“We’re going back to get Radu.”
*
Tevy fought to contain his frustration. They stood around one of the lab tables, a yellowed map of Chicago spread wide and held down at the corners with beakers that Mabruke had pulled from a cupboard under the table.
“Every second is precious,” Tevy said, looking around the table in the weak light of the kerosene lamp. “Radu could still be alive.” He usually found the scent of kerosene soothing, reminding him of Helen’s storybook readings to the Brat Pack. But tonight nothing calmed him, especially with Kayla glaring at him across the table as if he were the stupidest person alive.
“By now, he’s either dead or a ripper,” she said. “There’s no chance he’s alive and I’d shoot him on sight just in case.”
Why was she always angry with him? Tevy could remember several instances of this long before she’d been declared the Angry Captain, so it wasn’t that she was putting on a show. But now he thought of a weakness in her argument.
“So why did you agree to lead this raid if Radu’s dead?”
Kayla put a finger over the location of the high school on the map. “Because they obviously fortified the school to prevent exactly what Bobs wants: coordination between the Ericsians here at Wright and you guys at St. Mike’s. As long as that’s there, they might as well have built the Great Wall of China between the two strongest human fortresses in Chicago.”
Mabruke nodded but didn’t say anything and couldn’t seem to stop smiling every time one of the three spoke, as if everything they said confirmed his belief. Tevy wanted to punch him, but more than anything he wanted to fight the rippers. Ever since he’d aimed high, fearing to kill humans and go to hell, he regretted it. Radu stayed with them in the forest. He proved himself a worthy companion, and Tevy let him down.
“So, like I said,” continued Kayla. “We go in at dawn.”
“Six hours! For eff’s sake.” Tevy was tempted to rush out and try to shoot his way in right now.
“Come on, Tev,” said Elliot. “You can say it. Fuck.”
Kayla didn’t even glance at Elliot, let alone acknowledge his joke. “You want to catch this place full of rippers or not? If they’ve got as many as you say from all those trips downtown, plus all those traitors from California, we want to take as many of them out tonight as possible, or we’ll be fighting them tomorrow or next week.”
Several of Mabruke’s captains were with them, and they all muttered in agreement. They might treat Tevy with the honor due their prophet, but they all knew their history very well: it was Bobs and Joyce and Barry who command the armies that fought into Cave Mountain, not Erics and not Bertrand.
Tevy knew she was right, which didn’t make it any easier. Sure, it was unlikely Radu was alive, but maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny chance.
“You guys got any C-4 to blow the doors with?” Kayla asked of Mabruke.
Tevy found himself fascinated with Kayla’s expression, the intensity, the focus, the way her brow creased as she studied the map. One day maybe there would be lines, but she was younger than he thought, her skin still fresh.
Mabruke shook his head. “Nothing as subtle as C-4. We’ve got some good dynamite, but best of all, we have some M-72 LAWs.”
“What are those?” she asked.
Tevy suddenly remembered playing Call of Duty in the living room and his dad asking the same question. “They’re light anti-tank weapons. One and done. How many you got?”
Mabruke looked at the map for a few moments before he looked up and met Tevy’s eye. “I think we could spare two tonight. We have others, but we should save those for the next battle. These were very hard to come by, but I guarantee they’ll blow the doors off this place.”
Kayla’s eyebrows rose even higher, and Tevy could practically see the calculations going on in her head.
“This changes everything,” she said.
“This is just great.” Tevy could hardly contain his excitement. “We blow big holes in the side of the building, it doesn’t even have to be at the doors, and we charge in and get Radu.”
Kayla fixed him with a cool gaze. “Part right. We blow holes in the doors and go in through the second floor.” She turned back to Mabruke. “You must have some ladders around here?”
“We’re going to kill their human slaves?” Tevy still couldn’t break free of Bishop Alvarez’s warning.
Kayla looked up from the map in surprise. “We’re going to kill traitors. We killed a few today just in case....” That frown deepened. “Is that why you were such a lousy shot? You didn’t want to kill human traitors? What the hell’s that all about?”
