The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse

by Michael Andre McPherson

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One - Chicago

  Two - Raid on Atherley College

  Three - A New War

  Four - Flight to the North

  Five - What Comes Out at Night

  Six - Two Sides of a Triangle

  Seven - St. John’s Keep

  Eight - Vampire Road

  Nine - Monster in the Night

  Ten - Chicago

  Eleven - Among the Believers

  Twelve - Nine Miles

  Thirteen - The Ericsians

  Fourteen - First Day of High School

  Fifteen - A Ripper on the Inside

  Sixteen - The End of the World

  Seventeen - The Bell Tower to the Boiler Room

  Eighteen - Kayla's First Command

  Nineteen - At the Well's Street Bridge

  Twenty - Falling Back

  Twenty-One - The Saint

  Twenty-Two- The Offensive

  Twenty-Three - The Truth

  Twenty-Four - Confession

  Twenty-Five - Tevy's First Command

  Twenty-Six - It All Comes Together

  Twenty-Seven - The Dependable Rogue

  Twenty-Eight - Vlad Who Bleeds

  Twenty-Nine - Victory

  Thirty - Loose Lips

  Thirty-One - Last Stand at the Merchandise Mart

  Thirty-Two - Escape to St. John’s

  Thirty-Three - A Monument to a Hero

  Acknowledgements

  Apocalypse Heretics: Sneak Peak

  Generation Apocalypse: Book Two of The 1000 Souls

  by Michael Andre McPherson

  First Kindle Edition, September 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Andre McPherson

  All rights reserved.

  www.michaelandremcpherson.com

  mike@michaelandremcpherson.com

  This e-edition (2012) published by:

  Pectopah Productions Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-9868641-3-1

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  To my loving parents,

  My father, who never backed down from a fight

  My mother, who taught me faith

  Prologue

  He had just turned ten when the world ended. At first it was fun, because some of the teachers stopped showing up at school. The principal, tall and angry, kept stuffing the students into the gym to watch movies, promising each day that the next would be normal. Instead, fewer and fewer of Tevy’s friends came to school, and one day neither did the principal.

  In the evenings, his parents spoke in anxious whispers, careful to ensure he didn’t overhear, but one word often leaked out: rippers. He heard their neighbor, old Mr. Costa, say to his dad that there were rumors of murders happening all over Chicago, but for some reason it was never on the news. “They don’t want us to know,” Mr. Costa said, pointing his cane south in the general direction of city hall.

  One morning his parents didn’t go to work, and they kept him home, letting him play Call of Duty when the power was up. That was another big change: the power failing, the lights going dark, sometimes for hours on end.

  One day he helped his dad board up the ground-floor windows.

  “Is there a hurricane coming?” he asked, passing his dad another screw.

  “Not the windy kind,” his father replied.

  Nights became very scary. Sometimes he heard screams and running feet on the sidewalk outside, and one night Mr. Costa’s house burned down, with all kinds of people standing on his lawn but none helping. Tevy’s mother pulled him from the window and covered his eyes. He wanted to scream because he was afraid, but his mother whispered in his ear, “Don’t let them hear you. We have to pretend we’re not here, baby. Please don’t cry. We must be silent.”

  Silence. He had learned that lesson well.

  The next night, the world did end. The rippers came for them.

  The shouting frightened him beyond all reason, and he hugged his mother with all his strength. They called out rude suggestions with foul language and promised to hurt them all if they didn’t come out. He wanted to obey their commands, believing their lies, but his father knew better.

  “Stay in the closet,” he whispered as he shoved Tevy back amongst the shoes and the coats. “It’s like hide-and-seek, but you mustn’t lose. Do you understand me?”

  The intensity of his father’s actions, the fear in his eyes, and the pleading of his words warned Tevy not to argue. He had always known that his parents loved him, but from that day forward, he understood that loving parents lay down their lives for their children. Like his parents.

  The last time he saw them alive, his mother was loading a revolver and his father was holding a hunting rifle. His mother blew him a hurried kiss. The closet door closed. Then came the shouting and breaking glass, and a whoosh accompanied by a wave of hot air and the stench of gasoline. Guns fired and his mother screamed curses at someone, foul language he had never before heard her use.

  He wanted to leave the closet, but he remembered his father’s last words. He wanted to scream, but he remembered his mother telling him how silence could save his life. He clamped his hand over his mouth and wept, but he didn’t scream. He didn’t make a sound.

  But the dull roar told him that fire, or the choking smoke, would soon kill him. He had to leave the closet. Suddenly, there was a lot more gunfire and a lot more screaming, but not from his parents. Then his mother spoke her last words. “My son!” she shouted. “In the closet! Please—” Her voice choked off wetly. It wasn’t a normal sound.

  The closet door yanked open, letting in a billowing cloud of gray that stung his eyes and made him choke. A strange man on his hands and knees reached for him. Had there been a halo around his head?

  “Come on!” He grabbed Tevy’s arm and yanked him from the closet. “I’m here to save you.”

