The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (13 page)

A little flutter of arousal surprised her when she saw him leaning one shoulder on a bus while he stuffed a sandwich into his mouth. Barry had given him a free card for the cafeteria, and Kayla had been surprised to find Tevy there on many occasions over the last five days, usually raving about how much more food there was up here. Rachel’s husband also mentioned that Tevy had taken a long shower every evening, marveling about the hot running water. His hair looked spiky and damp, presumably because he’d just had a farewell shower and toweled quickly before running for the cafeteria.

His shotgun’s pistol grip stuck up over his right shoulder, and Kayla walked past with other people while pretending she hadn’t noticed him, wondering if he would call out, but he didn’t see her go by, because he was staring up at the Keep, apparently in awe.

Kayla turned around and headed back to him in order to get a look from behind at how he had rigged the shotgun. Someone had sewed an unusual holster for it in heavy leather so that he could carry it on his back, ready to draw as fast as a handgun. Her glance went to the Glock at his hip and then his narrow hips and his cute behind in those patched blue jeans. No man had caught her attention this way in years, had made her wonder what it would be like to touch and maybe even hold him, to let her hands wander down to cup those firm buttocks while they embraced.

She shook off this image, for the last thing she needed now was clouded judgment, although the thought of stopping beside him and slipping her arm around his waist teased at the edges of her awareness, thoughts of what it would be like to be a couple, to be casually comfortable with touching.

“Hey,” she said, stopping and crossing her arms under her breasts as if she too just wanted to take one last look up at the black steel and gleaming windows of the Keep. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

Tevy licked the last of his breakfast off his fingers. “It’s a bit weird. It’s like time travel or something, like someone took an old world office building and a chunk of 2014, then just dropped it here in the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s pretty much what happened. It was supposed to be a student residence and built less than a kilometer from campus, but St. John built it over here instead. The administration was all rippers and didn’t really care what he was doing or said. Never came to site meetings, just accepted photos of progress. Never occurred to them that he wasn’t building it where he was supposed to.”

“Weird.”

“Assholes were too busy snacking on my roommates at night to go looking at new construction.”

Tevy picked up the pack at his feet. “You picked out a bus yet?”

Kayla prayed she wasn’t blushing, didn’t show that she was happy that he’d essentially asked to sit with her. It was what Barry wanted, of course, but suddenly she knew that she wanted it, too, wanted to get to know this strange teenager who chased rippers into the woods at night.

“Naw.” Kayla made an effort to sound non-committal, as if this was all no big deal. “I was thinking maybe this heap.” She tilted her head in the general direction of the bus beside them.

“Great, we can sit together.” He tossed his pack into the belly of the bus on top of the pile of luggage that had already been loaded. “I’ll save you a seat.” He headed for the door without looking back.

It was a relaxed maneuver, so confidant, perhaps even arrogant, that Kayla wanted to go to another bus. She never said she’d sit with
him
, just that she’d be on the same bus. The cheek to assume. Yet, she had orders, but what made her angrier was that she did want to sit with him.

She went and got her backpack from where she’d left it lying on the road when Rachel had insisted she hold the baby. It was the same bag she’d packed to go to college, a pack she had hoped she would one day use for a long post-grad trip to Europe. That was never going to happen now. Who knew if it was even possible to get a boat to Europe, and it had been years since she’d seen jet contrails. As she tossed her luggage onto the pile beside Tevy’s, it did occur to her that this was a much more exciting trip than wandering around Europe, photographing churches and drinking at youth hostels.

She gave one last look up at the black tower of the Keep, promising to herself that she would return, and she climbed onto the bus to find Tevy.

Tevy didn’t seem to mind that Kayla didn’t want to talk much about life at the Keep. Instead, as the bus rolled down the highway toward the Mattagami, he chatted about his life, telling her about growing up under St. Mike’s, about the Brat Pack and Chicago. He described the Loop downtown and told her which areas had to be avoided because of flooding after the sewers clogged.

