The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (16 page)

“Yeah, like that.”

“If you got wounded fighting the rippers, we fighters take of our own, share our rations. If you’re old you need your family.”

Kayla wondered what her socialist parents would think of this harsh environment. “What if you don’t have family?”

Tevy shrugged. “I guess you head out of the city and scrounge.”

Radu also looked uncomfortable. “So you have no beggars.”

“No beggars. Bobs says they’d drag us down. Bishop Alvarez wants to set up a monastery though, one that can take in the useless.”

The words burst from her lips before she could stop them or moderate her tone. “Holy fuck, you people are shameless.”

Tevy looked up, surprise showing in his eyes. “What? We’d all be dead if we didn’t stay strong. And they kept all us orphans, didn’t they? A lot of the other churches didn’t, not unless their parents were in their church. I saw other kids scrounging in the early days, kids not from the Brat Pack at St. Mike’s or any other stronghold, kids with nowhere to go. Ripper snacks. Some of them made it, most of them didn’t. We were lucky to have the bishop take us in and watch over us.”

Kayla decided not to fight about this ruthlessness. She craved to know more about how the city still worked. “So who owns that gate we passed. Does everyone take orders from Bobs?”

“We got the biggest following if that’s what you mean.” Tevy looked proud now. “Over a two hundred block houses follow Bobs, more than any other church in the city.”

“But what do the other churches do for food?”

“They either got their own farms or they buy food from us when there’s extra.”

Kayla still couldn’t understand the payment system. “How do you pay without money?”

“Ammo. Bobs will trade a lot of food for ammo. If a church has got no ammo, they can send troops to our army, and then they send their rations, what they don’t eat, back to their families. Or a church can join. St. James joined with us last year.”

“How do they join?” Kayla wanted to return to Barry St. John’s benevolent dictatorship more than ever. This place was simply medieval, and Tevy didn’t even see it. She had to remind herself that he was seven, nearly eight years younger when the world ended. Maybe this just didn’t seem so strange to him.

“Join?” Tevy had finished cleaning the shotgun and put it back in the leather holster. “Simple. Just convert to the Chicago Catholic Church and agree to join Bobs’ army. It’s all good. About twenty churches joined us so far. We’re all Christian, after all.”

“What about Muslims or Jews or the Ericsians.”

Tevy nodded and looked thoughtful for a bit. “Uhm, never thought about it. I just figured they wanted to stay on their own. I mean the Ericsians, they don’t need to join. They’re way organized, maybe even better than us. They got block houses and their own farm country out on the Prairies. I think there’s a lot of them, but they don’t come to Chicago much, only one fort that I know of over at Wright. Used to be a college.”

The bus changed gears, idling down as it pulled onto an off ramp, and suddenly Kayla could see all of Chicago’s downtown, and for just a moment in the bright sun, she could pretend that it was ten years ago, the first time she’d seen those immensely high office buildings shining in the distance. She wanted to believe they were still full of people pushing paper, making phone calls, and tapping away at their keyboards.

But even from this distance, she could tell that the windows were dull with grime, that some were missing, and several buildings had holes with blackened edges from artillery or rockets. Some buildings had the office windows bricked in: ripper strongholds. The Willis Tower rose above all, so high that it looked immune from the destruction, but Kayla knew from Tevy that this was the center of ripper control, deep in the no-go zone. Except that he went. What was that like?

Margaret marched down the aisle of the bus, not like a child running to play, but one sent on a mission. She climbed into Kayla’s lap and gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “Hi, Mommy,” she said very loudly while looking at Tevy to judge his reaction. She leaned in close to Kayla’s ear and whispered, “Mommy told me to say that.”

Kayla could see Joyce and Jeff standing near the front of the bus looking back their way. She wanted to raise her eyebrows and shake her head to indicate that this wasn’t a good idea, but the last thing she needed to do was draw more attention from Tevy. She looked over but he was staring out the window, apparently oblivious to the charade put on for his benefit.