  Tevy climbed onto the man’s back as directed and hung on around his neck as the house cracked and groaned from the flames. They spilled out onto the front porch, and the man stood, scooping Tevy into his arms and running from the house. It was the first time Tevy had seen dead bodies—real dead bodies, not like his grandfather in the coffin at the funeral home. These bodies had chunks of their skulls missing or bloody holes in their chests. They were splayed at strange angles and had nightmare-inducing expressions on their faces—gapping mouths and bloody teeth.

  “We’ve got to get him to St. Mike’s,” said a woman with a machine gun. “What about his parents?”

  The man, his savior, shook his head.

  The woman turned, stared off into the distance for a moment, then shot one of the corpses on the lawn in rage.

  Tevy understood. The world as he knew it had ended forever. But he remembered to be silent, so he bit his tongue as he wept and buried his face in man’s shoulder, breathing in the stink of a sweating saint.

  *


  Kayla had worried about homesickness when she showed up at Atherley College, but by the second week she was more concerned about where she could buy a gun. Her roommate, Ashley, had gone missing, and there was talk of a serial killer hunting around the campus. The police said they shouldn’t worry, that Ashley had probably just succumbed to the strain of college and headed down south to live on the streets of Toronto or maybe even Chicago.

  Neither Kayla nor the other girls in their student residence believed that for a second, and they all found it disconcerting that the police were downplaying Ashley’s disappearance.

  “Frigging cops have no clue,” Rachel said. She was in her third year and a lot older than Kayla, who wouldn’t turn eighteen until December. “Last time a girl was assaulted was in my first year, and they practically locked us all down for a month until they caught the asshole. This time they tell us to go about our business as usual? I got this.” She showed them all the Taser her dad had sent. “Get some protection girls, and I’m not talking about condoms.”

  But Kayla’s parents were committed pacifists, even though Sioux Lookout, the little town where they lived, made a lot of money from tourist hunting and fishing. The town was so far north that the only way to go farther was by plane, and she already missed the sound of those little aircraft taking off early every morning to fly campers up to the high lakes. She considered dropping out and going home, but her mom suggested she stay at the college.

  “Something’s going on in town,” she said on the phone. “There’ve been a lot of house fires. Your father and I are thinking of taking Kevin and heading down to a hotel in Thunder Bay for a few days.”

  That frightened Kayla. Why would they take her little brother and abandon the family home just because an arsonist was loose in town? What about their teaching jobs? The news reports didn’t mention the problems in Sioux Lookout, but they didn’t mention Ashley’s disappearance either.

  Kayla found Rachel in the common area reading a textbook, her dark hair tied back in a tight ponytail.

  “I need to buy a gun,” said Kayla.

  Rachel looked up from the book, and her expression showed approval rather than surprise. “That’s pretty much impossible to do legally now.” She slapped the book closed.

  “I don’t care about legally. It’s my body and no one’s gonna take me without a fight.”

  “My dad knows a guy.” Rachel stood and stretched. In another time—a month ago—Kayla might have thought Rachel needed to lose a few pounds, but that seemed so irrelevant and petty now. “Dad’s decided I need an upgrade from the Taser. He’s getting me a Glock. If you want, I can get you one too.”

  Kayla did want, but her weekly allowance from Mom and Dad hadn’t been deposited into her bank account yet. “How much?”

  Rachel smiled. “Don’t worry. You can pay in installments. We’re doing it for a few other girls too. Dad says we need to be our own police force here, watch out for each other.”

  And they did. No one went anywhere without an armed partner, but it turned out this serial killer wasn’t just interested in women. Boys started to disappear, and even a few professors. The college president responded by going on a rant about absenteeism. By mid-October, rumors began to circulate about a cult of serial killers. Some guy down in Chicago was all over the Internet talking about rippers—blood drinkers. He said you couldn’t believe what you see on the news, and Kayla fervently agreed. Her parents had found Thunder Bay just as dangerous as Sioux Lookout.

  “It seems like a house burns down every night,” said her mother in a quick phone call. “We’ve decided we’re better off at home, and things seemed to have quieted down since the band council took over policing from the OPP.”

  When Kayla’s physics professor didn’t turn up one day, she decided to go home. Teaching assistants now taught half of her classes anyway, and they seemed as lost as everyone else as to why the campus was in a state of crisis unnoticed by the administration.

  But she was too late.

  She managed to hitch a ride in a rusting Jeep Cherokee that took her all the way to Sioux Lookout. The driver was young, Ojibwa, and cute. He told her his name was Ted, but she was pretty sure that was just the name he used with non–First Nations.

  He was twenty and chatty, his jeans snug fitting and his muscles lean. He’d been out west working on the oil sands projects, but things had gotten weird and his grandmother had asked him to come home.

  “The farmers,” he said about his journey thus far. “They’re burning the fields out in the Prairies instead of harvesting—some kind of protest, the newspapers say. Don’t know much but it seems stupid to me.”

  He continued to say, “Don’t know much,” several times during the two-hour ride, but Kayla began to believe he knew quite a bit, and she was really glad he was there when they pulled up in front of the burnt shell of her childhood home.