He described his adventures with a matter-of-factness that Kayla found refreshing. He didn’t brag so much as he seemed unaware of how crazy it was that he liked to raid into ripper territory, that he liked to spy and listen to gain advantage. The first half hour to the Mattagami bridge passed quickly, with the only problem being that the usual suspects who tried to get into Kayla’s pants every Saturday night stood in the aisle and hung over the seat. At first she thought they were hanging around for her, and she did sense that sexual tension, but soon it was obvious Tevy’s stories of Chicago were a draw. How many of these guys had ever seen Chicago? Even if they were from there, they were desperate for information as to how it had changed.

It wasn’t long after the river that they had their first halt.

“What is it?” asked Tevy, half standing in an effort to see up the bus, but everyone else stood as well, blocking his view.

Radu, a guy who’d asked Kayla out many times to no avail, stood tall in the aisle. “A truck. A very big truck.” His very slight Romanian accent, somewhere between French and Eastern European, was a little more evident than usual. “It blocks the road, turned on its side.” Kayla knew Radu’s story, for he’d told her many times. He came over from Romania before the end, studying at Lakehead University and hoping to get landed immigrant status in Canada. He was visiting friends at Atherley College when the invitation to go take shelter from the rippers in the Keep had arrived. He accepted, but many times since, he expressed his desire to return to Romania. Some blamed him for Vlad the Scourge, since most believed he was connected somehow to Vlad Tepes, the prince of Wallachia in Romania and the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Many had whispered about Radu’s accent, the same as that of Vlad the Scourge. Kayla liked his thick hair and his sun-darkened complexion that spoke of Roma heritage, but something about his body didn’t attract her, the sense that, while he was slim now, a chubby, lazy man would appear in middle age.

The bus driver’s voice cut above the hubbub. “Taking a break folks. This is a good time to use the forest.”

Tevy sat while they waited for the bus to empty. “Do you we have a bulldozer or something?”

Kayla shook her head. “We’ve got a big tow truck, one that can move big rigs even if it means dragging them. We’ve done this before, you know. For a long time, we tried to keep the highway open but the rippers keep blocking it at night, trying to catch people driving up from away.”

Tevy did know, for a favorite tactic of the rippers in the early days was to get their human slaves to stall cars on the highways, creating huge traffic jams that lasted until dark. The carnage after sunset taught people pretty quickly that it was better to abandon a car and go to ground in someone’s house as far from the road as possible than to wait for the rippers.

The drive continued that way all day: the convoy pausing, the tow truck clearing—in one case a barricade of old-growth trees—and another half hour of driving until the next blockage. By mid-afternoon everyone knew they wouldn’t reach the relative safety of International Falls. People began cleaning and loading guns.

“There can’t be many rippers up here in the forest, can there?” Tevy asked.

Kayla had a hard time not frowning at him. “The forest isn’t the problem. The highway is, and that’s where we’ll be spending the night. Look at the crap they block the road with. They’ve been catching people out here for years, even if it has slowed to a trickle lately. And they’re not deaf. They make their hidey-holes close to the road, and believe me they’ve all heard our buses pass today. Every ripper for forty miles will be coming for us tonight.”

As soon as the bus stopped in the late afternoon, Kayla headed for the luggage bay, deciding she wanted to carry a couple more spare clips for her Glock. The luggage had shifted a fair bit, and she had to toss first one bag and then another out of the way, digging deep to find her backpack. But just as she saw it, the big hockey bag to the right shifted of its own accord. Kayla startled and leapt back, a superstitious dread rising in her gut until the warm sunlight on her back convinced her that it couldn’t be a ripper. But maybe an animal?

She raised her Uzi and leaned forward, intending to prod the bag with the barrel, but then the zipper began to descend, pulled by something or someone in the bag. Kayla stepped back now, ready to shoot. It had been years since she had seen a raccoon, but what other creature could perform this trick? A person could never fit in that hockey bag.

Not a grown person. A little hand appeared when the zipper stuck, and seven-year-old Margaret wiggled halfway out of the bag before she saw the Uzi and stopped to stare at it with a puzzled frown. Her pigtails had come free, perhaps while she was asleep in the bag, and her blonde hair hung in a tangled mess, framing her pale face. She rubbed her eyes and squinted at Kayla. “Are we there yet?” she said. “I have to pee.”

