The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse (4 page)

Kayla nodded, careful to hide her disappointment. Joyce had yet to accept her, and it was only because of Jeff that Kayla was here at all. She had overheard him the morning after the manor house had been lost. “She fights just like you—all angry but clearheaded,” he’d said. “That’s why she should join our ranks and that’s exactly why she bugs you.”

Joyce and Jeff backed away from the ridge and turned south, followed by twenty-five of the raiders, leaving Kayla with Martin and his troops. He checked the angle of the sun, to ensure he wouldn’t be flashing signals at the college, before putting a set of binoculars to his eyes. “How many could be in your college?” he asked Kayla.

“Could be lots. There were three big lecture halls that could hold maybe three hundred each. Profs had their offices on the floors from three up to six, but I doubt there are any up there since the windows are open to the sun. The big problem is the basement: there were labs on two floors below the ground. Then there’s the gym, cafeteria, and meeting place at the bottom of the stairs on the way to R-wing.

“Where’s that wing?”

Kayla pointed to a long, blackened heap beyond the college. “It was over there. It didn’t have concrete walls.”

Martin, still bulky and strong despite middle age and graying hair, looked over from his binoculars and frowned. “Hey sorry, must be hard for you—to see this, I mean. Must bring back some good and bad memories.”

Kayla nodded, wishing she was able to get more sleep last night. Her lower lip came close to quivering, but she turned it to anger. “Bastards.”

Martin looked back through the binoculars. “That’s what I say about the rippers whenever I see the ruins of a McDonald’s. I ran one, you know, back in Chicago. It was a good life.”

Kayla did know but saw no need to comment. She couldn’t imagine what he left behind and how he became such a legendary fighter from such normal, middle-class beginnings.

For the next half hour, they watched the dead college in silence. Nothing stirred but the occasional bird. Finally, Martin gave a low whistle and started working his way down the easiest part of the rocky slope, his thirty troops following. When they reached the valley floor and moved out of the woods, Martin broke into a run. Kayla marveled that such an old guy, at least fifty, could sustain a run for so long. A cramp tore at her side before they were even halfway across the field, but there was no way she’d let them show her up. She did vow, however, to start running the old highway to the Mattagami Bridge and back to get in better shape.

Martin’s troops understood his hand signs, and Kayla struggled to follow along, watching the results more than comprehending the motions. Troops spread north and south along the curve of the college, some with packs beside those who just carried guns. A shaggy man beside Kayla, an older Newfoundlander who she didn’t know well, slipped off his pack and pulled free a hammer and a chunk of C4.

“Stay back there, girlie,” he said, his voice guttural but not unfriendly. He was so skinny he looked rather like a mop with all the hair and beard.

Basil—that was his name, Basil Macintyre or Macintosh or something. He drank with Jeff a lot. He wasn’t treating her like an idiot for nothing, because now he raised the hammer, his eyes on Martin. Basil didn’t want her in the way of his swing.

Martin’s next hand signal was clear: a finger in the air, sharply turned to point at the wall.

Basil slammed the hammer into the concrete block with all his might. It took him three swings to smash into the block, not breaking through, but making enough of a hole on the outside of the block that Kayla could see into the manufactured core of the block below. Other hammers rang out along the wall.

“Now quick, there.” Basil waved her back to the wall, grabbing the C4 and shoving it into the hollow core of the cement block below the one he had broken. He and Martin moved along the wall, reeling out wire as they went and urging Kayla with impatient waves to join them.

“Now’s the time for your Uzi.” Martin put his back to the wall. Kayla and Basil took up similar positions on either side of him.

Kayla let the fear rise as she unslung her Uzi and checked the mag: full clip.

“You okay?” Martin’s question was more of an accusation.

“I’m fucking great.” She chambered a round. He should just fuck off and let her deal with her fear her way. Already she could feel it changing to anger. How dare the rippers murder her family and ruin her life? Now she would make them pay, as she did every time she encountered them in a fight. Like she did the night they lost the manor house, when she thought she would die, when she thought Joyce had miscalculated.