Margaret slipped off Kayla’s lap and headed back up the bus to Joyce, leaving Radu and Kayla to exchange a glance, Radu’s eyes raised high in disbelief. Kayla could tell he knew this wouldn’t fool anyone who could remember their mother, but what about an orphan raised in a pack of kids? The other problem was that too many people were in on the secret. How long before someone from St. John’s made an incautious comment?

“Must’ve been tough.” Tevy’s gaze stayed with the city streets as they rolled by, a retail area before the end, now a lot of smashed windows, the sidewalks liberally sprinkled with crystalline shards.

Kayla wished she understood this strange young man. Sometimes he spoke as if completing a conversation in his own head, one that she was somehow supposed to have been party too. “What?” she asked.

“Being pregnant at the end. Having to fight the rippers with a big belly.” Tevy looked away from the window and met Kayla’s eyes, and she fought to keep the panic from her face. She wasn’t good at lying.

“Oh, my friend Rachel took good care of me.” Kayla rewrote history as best she good, taking Rachel’s experiences from last year and trying to imagine them as her own from eight years ago. “I hated it, though, hated having to stay behind the walls as if I was some fragile princess while everyone else went on ripper raids. That really bummed me out, especially ’cause I was sick just all the time.”

Tevy studied her so closely that Kayla had trouble not blushing. This made her angry and that could help.

“Who was the father?”

Kayla let the anger surface, and it came naturally. “None of your fucking business.” But she thought of Ted, the young Ojibwa man who had saved her life, first by giving her a ride to Sioux Lookout in his battered Jeep, and a second time by insisting on giving her another lift back to Atherley. She often wondered what became of him after he flew with his tribe to the high lakes, and she often caught herself looking across the fields in the early morning as if he might come wandering in to join her at St. John’s. She would take him to be the father of her child if she were ever to have one. In this imaginary world she was building for Tevy, she pretended that she and Ted made the mistake of having a passionate encounter on the couch at his gran’s before they parted forever.

Tevy still frowned at Kayla, but her blush was gone, to be replaced with an angry frown. Surely that would carry the lie? Kayla was spared further scrutiny when the bus pulled up to another medieval-like gate, except that it was constructed with poured concrete rather than stone and anchored at each end by older buildings that might have once been retail stores or early twentieth-century apartments. Now their windows on the ground floor were bricked in, and circular razor wire hung between the first and second floors to make it difficult for rippers to scale the walls.

Radu leaned down so that he could look up through the window as they passed under the wall. “Does this go all the way around?”

Tevy shook his head. “We wish. We just got the main roads like this covered, but everything else on the perimeter is just row houses and whatever got bulldozed. They cleared some good fields of fire around the St. Mike’s cantonment just after I joined the Brat Pack. Rippers can get into Old Town all right, just not with cars. Tanks, though, that’s what I worry about. Some of the streets are just blocked with piles of stuff from the bulldozing. Tanks can climb piles.”

The bus stopped in a large square in front of a gothic church, it’s bell tower rising high. Kayla stepped into the afternoon sunlight, stretching in relief and staring up at the church. It was old world, for sure, but given that it was the center of humans in Chicago, given its huge reputation, she had been expecting something more like St. Peter’s in Rome. This brick edifice, while grand in a regular urban neighborhood, was not as large or imposing. She knew the history from Joyce, that it had been built by German immigrants before the Great Chicago Fire and then rebuilt even better after the fire. Their passion showed in the ornate flourishes, yet the brown brick was local and practical.

Joyce had said that before Vlad it was a twelve hour drive to St. John’s. They had taken nearly a week, although most of that was clearing the highway of ripper roadblocks down to International Falls. There were only a few between there and Duluth, and the closer they came to Chicago, the faster the trip. General Roberts, the leader Tevy called Bobs, had been clearing the way for them.

Kayla looked up in awe at the church, not so much because of the architecture, but because of what St. Mike’s represented. This was the center of resistance to the rippers in the early days of Vlad. This was where Bertrand Allan had planned the Battle of the Mountain. In this square, one of the first riots against ripper police took place, and she recognized it even now from the grainy YouTube videos that she had seen so many years before, back when people were just discovering that the rippers existed, let alone that they had infiltrated the governments first.