“It’s about hell.” For once Elliot wasn’t in joking. “I got this,” he added to Kayla before taking Tevy by the elbow and turning him farther down the lab and away from the pool of light and humanity.
“I know they deserve it,” Tevy said. “I just get the heebee jeebies and all. There are a lot of rippers in hell waiting for me.”
“Remember how the bishop said that rippers weren’t human?” Elliot looked older than his seventeen years now, all the youth and mischief leaving his face.
“Of course.”
“We’re going into a ripper fortress, dude, and for all we know there are no traitors. Everyone you come across will be a ripper, and God’s okay with killing them. We just shoot everybody and let God sort them out.”
“But we saw humans go into there.” Tevy leaned back against a wall.
Elliot tapped a finger into Tevy’s chest. “Last evening. They’ve been in there with hungry rippers all night. It’s fair to say that anyone we come across is a ripper, and if you do shoot a human, well, you thought you were killing a ripper. No intent to murder. No harm, no foul. You don’t burn in hell.”
Tevy took a deep breath. “I sure hope you’re right.”
“If I’m wrong, I promise we’ll at least be together in hell.”
*
The cold produced a steady tremble in Tevy, rising and falling depending on when they were moving and when they were waiting—like now. Dawn had yet to blush the horizon and the moon set made it difficult to travel without using flashlights, a tool only a few possessed and even then were forbidden from using for fear of warning the rippers. The stars shone in a brilliant display above, now fading in the east, but they didn’t provide enough light to see the ground, which was littered with lumps of brick from burned and smashed buildings. Tevy had one aching knee from an encounter with these.
Now they all waited on the sidewalk of opposite the high school, which sprawled around three sides of the quad, with its peaked roofs making it look more like an alpine hotel than an education center. Tevy decided it was a shame they were going to blow holes in the building, for it had survived relatively unscathed by the apocalypse until now. It would be harder tomorrow to imagine what high school would have been like without this huge piece of architecture frozen in time as if the teachers and students were off for the summer.
Two wings of the school protruded at right angles from the main building and ended close to the street. It was the street side of those two wings that they would assault. One group here with Kayla, the other at the far wing with Mabruke.
Dim light glowed from the upper-floor windows, proving that power of some kind must be in use. Tevy strained to listen for the drone of a generator and crossed his arms close to his chest in an effort to stop trembling.
“Don’t be scared,” whispered Kayla, standing close while studying the school and the sky.
“Just freezing.” Tevy tried to sound relaxed to prove his point and not seem defensive. He’d done stuff that would turn her white as a ghost. How dare she suggest he was afraid? But he had to admit that the source of the tremble did seem beyond the cold. It also came from excitement, the exhilaration that he would get to fight rather than hide.
The high-tech weapons that Mabruke provided also excited Tevy. One of the Ericsians, an older man with a trimmed gray beard and black skin,
stood nearby with the tube of the LAW now aimed at the front door of the building. Tevy had watched with interest when the man had extended the tube and set up his position, ensuring that no one stood behind him.
“This would fry you good,” he’d said, his accent suggesting Jamaican origin before the apocalypse. Tevy remembered that Erics himself had been from that country before becoming an American.
Elliot had nodded when he moved to stand clear. “Back blast from the rocket. I should’ve thought of that. This is going to be great.”
“Will it blow through the doors?” asked Kayla.
The rocket man nodded. “Through the doors and down the hall and out the ass end. Made for tanks, this was. Not piddly little high school doors. We’ll make a fine mess as soon as you give the word.”
Tevy was desperate for her to order the attack, too, and he really wanted to just charge in right after the rocket, but Kayla had the plan and he would follow it. Surely, she would call soon. The rippers all had to be back by now, and any that weren’t would likely trip into the little army that waited in the pre-dawn. But it was another ten minutes—when the school began to resolve in the early light, looking more like a building and less like a hulk occluding the stars—that Kayla tapped the man with the rocket launcher on the shoulder and hurried to join Tevy and Elliot.