“Kill any ripper that moves in there, but don’t kill our raiders. Watch for armbands.” Martin pointed to the white armband wrapped around his biceps. Kayla had dressed like the raiders for this day: black shirt with a white armband.

Martin moved out from the wall so that he could look up and down, checking the status of his other troops. They must’ve been ready, because he raised his fist to shoulder height and pulled down as if yanking on a rope. He barely had enough time to turn and crouch beside Basil before the explosions ripped out along the wall, sending chucks of concrete block flying out.

The blast dazed Kayla for a moment, but Basil and Martin lunged up immediately and charged along the wall to the new hole, prompting her to run after them, more terrified of being thought useless than she was of any ripper that might be waiting in the college.

The C4 had knocked a hole about four feet in diameter, and Basil widened it as he went through, kicking out a loose block with his boot. Kayla followed close behind, plunging into a world of white dust kicked up by the explosions and now highlighted with the sunlight that streamed through new holes. Shouts and gunfire echoed up down the corridor, and in less than a second she lost Martin and Basil in the white cloud. She ran toward the gunfire.

As the fog thinned, she discovered it was not the light, airy college she remembered. Bones littered either side of the corridor, as if a great battle had taken place years before and no one had survived to bury the dead. Yellow paper drifted in the air, blown off the floor by the blast, perhaps term papers or the rough drafts of some graduate student’s thesis. A stench mixed with the choking scent of concrete dust, a stench that promised that somewhere nearby there were fresher corpses.

A shadow emerged from the fog, a knife in one hand. Kayla aimed the Uzi and let the anger flow, but she was careful to search for a white armband.

“Let me by!” It was a ripper all right, his clothing ragged, his face gaunt.

Kayla fired into the ripper’s chest, one shot straight through the heart. He made a last desperate rush at her, but she sidestepped and tripped him as he passed. She followed up quickly, putting a second shot through the back of his skull as his face struck the floor.

Another figure rushed her, but she recognized Martin and lowered her gun.

“Where are the stairs?” he shouted. Several others rushed to the sound of his voice, and Kayla abruptly found herself in the center of a circle of people.

Before she could shout that she couldn’t see shit, her eyes fell on a small metal sign above a set of double doors: S-316. How long she had struggled to find that lecture hall on her first day, late for her psychology class? The years fell away and she remembered Atherley College before the rippers, the way she sometimes had happy memories of a dead friends. Now she understood why the ripper was trying to get past her.

“Two sets!” Kayla shouted in her excitement. “One is just to the left here, and the other is about two hundred feet that way on the same wall.”

The gunfire had diminished significantly, the rippers running for the basements in order to escape the sunlight, and that meant that Joyce and her other raiders were about to take the full brunt of an attack.

“We have to go after them!” she shouted. “Follow me!”

At first she thought she was running alone, but she heard a shout from Martin and found him beside her as she reached the metal double-doors. They yanked them open together, the hinges creaking but well-used. The light spilling from the main floor illuminated more bones scattered to either side of the stairwell as they charged down, but when they turned the first corner, the darkness closed in and hid both stairs and the obstructions. Kayla slowed in order not to trip, doubting now the wisdom of rushing into the dark, but Martin switched on a Maglite, holding the little flashlight close to his shotgun as he aimed it down the stairs.

The flashlights of Basil and other members of Martin’s troops snapped on. Kayla owned a flashlight but didn’t have any working batteries, because they were way too expensive. Now she vowed to find a way to pay. Her eyes couldn’t go where she wanted them too, but instead had to follow the beam of someone else’s light. It was distracting and infuriating, because the spot of light might change direction without warning, forcing her to either chase it or latch onto someone else’s spot of light.

The fire doors at the bottom of the stairs stood open, allowing them easy access into the first basement corridor. They spilled out, fanning to either side along the walls. Kayla got her back to the concrete and forced a deep breath. She had to remember, had to picture the day she had turned the wrong way down here when she was late for her chem lab. For a moment, she remembered the corridor in fluorescent glory.

“That way to the loading docks,” she called to Martin, pointing to the right. “That way to the labs.” She pointed left.

