot one of them to make them drop Radu, but Bishop Alvarez had always stressed that “Thou Shalt not Kill” meant that you must never kill humans or you would go to hell. Tevy feared hell. He had killed rippers who were down there, had sent them to their eternal hell. If he committed a mortal sin, if he killed uninfected humans, even if they were traitors, he would meet his victims in hell, and he feared the welcoming committee.
He had to find another way to save Radu. But before Tevy could run after them, before he could think, the door to the school slammed shut, locking out the sunlight and locking Radu in with the traitors and their ripper masters. Tevy suddenly knew he had made the wrong decision, knew he should have murdered humans and risked hell to save Radu. He ran for the school, promising to himself that he wouldn’t hold back this time, that he would murder every human and ripper between himself and Radu.
Thirteen - The Ericsians
Kayla wanted to scream and shout and shoot, but she knew immediately that it was to no avail. Radu was lost, maybe dying this very moment. Hopefully dying this very moment, because he knew too many of the secrets of St. John’s, but hopefully not about the back door. That was information she didn’t want to rippers to use to assault her home.
Tevy charged across the street, firing wildly at the metal doors, obviously bent on a frontal assault on a fortified position. Joyce warned her about this last week, apparently having assessed Tevy during their few engagements with the rippers: “I know his type. He’s brave as all get out, but he’ll charge without thinking. You have to think for both of you.”
“Stop!” Kayla shouted it over and over, chasing after him across the street, trying to check for movement among the traitor bodies at the same time.
Tevy was at the door, pounding and shouting, but thankfully the red-headed kid helped her pull him to the side before return fire punched outbound holes in the doors. The three of them tumbled into the long grass of the quad, and Kayla sat up quickly, her Uzi aiming for the door in case the traitors sortied out to try to capture them.
“We have to go get him before they bleed him out!” Tevy shouted while the redheaded kid held him down.
Kayla let her anger rise because she needed it now to make him understand.
“Stop it, you stupid moron! If we could have brought the traitors down before they reached the doors maybe we could have saved him, but it’s way too frigging late now. They’re bleeding him to death as I speak, and going in there will be our own useless deaths.”
Tevy stopped struggling, and Kayla almost regretted the harshness of her tone.
“But he was your friend,” Tevy said.
Kayla fired a bullet into the grass near him in her fury. “You’re fucking right.” She would grieve later. She would weep later. “He was my friend, but use your thick head. It’s about fifteen minutes to sunset. Why do you think all those traitors are hiding in there right now and not coming for us again? Because the rippers will be pouring out of this place in minutes. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
Across the street a man screamed, a horrible cry that cut wetly off. Amanda stood over him, a bloody knife in one hand, holding up his head by the hair. She had just slashed his throat and blood pumped onto the pavement. Amanda looked up at them, her face impassive as if she were simply taking out the garbage.
Kayla nodded. “Quick, Tevy, and you, dude,” she pointed to redhead. “We’ve got to bleed these guys out and get on our bikes. Move before they get the idea to try and wing us.”
She ran across the street hoping the others would have the sense to follow. Amanda had already moved on to the next body, pulling back the head and slashing the throat, but very little blood spilled, this one obviously already dead.
Kayla grabbed a handful of long gray hair of a skinny man lying face down and yanked back his head. He groaned as she pulled her knife from her belt, but she reminded herself that this man would have handed her to the rippers to have her throat slashed for feeding. She hauled the blade across his throat, pulling up strongly to ensure it bit deep. Blood sprayed onto the pavement. The man never regained consciousness enough to scream.
“That’s all of them,” said Amanda. “Guaranteed nothing left for the rippers.”
“Good idea.” Kayla didn’t have time to determine if Amanda was in shock, but the emotionless expression was worth noting. Either she was as cool as a cucumber or she had totally lost it.
Amanda looked past Kayla, and thankfully a tremble of her lip proved that she there were emotions fighting inside her. “You okay, Elliot?”
That was the redheaded kid’s name. Kayla now remembered Tevy shouting introductions as they rode away from St. Mike’s, but while navigating that crazy pile of crap she had missed the name. She wouldn’t forget again. Elliot had been helpful with Tevy, had taken her side and kept his head. He was dependable.
Elliot had just finished freeing his bike from the net, and he took a second to give her a quick thumbs up. He had already retrieved his M16 and slung it back over his shoulder. His Ruger was again holstered.
