Bertrand looked up and down the sidewalk again, noting that a sad little flower shop—its window displays oddly sparse but neat—sat next door, a sandwich board on the sidewalk stating that all the flowers were half-price until Monday.
The contrast between the shops had more to do with security than flower power versus fire power. The flower shop had no need for bars inside the glass display windows, and the gun shop also had heavy rolling metal doors, which Bertrand guessed came down each night to turn the shop into a fortress, impregnable at least to smash-and-grab thieves. Apparently the criminal types in the neighborhood had no use for flowers.
Bertrand at last opened the door to the gun shop, causing an electronic chime to alert the owner that his perimeter had been breached. A heavy man sat on a stool behind counter at the back of the shop, his newspaper obscuring his face. The man didn't look up when he spoke. "Wondered when you'd find the balls to come in." He must have noticed Bertrand standing in front of his shop for so long.
"My balls are there when I need them."
The newspaper folded down; the man behind it had red cheeks, puffed from alcohol and food, his beard and mustache short and black, not so much trimmed as looking like he'd forgotten to shave for a week.
"No bullshit guy. Okay, let me guess: you've never owned a gun. Your parents are pinko-commies, and they've always told you that no one needs to own a gun, but now you want a gun."
Bertrand stopped in front of the display case under the glass countertop. Handguns of many types were arranged haphazardly, some missing as if recently purchased and not replaced. Above and behind the owner, racks of weapons rested vertically so as to allow maximum storage. The sidewalls of the shop displayed photos of hunters and fishermen—and a calendar with a buxom woman in a pink bikini washing a car with lots of foamy soap. "Yes, yes, yes and yes."
The owner took a sip of coffee from a huge plastic mug, capped to prevent spilling or wasting heat. "So what do your parents think of your newfound desire to own a self-defense device?"
"They're dead."
The owner put his coffee down and stood, holding out his hand to shake.
"Lake," he said. "Emile Lake. Sorry about your folks. You're hardly growed up. What happened? Was it recent?"
"Nope. It was a couple of years ago—car accident. I'm told it was probably quick." Probably, unless they were still breathing when the fire took hold.
"Right. Bummer, but at least they don't have to put up with all the crazy shit that's happening now."
"What do you mean?"
"Come on! I thought you were a no bullshit guy. What brings a yuppie like you into my shop looking for a gun? Do you know how many shirt-and-tie types—who probably all wanted total gun bans last year—have come flooding into my shop in the last month, all looking for a little self-defense? I have to rush order to keep me in handguns." He tapped the glass of the counter with a heavy finger to draw Bertrand's attention to the empty spots.
"Okay, I admit, totally weird shit's happening out there. I just wanted to know what you've heard, 'cause it's not in the news anymore."
"People are dying." Emile studied him in challenge, daring him to disagree. "Lots of people."
"And it's not on the news."
"Because the government's in on it."
Bertrand realized too late that he'd rolled his eyes, the sudden anger on Emile's face proving that he'd communicated disbelief.
"Come on!" Emile picked up his newspaper for evidence, turning it so that Bertrand could see. "What is this crap doing on the front page?" A photo-op showed men in suits—one recognizably the mayor—cutting a fat ribbon at a recently constructed school. Bertrand leaned in and read the caption, discovering that the other men were local congressional and senate incumbents.
"Since when," Emile said, "do three levels of government show up to open a school at night. What is this crap? What's a senator have to do with a kiddie school? And at night? No wonder there's hardly any kids in the shot: their parents are too smart to let them out after dark."
"They're not vampires," said Bertrand. "They're something else."
Emile folded the newspaper, calm now that he was believed. "Whatever they are, they're in on it."
"It's like some kind of cult." Bertrand looked back at the front window of the shop to see if anyone was about to enter and overhear his crazy talk. "They drink blood, but not like vampires. They use knives to open your throat."
Emile stared at him for ten seconds. "That's even crazier than my theories," he said at last. "But the Chicago Ripper was cutting people's throats open. You're right about that. I thought it was a plague."
"Rippers." Bertrand looked down at the guns, trying to figure out what would be comfortable in his hands. "There's more than one Chicago Ripper. I think there's dozens."
"Buddy, this isn't happening just in Chicago. I got a buddy in New Hampshire and he says it's happening there."
"I think it's happening in a lot of cities, but I tell you I've met these rippers—one tried to open my throat last week—and I was only saved by some kind of cult leader. They just called him 'the boss' and said something about no evolutions in his club."