On the far side of the square stood the white statue of St. Michael, but near where the buses stopped was a new and larger monument: a tall pillar of stone on top of which sat a stone triangle, the symbol of the mountain and the memorial to Bertrand Allan for his sacrifice for humanity. Kayla stared up at it now, thinking of the man she met in the basement of Atherley College. What did he think of this monument to his passing?

“Better watch your daughter.” Tevy had come to stand beside Kayla and look at the monument, but now he pointed to where Margaret ran ahead of Joyce toward the statue of St. Michael.

“Oh, she’s okay with her aunt Joyce.” But Kayla felt the blush returning to her cheeks. How could she end up having to fake the role of mother? She wasn’t one and wasn’t the least interested in being one.

“You’re very trusting,” Tevy said. “My mother wouldn’t have let me out of her sight for a second in a strange new place.”

“Well, I’m not your mother.”

Tevy shrugged and turned to their bus, which now had its luggage bays open, to retrieve his small pack from the pile before others could start crowding around on the same mission. He had already put his back holster on and stowed his shotgun so that the pistol grip was handy by his shoulder. He turned and stood awkwardly in front of Kayla, as if suffering some internal debate.

“They’ll clear a blockhouse for you guys, maybe Emile’s.” He pointed to a four-story brick building that faced St. Mike’s head on across the square. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

“Wait.” Kayla suddenly didn’t want him to go, and it bothered her. Sure he was cute and all, but he was just a teenager. Why should she be disappointed at no longer having to watch over him, even spy on him.

“Listen,” she said, awkwardly sticking out her hand to shake. “Thanks for your help and all on the way down. You’re a frigging good fighter.”

It was Tevy’s turn to blush, and seeing him look vulnerable somehow pleased Kayla. So he did have emotions, this strange, serious, and underfed man.

“So are you—a damn good fighter.” He started to turn away but then stopped, his eyes up on the monument and his top teeth coming out to bit at his lower lip while he thought.

Kayla held her breath, for she sensed that he had something very important to tell her, something she should hear, and that he needed a moment to find the words.

“You’re a really great fighter,” he said again, turning his blue eyes to meet her gaze. “But you’re a lousy liar.”

Tevy ran down the stairs to the church basement, desperately hoping to find some of the Brat Pack around. He wasn’t disappointed. He’d hardly rounded the corner into the common area when a shout went up from Elliot.

“There he is!”

A bunch of the smaller children, the five- to ten-year olds, had been sitting in a circle on the gray carpet, one he and Elliot had proudly liberated from a Home Depot several years before and lugged back to cover the concrete floor in the common area. Subsequent raids carpeted the whole basement, even the dorms. Tevy hardly had time to take in the room, the heavy wood shutters open to let in the light, with the bars throwing shadows across the floor. The gray office dividers that separated the dorms from the common area had new art on them, indicating that Helen must have found someone to scrounge an art store or a school for fresh paper and paints. Talented children had been busy.

The younger children now charged Tevy, and he swung several into the air to squeals of delight. Some of the older kids, the ten plus, came over to knock knuckles and admire the new shotgun and holster. Elliot came over last, and Tevy had to resist the urge to give him an undignified, back-pounding hug. The unruly red hair, the freckles, and the big grin with the crooked teeth were all such a welcome sight. Tevy settled for a high five and a knuckle knock.

“Dude,” Tevy said as he waded through children, heading for the boys’ dorm and his cot. “Good to see you.”

Elliot grinned and shook his head, putting out a hand to stop him from passing the curtain into the dorm. “You sinner. Didn’t you know we’re not allowed to say ‘dude’ anymore?” Some of the smaller children giggled as if Elliot had made a fart joke.

“What?”

Elliot nodded and couldn’t contain himself. “Should I?”

Several of the older boys nodded, and the children all huddle into a circle around him.

“These are the words we must never say, for fear of angering God.” His smile belied the seriousness of this statement. Elliot began a string of profanity, the usual like the f-word coming first, followed by body parts and combinations—these Bishop Alvarez had punished them for since the formation of the Brat Pack. But then Elliot launch into ones that were new to Tevy: blood, stinking blood, Vald’s blood, Bertrand’s blood, and finally yo and dude.