Kayla caught Tevy looking back at the high school, the last rays of the sun reflecting orange from the second floor windows. “Tevy!” Her shout made him start. “You with me? I heard you tell Bobs that you never let her down. Is that true?” She had to get him focused on the mission and not a suicidal attempt at rescue.
He nodded, giving her one angry glance before yanking his bike from the ground.
Kayla didn’t take it personally. He could be angry at the rippers, or himself, and even if he was angry with her, well, you need to accept that you can’t make everyone happy when you’re a leader. The mission was more important.
She hadn’t intended to take over this little group, but Joyce was right: Tevy was a good fighter, but you wouldn’t want him leading you into battle. By sunset Kayla knew she was in command.
*
The campus of Wright College looked so normal at first that Kayla could almost believe she could walk through the doors and find students at night classes and profs in their offices. It was a modern campus like Atherley, with the buildings constructed in the late twentieth century, built to receive design awards. She could imagine them filming Star Trek here when they needed an exterior Star Fleet Academy set.
But closer inspection revealed that this was not the old world. The expansive lawns weren’t mowed, they were sowed with rows of crops, perhaps new corn, although it was hard to tell in the dark. The lights shining from the lower floors came in neat rows—gun slots. In the dark she couldn’t tell for sure, but Kayla guessed that all the ground-floor windows had been bricked-in back in the days of Vlad the Scourge.
Even the second floor windows looked smaller than the architecture would suggest, and they reminded Kayla more of the shape of windows on a subway train frozen in place. The light looked dim compared to what the college must’ve once boasted. The occupiers either had only a few bulbs connected to a small generator or they relied on oil lamps and candles. The yellow suggested kerosene lamplight.
“How do we get in without getting shot?” she asked of Tevy.
The four of them had dumped their bikes in the backyard of a bungalow. They now stood close to the vinyl siding of the little house across the street, although it was so dark they could probably have stood in the open and been invisible. The moon had waned to a crescent, and in couple of more nights there would be no moon. A good time for rippers.
Tevy stepped forward to look up and down the street, a four-lane road that had been kept clear of weeds and saplings. “That’s mined.” He pointed to the long grass on the strip between the street and the sidewalk, the only uncultivated space on the campus. “Leaves us no choice but one of the entrances, but I think we might be better off to wait for a patrol. Just jogging up with all our weapons could get us shot pretty damn fast.”
Suddenly, Tevy pushed them back against the house, pulling his shotgun off his back and handing
it to Elliot, followed by his sidearm his vest and shirt, and, to Kayla’s horror, the rest of his clothes. Apparently he didn’t wear underwear and lacked any modesty. Her cheeks burned in the dark and she briefly looked away, but she had to know what he was doing, so she fixed her eyes on his face.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked in a whisper.
“There’s a patrol coming.” Tevy pointed down the street. “Can you hear it?”
Kayla listened carefully and picked up on the patter of feet in running shoes, trotting up the center of the street from the south.
“I’m going to meet them. If it turns out they’re rippers or traitors, then cover me and I’ll get my butt back here.”
Kayla considered stopping him, but that would mean looking at him, and even with this weak moonlight she might find herself glancing down and worse, get caught checking him out. Amanda and Elliot seemed oblivious to his nudity, and that made Kayla wonder what it was like to grow up in a church basement.
Tevy walked out into the street with his hands on his head, a slim figure of white in the moonlight, practically an ethereal spirit. Kayla watched as he knelt in the middle of the street facing the sound of the patter of shoes, now occasionally pausing as someone whispered commands.
“How do we know they’re Ericsians?” Kayla asked of Elliot, but Amanda beat him to the answer.
“The first thing they’ll say is ‘The 1000 Live On.’ It’s a heretic thing.”
“Heretic?”
Amanda shrugged, but her concentration stayed on the road, focusing down her gun sight in the direction of Tevy, waiting for targets to arrive. “They aren’t Catholic or Muslim or Jewish, so they’re heretics from some religion.”
An internal shiver unsettled Kayla. Did Joyce and Jeff know that this is how the Ericsians were perceived in Chicago? Did anyone from St. John’s know? She would go to Joyce first thing tomorrow and warn her that people should keep their mouths shut, shouldn’t talk about the 1000 Souls. Even she would have to pretend she knew nothing of the Ericsians.
The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse Page 15