“Hide your eyes, children,” said the rocket man.
Tevy clamped one hand over his eyes, his other hand already holding the pistol grip of his Winchester, but even then the light dazzled him through the cracks of his fingers, and the scream of the rocket deafened him, prompting an involuntary switch of his hand from eyes to left ear. The explosion sent a concussion of air back at them, as if a giant had exhaled.
Tevy yanked up his end of the aluminum ladder and rushed ahead, Elliot barely having a chance to pick up the back end before the charge across the street. Small fires inside the school now provided light, and that saved Tevy from stumbling over errant bricks from the blast.
The open door beckoned, undefended now because of the explosion, but Kayla had been insistent, and Tevy turned onto the lawn, dropping his end of the ladder. He holstered his shotgun, cursing himself for getting it out too soon, and helped Elliot raise the ladder to the second-floor window.
This was it. A chance save Radu or at least avenge him. Tevy again drew his shotgun and rushed up the ladder, keeping a wary eye on the window in case a defender appeared. None did, and Tevy smashed the window with the barrel of his gun, the glass raining around him and slicing at his hands as he dumped his body over the sill and onto the floor.
There was dim light from the hall, enough to show student desks shoved and tossed to either side of the room. Tevy scrambled up, ignoring the pain and the sound of falling glass as others smashed into the classroom. He headed straight for the door, shotgun leveled and ready to fire, but now a figure rushed through the hall. Tevy peeked left and right out the door, not seeing the figure but discovering that the dim light came from a single bulb hanging from an electrical cord strung like a lazy clothes line down the hall. Farther down the hall another single bulb also hung.
Elliot moved up to the other side of the door. “They must have a generator going somewhere,” he said louder than necessary. “Where the hell are they all?”
“Let’s go!” Tevy charged into the hall, aware of his heartbeat but ignoring it as he searched for that first target. He found him at the staircase, rushing down from above and headed for the first floor, unaware of the intruders already on the second floor.
The Winchester kicked up when it fired, the shot unusually quiet to Tevy’s rocket-deafened ears, and the man stumbled, turning in surprise as the shot punched through the glass by the fire doors and into his side. He fell down the stairs, his own gun clattering across the tiles of the floor.
“He was a ripper,” shouted Elliot, reading Tevy’s mind. Was he going to hell?
Shots came from the landing above now, from other rippers needing to get downstairs to join the fight at the main doors, where they assumed the Ericsians would all be attacking. They may have even wanted just to get to the basements, for the upper-floor windows weren’t bricked in against the pale light that would soon wash into the classrooms.
Muzzle flashes dazzled the combatants, and Tevy and Elliot hit the floor, going to either side of the fire doors where glass provided a view to shoot, although the wire embedded in the glass kept it from shattering, recording the incoming and outgoing shots with relatively neat bullet holes. Tevy’s shots punched big holes.
He fired at the dark forms as they ran down the stairs, turning at the landing where they were lit from above by a distant bulb that was not visible from this floor. They were rippers, Tevy promised himself as two and now three tumbled down the stairs, prompting a pump from his shotgun between each death.
In all, a dozen had fallen from their fire, others from the Ericsians joining to stand above Tevy and shoot. Finally, the flow of rippers stopped. Elliot leapt up and shoved at the fire door against a body, Tevy standing to join him while others shoved at the other fire door until they both stood wide.
“Let’s go!” shouted Tevy, but a woman’s hand caught him, the white bandana around her head showing that she was an Ericsian. Mabruke had made them all wear these bandanas, which had a circle with the number 1000 written in black marker in the center of each above the eyes. Elliot had complained about the fashion with a grin.
“Wait!” From her belt the woman pulled a grenade, a weapon both Tevy and Elliot earlier noted with envy that several of the Ericsians carried. She pulled the pin and tossed it down the staircase, the sound of its tumble distant and innocuous as it turned at the landing and disappeared.
