“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.”
She buried the frustration that this was a hopeless effort and walked to the nearest machinegun nest. The two men looked up expectantly. “You guys, take your gun and get into that tower.” Kayla pointed to the little bridge tower. “Stay on the ground floor so that they can’t shoot through the roof at you so easy.” She hurried over to the other nest and ordered them to pull back fifty feet so that their position was obscured by the overhead train tracks.
“Tevy, Elliot.” Kayla pointed north across the river at the Merchandise Mart and the office tower. “Can you guys each pick a building and organize some guns up about six floors in those buildings. The gunners should be watching these office towers,” she said, here waving back to the south side of Wacker, “for traitors or rippers. This is going to be a hot wall.”
Kayla turned back to Wacker after they left and walked across the street under the ‘L’ tracks. Her intention was to check the ground-level windows of the stores to see if she could set up a crossfire for troops coming down Wells Street. The decision saved her life.
The scream of the artillery shell and the explosion of its impact came together and continued to echo down the street. Kayla found herself on the pavement, but whether she was thrown there by the explosion or dived for cover she couldn’t remember. The second round came a full minute later, just as she was trying to get her muscles to move and pick her up. This explosion was oddly muffled, as if someone had stuffed cotton balls into her ears.
The shell hit the far side of the bridge, and the whole structure sagged toward the river, like a giant turning in its sleep and settling lower. Kayla’s brain now worked faster than her muscles. They were targeting the bridge. The traitors were going to destroy the bridge, and Kayla was on the wrong side of the river.
She forced herself to run for the bridge tower, the gunners inside it wide-eyed but still manning their gun. “Get back across the bridge,” she yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”
They didn’t need to be told twice. The men in the other nest were dead, tossed about like unwanted dolls, their bodies riddled with shrapnel and a hole in the metal deck only a few car lengths from them showing where the shell had struck.
Kayla was about to run across the bridge with her gunners when she remembered the timing. “Wait! Wait! Wait!” she yelled, pulling one man to a stop. Sure enough, another shot hit the far side of the bridge. They needed a full minute to reload. This was definitely their target, and some of the ‘L’ line collapsed through to the deck.
“Now, run!”
They ran but they didn’t make it. Whether there was a second gun or the traitors were getting faster at reloading, another shot hit the bridge abutment on the northeast side. The whole bridge tipped to Kayla’s right, twisting and bending steel, because the south side still held while the north side collapsed. Kayla lost her footing on the deck and slammed her head into an I beam. She tumbled down to the sidewalk and against the handrail, for a moment nearly going over it into the river. The bridge had twisted over so far that the rail was canted at a sharp angle.
She hung on for a moment, blood in her eyes and her skull pounding from the impact. Another shell struck the bridge, and it gave a metallic groan and sank closer to the river.
Suddenly, a hand caught hers and someone heaved her to her feet, one foot braced on the handrail and another on the sidewalk. Tevy’s face filled her field of vision, blood smearing his cheeks and forehead, and his eyes wild.
“Come on!” The cotton in Kayla’s ears muffled his shout.
“What are you doing here, you fucking moron?” She tried to shout, but her vocal cords didn’t seem to work because it sounded more like a whisper. “Saving me makes no tactical sense. We’ll both die now.”
“I won’t live without you,” shouted Tevy.
What the hell did that mean?
Another shell slammed into the bridge and they both fell into the river.
As the water closed over her head, cold and refreshing for a second, Kayla discovered that her arms and legs weren’t responding to commands, and she sank toward the muck.
Twenty-Three - The Truth
Kayla remembered the hands grabbing hers, feet kicking, bodies on either side of her pulling her up to the surface. Elliot’s hair was red again, washed clean of the concrete dust by the river, plastered against his head, his particle mask hanging forgotten around his neck. Tevy’s cuts were washed clean of their masking blood, and livid gashes on his forehead and cheeks looked likely to form permanent scars.
Her arms and legs began to respond to commands, and she kicked and splashed to the shore as far from the bridge as she could manage. Several times she sank, but Tevy and Elliot always pulled her back to the surface. Others helped drag them out of the water, even though the artillery rounds kept plowing into the bridge. She never lost consciousness, although her head throbbed.