Kayla tried to think. How could she keep Joyce’s daughter a secret from Tevy when the little girl was a stowaway on the bus? How could he ever believe she was really Alison’s daughter when she’d runaway from the Keep to go with Joyce? This was a disaster, but maybe it could be saved if she could rush the little girl to a different bus, keep her away from Tevy’s inquiring mind, the one that liked to know secrets.

She lowered her Uzi and reached for the little girl’s hand, putting a finger to her lips to indicate quiet. “We mustn’t let anyone know you’re here.”

But it was too late. A shadow joined Kayla’s shadow on the luggage, and Tevy said, “Hey, who’s kid?”

Kayla panicked. How could she keep this girl a secret as she’d promised?

Suddenly, inspiration.

“She’s mine.”

Tevy struggled to remember his mother, but the diesel fumes weren’t quite right. It had been gasoline that last night, and thus that rare scent was what he sought when his memory failed. Sometimes he’d find a rusting car and pull off the gas cap to sniff, not just to scavenge, but to aid memory.

Radu stood high in the back of the pickup truck beside a forty-five-gallon drum, sweat dripping from his forehead as his arm worked the pump handle up and down. Tevy kept the hose, which barely reached, from slipping out of the bus’s fuel supply pipe.

Did she have black hair? Tevy took a deep breath of fumes and closed his eyes, searching for that last moment when his mother blew him a kiss before continuing to load her revolver. He focused. He could sense her close, teasing at the edge of his memory, but her face would not conjure, and he had to settle for the memory of her presence rather than her visage. He savored it until Radu interrupted.

“It’s not full yet?”

Tevy tried to see down the tube into the bus’s fuel tank, but that was impossible. “I think you have to pump the whole barrel in.”

But Radu had stopped to wipe his forehead. “But we only drove about six hours. How could it be empty? Is it leaking?”

Tevy let go of the hose and got down on hands and knees on the asphalt to look under the bus. Dark fluid did drip from under the engine, but it was a slow black drip, which Tevy decided must be oil. He stood up and climbed into the back of the truck, pulling his shirt over his head so that he could use it to swat at black flies with his free hand. “My turn.” He took over on the pump.

It turned out Radu had almost finished, for after just a few minutes, he called out, “Stop, stop! It’s full.”

Joyce and Kayla approached, both looking grim and serious, both carrying slung Uzis.

Tevy had tried to get Kayla to talk about herself and the Keep while they were on the bus, but she had been a closed book, and he recognized the signs of painful memories. Some kids in the Brat Pack were okay talking about how their parents died, and Elliot made up endless stories of heroism and adventure, all with bloody endings in which his parents died while killing hundreds of rippers at once. His stories were a favorite on Friday nights. But other Brat Pack kids didn’t want to go there, didn’t even want to talk about how their lives were before the end. For them conversation was reserved for the present and for important things: food, weapons, and killing rippers. If they were post-pubescent like Tevy and Elliot, they might talk about sex.

So Tevy filled the empty air on the bus with chatter about Chicago while Kayla sat there looking grimmer and angrier with him by the mile. He would have stopped talking altogether, but he was sizing up the young men who stood in the bus aisle and in the row ahead to eagerly listen. Who would be useful and who would run at the first gunshot? Only Radu had Tevy’s cautious vote of confidence so far, for he had seemed totally unimpressed with the stories, and he had expressed disbelief at the right places.

Kayla looked up at him now and turned her head away to look at the sunset over the forest, her cheeks blushing as if she’d caught him naked. While Helen and Bishop Alvarez had made it clear that men and women, and boys and girls, should not be unclothed in front of one another, casual glimpses of nudity were common in the basement of the church and often a source of amusement. Tevy wasn’t used to feeling immodest or self-conscious about going topless, especially in summer, but suddenly he wanted to put on his shirt. He knew he was painfully underfed.

Joyce was already speaking before he got the shirt over his head. “You stick with Kayla tonight. Her daughter will be on my bus.”