  He let her cry for a while on the front lawn, and his hand on her shoulder was a comfort. Her knees were getting wet in the fresh snow as she let the tension of the last few weeks pour out. She was detached, almost watching herself cry. She couldn’t stop.

  “Sorry,” he said finally. “You should come to the rez with me. Gran said I had to be there before sunset. She said that was really important.”

  Kayla considered saying it was okay, that she just wanted to be a here a bit longer, that she’d stay at the Sunset Motel, but she was angry. Someone was going to pay for this, and she had to be alive to deliver that punishment.

  She went with him to the little bungalow in the woods, and his grandmother had clucked and shouted at him and reached high to cuff his head, but she reluctantly let Kayla stay the night on the frayed couch.

  The next morning, Kayla helped Gran with the dishes while Ted went off to a band-council meeting. If Gran spoke English, she didn’t use it with Kayla. Ted came back with a grim expression.

  “We got to go. Most are going.”

  “Where?”

  “Most are heading up north, flying to the high lakes, away from...people.”

  Had he been going to say white people? He looked embarrassed, guilty.

  “I can’t go there.”

  He nodded his agreement. A long chat broke out in Ojibwa between Gran and Ted. It rose to shouting, but never aggressive, just both trying to be heard over the other, both used to talking this way.

  “I can take you back to the college,” he said finally. A four-hour round trip for him.

  “I can’t ask you to do that. If I could just get a ride into town, I’ll get the bus tomorrow.” Every Monday morning a bus headed down to Atherley with people who spent the week working there or at the pulp mill in Dryden.

  “There won’t be a bus.” He turned and began zipping up her pack for her.

  “Well, I’ll hitch a ride then. Don’t worry, I can take care of myself.”

  But she didn’t feel that way. Had her parents gone back to Thunder Bay? She’d checked her phone about a hundred times during the night, calling her mother, texting her little brother, but there had been no replies. In her heart she knew there was only one reason that little brat hadn’t texted her back with some amusing or snarky message, or a least an excited 140 characters about the house fire. He had always loved trying to fit his sentences into exactly 140 characters.

  “It’s not safe to hitch a ride.” Ted opened the door, letting cold air into the little house. “There are people in the day who work for them—for the rippers.”

  And Kayla knew the world had changed forever. They were talking about them, the serial killers that slashed throats and drank blood, the ones that guy in Chicago, Bertrand Allan, kept talking about in his YouTube broadcasts. The rippers were humans that had changed, that had millions of strange cell-sized parasites in their blood and their organs, parasites that only allowed them to digest blood. No other food could sustain rippers.

  “Thanks,” she said to Ted. “Really, I don’t know how I can thank you.”

  They rode in sile
nce back to the college, the trees frosted with fresh snow, the road unplowed. Ted’s Jeep had four-wheel drive, but he rarely used it because it sucked too much gas. “A lotta gas stations closed. It’s hard to come by.”

  She tried to give him every bit of cash in her wallet even though he had refused and even seemed insulted.

  “You’ll need gas,” she said. “Please, you probably saved my life.”

  He took it in the end, perhaps just to get her to stop. “It’s probably worthless paper anyway,” he said before he sped away, clearly anxious to get back to his grandmother before sunset.

  Kayla found the dorm in a panic, girls crying and packing.

  “What’s going on?” she said to Rachel, who wasn’t crying but was stuffing a pack with clothing.

  “We’re getting the hell out of here.” Rachel suddenly stopped and looked up. “Hey, I thought you’d gone home.”

  Kayla didn’t want to appear weak, but it was too much. She shook her head and bit her lip, unable to speak but successfully fighting back the tears—until Rachel swept her up in a hug.

  “Oh, baby. It’s okay. It’s okay,” Rachel said over and over as Kayla wept. “We’ve got a place to go, a safe place.”

  “Where?” Kayla pushed back from the hug and wiped her cheeks.

  “It’s a new student residence about a mile from here, but it’s built like a fort. I don’t know why but everybody already calls it ‘The Keep.’ The contractor who built it is sending a bus over for anyone who wants to join him—and they’ve got a lot of guns.”

  “Good.” Kayla pulled out her Glock and looked at it for a moment, sensing the new life that was before her. “I’d like an upgrade to a machine gun.”

  One - Chicago

  Silence. Tevy was the best at it, which is why he preferred to go on his raids alone. None of the other kids in the Brat Pack could move with his stealth, and in the Loop, an incautious step on broken glass, or kicking a piece rubble down a staircase, could mean capture and gruesome death.

  He ducked under the window so that no one down in the street would see him flit past, and he put his back to the moldering drywall, keeping a wary eye around the whole floor of the office building, searching above the cubicle dividers just in case someone else was up there. A few light fixtures, the fluorescent bulbs smashed, hung perpendicular to the ceiling, and of course the building had no power, but this floor wasn’t as trashed as some Tevy had seen. No one had lived here, built a campfire for cooking, or even smashed the computers at the desks. He should tell the others about this place.