“Loading docks first.” Martin stepped into the hall, waving to his troops. “Gabe, cover the rear. Andreas hold this stairwell. Everyone else, Go!”

Kayla wasn’t sure where she fit into all this since Martin’s troops seemed to already know who should be with Gabe and who with Andreas, so she went with Martin, running beside the big man toward the sound of screams and gunfire. At least down here there was little of the fog of dust that had been generated upstairs by the C4.

They turned a corner to find a crowd of rippers running in panic down the wide corridor, heading straight for them, practically fighting one another to get away from the loading dock area. Their clothes were often little more than rags hanging from sunlight-deprived skin, which sometimes hung loose where fat had melted away. Grime and filth coated many, as if they had at times been buried and dug up.

Kayla had no time for fear or anger. She slid to a halt and put a bullet through the chest of the one closest to her. There were enough flashlights now concentrated in this area that she could dimly see even if she wasn’t focused on a single spot of light.

“No!” screamed one ripper just before the discharge of firearms, his hands forward as if he could shield himself from bullets. “The demon’s coming. It’ll—”

Kayla put a bullet through his head, wondering madly for a second if he had been her physics professor before the end.

The rippers in front skidded to a halt as waves of gunfire poured into them from Martin’s troops. Rippers behind piled into those still standing in front, others tripping over the bloodied bodies of their comrades. Screams and shouts were buried by deafening discharges from their guns, the echoes of the concrete corridor multiplying the explosions. Eye-dazzling muzzle flashes lit the whole corridor as if bolts of lightning were striking underground.

The rippers began to fire back, forcing Kayla to rush to the wall. She never stopped shooting, still trying to aim in the chaos, still counting her shots. But her enemy, trapped between them and whatever terror had driven them from the loading dock, now scattered into the kitchens and boiler rooms on either side of this service corridor.

Kayla followed into one room, diving to the right as soon as she was through the door, so as not to be a target. Others followed, judging by the beams of their flashlights, but there were only shadowy forms holding them. Kayla had no idea whether Martin was among them.

A gunshot and muzzle flash stunned Kayla, for a second totally deafening her, dazzling her, and making the flashlights irrelevant. She had been looking the right way, so she remembered what the flash had shown her even after the room again fell dark: several rippers, men and women who probably had once worked at the university, were crouched on the far side of a metal cupboard/workbench. A bulky machine sat on the bench, possibly a lathe. They were in a machine shop.

Kayla fired from memory, and the flash, less dazzling now that her eyes had adjusted, showed her that she had hit her target, a woman who looked middle-aged with bad plastic surgery, her skin stretched too tight, giving her a skeletal look—a starving ripper. More gunfire and more screams and shouts and curses. Kayla crawled along the wall, forcing herself to not think about the hundreds of students that must’ve died in the college, as bones crunched under her hands and knees. She found the corner and turned to follow along, keeping an eye to the workbench behind which the rippers sheltered. She pulled into an enfilade position, lying on her side, just her head and shoulder sticking out from behind another cupboard that was perpendicular to the rippers’ shelter. From her angle, perpendicular to the workbench, it provided no cover for the rippers. In the muzzle flashes, she could see the ripper closest to her as he rose, fired blindly, and ducked back down, thinking the workbench hid him.

Kayla frantically changed mags, let a few staccato flashes illuminate the rippers again so that she could memorize their positions, and started firing into them, confidant that if she missed one ripper her bullets would just carry on to the next.

She threw them into total confusion.

The rippers saw their comrades fall or scream and writhe, but they couldn’t determine the source of the gunfire. Clearly, some thought it was punching through the metal cupboards of the workbench, for they stood in panic to shoot at the other troops, only to expose themselves to more bullets. Others crouched low, and Kayla finished them off.

When the last ripper fell, Kayla called out, “Clear! Clear!”

Martin rushed forward, his flashlight and shotgun aiming at the corpses just in case, the haze of gunpowder smoke defusing the flashlights of his troops and giving the room a pale gray light. He came around the corner and for a moment his flashlight was straight in Kayla’s face where she lay.