No one would hear of her going back into the Merchandise Mart, and Tevy rode with her in the back of a pickup truck to Emile’s blockhouse, where a doctor visited her in a top floor room. He was a little man who clicked his tongue as if it were dry or he disapproved—she couldn’t tell which—while he took her pulse, her blood pressure, and her temperature. He declared she had a mild concussion and proscribed bed rest. She asked for news of the battle, but instead he gave her a glass of water and shut the door.
Tevy visited at dawn. The doctor had stitched the gashes in his forehead and cheek. He spoke of the situation, of how Joyce had taken command of the Mart and the Ericsians, how she had ordered the blocked windows on the south side to stay that way to protect against gunfire from across the river. The artillery had stopped not long after the bridge collapsed, but the water in the river was low and most of the ‘L’ train deck was still above water—certainly nothing anyone could drive a vehicle across, but something Tevy was sure troops could cross.
Kayla listened clinically, detached and professional, but her emotions were a mess. She wanted to touch him. She wanted him to hold her while she wept. She wanted to ask him what he meant when he had shouted that he wouldn’t live without her. Was that just some excited utterance, some lame thing he’d heard in a movie? Some excuse not to leave her to drown?
Instead, she asked military questions. Were any of the other bridges destroyed by the rippers? Yes, four besides the Wells St. Bridge. With La Salle stuck open, that left four crossings to the north. Bobs took that as proof that the rippers were still planning an offensive and Gonsalves and Chen were setting up kill zones. Control of the open bridges had been ceded to the rippers, although their human troops did little to protect them during the daylight hours.
Tevy had to get some sleep, because he would go on a patrol tonight, and Kayla was left to debate what was going on in her head. She cleaned her Uzi, which had stayed with her thanks to the strap. In fact, it and the ammo in her vest pockets had nearly been her death, weighing her down toward the riverbed. But for Tevy and Elliot, she would be dead and rotting in the muck.
She had lunch with Margaret, who had her blonde hair in pigtails again and warmed up to Kayla, chatting contentedly about some of the friends she’d made at St. Mike’s. She had joined Helen’s reading and writing classes. Others from St. John’s not based in the Mart were also at lunch, and several smiled at Margaret’s cuteness, and others winked at Kayla as she pretended to be mom whenever someone from St. Mike’s was around.
Later, Emile stopped by to see Kayla, and she offered to give up her closet of a room to someone else, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Besides, with so many of Joyce’s Raiders now based in the Mart, there was room to spare for once. Dinner was served early in what was the little dining room of the blockhouse, with people eating chicken and last year’s potatoes in shifts. Kayla helped some women from St. Mike’s wash the dish
es in an old bathtub out behind the house. The stink of the outhouse not far away spoke of the serious summer heat that now descended on the city.
One of the dishwashers, a much older woman, wore the lightest summer dress, but she gave Kayla a bikini. “These are great in the heat if you stay out of the sun.”
Kayla had loved wearing a bikini in the summer in high school. She had loved the way boys’ eyes tracked her lithe body when she walked along the beach or the poolside, but these days it just seemed obscene. The doctor condemned her to one more night of bed rest, however, so she retired to her stifling room and put on the bottoms but not the top. She now guessed that Emile wasn’t just being nice: no one wanted the top-floor room on a sweaty day.
She was standing near the window when there was a knock at the door. The window was high enough and she stayed back enough that she knew no one could see her from the ground. All she had been trying to do was get a sense of where the gunfire she could hear came from, the sort of lazy back and forth that indicated sniping but not battle.
A light cotton blouse, nearly transparent, hung over the back of a chair and she snatched it and tossed it on lest someone walk in without waiting for her reply. There was no time for a bra.
“Who is it?” she called as she did up the buttons. She stopped two from the top, leaving her cleavage a little exposed in the heat.
“Tevy.”
She debated making him wait so that she could get more appropriately dressed, and yet part of her wanted to know more about him. Would his eyes track her? Did he have any physical desire for her? The room was gloomy enough in the sunset that she wouldn’t to feel too naked.
The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse Page 25