The flash was brilliant, and for a moment every detail of the stairwell was sharp as nails, only to seem darker afterwards, but the moment was enough to show Tevy that one of the corpses was far from dead, sitting with its back to the wall, its handgun rising to point at Elliot. Tevy shot from the hip with no time to aim or think, but he was only a body-length from the ripper, and the blast took it in the chest.
“Whoa, shit!” Elliot had noticed too late. “I owe you.”
He charged for the stairs and Tevy rushed after him, leaping a splayed body near the landing and turning to find more corpses farther down. Gunfire from the main-floor hallway indicated that Kayla’s assault with her people was well under way. Tevy feared for her. What if she were shot, or worse, made a ripper? He charged into the main-floor hallway to find rippers behind banks of tumbled lockers or improvised defenses of broken doors turned sideways and supported with desks. The rippers were turning their way now, alerted by the grenade if not the gunfire that there were Loyalist humans in the building behind them, blocking any retreat to the basements.
Elliot grabbed Tevy by the collar and yanked him back into the stairwell before a dozen shots whizzed by them. It was such a mighty heave that Elliot tripped and they both went down, Tevy sprawling on his back on top of Elliot.
“We don’t go into the hall, remember,” shouted Elliot as they scrambled up.
Kayla had been specific. Don’t go into that main floor hallway because we’ll be there and we’ll be as likely to shoot you as them. Hold the stairwells and don’t let them into the basement. You’ll have plenty of targets, don’t you worry about that.
And she was right, and now Tevy and Elliot retreated, backing down the stairs toward the basement, firing at rippers as they surged recklessly from the main floor into the stairwell. It was as close to a crossfire as the stairway could provide, with Ericsians on the first landing above the main floor shooting down, and Tevy and Elliot on the first landing below the main floor shooting up. The fire door to the main floor was the kill zone, and the rippers continued to pour into it, desperate to get to the basement now that true dawn had arrived. Some were clearly rippers, their figures gauntly nonhuman, their clothes little more than rags, their eyes mad with hunger. Others looked suspiciously normal, except that they were will
ing to risk everything to get to the basement, and some took more shots to kill than any human could withstand.
Tevy counted eight from his shotgun and dropped it to draw his Glock. It didn’t have the stopping power of the Winchester at close range, but it was better than his knife. One ripper made it right to him, taking three hits in the chest before falling, draping his bleeding body into Tevy’s arms. Tevy shoved him away and put a bullet through the skull for good measure.
“Tell me that wasn’t a ripper!” Elliot’s call was a challenge. He dropped a clip from his M16 and shoved in a new one, but no more rippers charged the doorway, which was now partially blocked with a pile of bodies, at least a dozen.
“Hold here!” shouted Tevy to the Ericsians still up one landing. But the woman with the grenades was already with them, slipping over the pile of ruined humanity.
“Allow me,” she said, obviously guessing that Tevy intended to assault the basement. She pulled a grenade from her belt but waited for agreement. Tevy waved her to the landing but put up one finger to indicate she wait. He retrieved his shotgun, pulled a fist full of shells from his vest pocket, and reloaded the gun as quickly as he could. Sporadic gunfire continued out in the corridor—Kayla’s troops polishing off the main floor.
Tevy gave the nod to the Ericsian trooper, the woman looking old, like forty, her dark hair tied up in a tight bun. She pulled the pin on the grenade and lobbed it around the next landing. This time Tevy closed his eyes and covered his ears. The flash still showed through the eyelids and the explosion was still deafening through his hands. He charged down the stairs, his shotgun ready. They were below the ground level now, and any windows high up were bricked in, but the Ericsian trooper had a small flashlight, and she turned it on now, guiding them into the hall. Lockers ran down the wall on each side.
“Seems like a weird place for lockers.” Elliot kept his voice low. “The basement?”
“No locks on them like upstairs. Maybe these were extras or something,” said the woman with the flashlight. “What does it matter, anyway?”
The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse Page 17