Again Emile regarded him for a moment—judging. "I think it's a plague that they're trying to cover up," he said. His furrowed brow spoke otherwise, showing the concentration of a man sorting through a particularly challenging puzzle. "But you know, even though you talk weirder than a crackhead who sidelines in meth ... there is something to your ripper thing."
"All I know is that some kind of Judgment Day is coming. The east coast has had three black outs in the last two weeks. Before this summer, they'd had one in my entire life. At first they said it was because absenteeism had shut down a nuke plant. Now they don't even say why. It just happens."
Emile's fist pounded the counter. "Now that's what I'm talking about. All this absenteeism. People just aren't off sick, they're not coming back to work at all."
"Some of them are." Bertrand was thinking about Malcolm, but decided not to bring up that he only came in for the night shift these days. That kind of statement would bring them back around to vampires, and that wasn't the kind of nonsense he wanted to argue.
"Not enough men coming in to work to keep the lights on though." Emile noted Bertrand's gaze into the handgun display. "What's your pleasure?"
"A friend says I should get a Glock."
"Who's your friend?" Emile pulled a set of keys from his belt, held there on a retractable cable, and waddled toward the far end of the counter to open a sliding panel on his side.
"Jeff Aubert. I think you guys are in the same gun club."
"Jeff! Tall Jeff?" Emile held one hand in the air to indicate six feet. "Jeff with the Ruger Super Redhawk? Why didn't you say so? Now there's a guy who can shoot, and when that baby goes off it's deafening even with ears." He pulled a black handgun out and slapped it on the counter.
Bertrand picked it up with all the comfort of a librarian who had been handed a tarantula, moving it from one hand to the next while trying to figure out what a prospective buyer should be judging about the weapon.
It was Emile's turn to roll his eyes. He snatched the gun from Bertrand.
"First, it's not loaded, but you should never handle a gun without checking for yourself. Eject the mag here and inspect that it's empty. See? Pull back the slide here and check the breach to make sure it's clear. See?"
Emile's hand motions were fast and practiced, but Bertrand got the idea and repeated the maneuvers with only a few extra instructions from Emile.
"Okay. I'll take it," said Bertrand.
Emile took the gun back and studied Bertrand for the third time.
"You're not a cop." It was a statement rather than a question.
"No. Why?"
"Another thing that hasn't been in the news lately is that they passed a new gun law extending the cooling off period. You buy it now—pay for it I mean—and you'll have to wait six months before I can hand it over to you."
"But
that's ridiculous. This is all gonna come to a head in less than six months. It's getting worse at an exponential rate."
"At a what rate? Never mind. Look, I'm not gonna sell you this gun." He slapped it down on the counter and slid it across to Bertrand. "I'm going to give it to you." He held up one meaty finger. "But I got two conditions: first is don't tell anyone, second is you gotta come down to my range in the basement every couple of days, starting today, and learn to shoot so that you don't blow your own fucking head off."
Bertrand nodded, because he shared the same concern for his head.
"Oh and third—" Emile's cheeks reddened and he didn't meet Bertrand's eyes. "Jeff's been talking around the club, says you guys are maybe going to form some kind of self-defense group, band together at nights and all."
"Really. He told you that." Bertrand kept the surprise off his face. When did he ever say anything like that to Jeff?
Emile looked Bertrand in the eye.
"Yeah he did. My folks are way up north and my wife took the kids and split for New Hampshire last year, so I'm isolated in this shop. I can't get a handle on what's going on out there, and the papers are no fucking help. So when things fall apart and you guys band together to fight back, you come and get me out of here."
When things fall apart. In his soul, Bertrand had known for some time that this must all come to a head, that there would be a day of reckoning when civilization could no longer function. But part of him wanted to cling to the old world—the safe world where the greatest danger to his life came in the form of chicken wings and beer. He longed for the days when he worried about whether he'd live into his seventies. Now he worried about whether he'd live through the next night.
"We'll keep you posted."
*
Temptation beckoned in the form of Malcolm's computer. Bertrand had switched to an eight a.m. start so that he could leave at four. Despite this schedule change, the shorter days would eventually compress to the point where he would have to go out while it was still dark, either on his way to work or on his way home. That was Chicago's winter.
Bertrand had been thinking about his own prediction to Emile: that this would all reach a crisis in less than six months, a prediction he'd made two weeks ago. The office had achieved a new normal that could not be sustained: the evening staff grew each day, the call load shifting to a peak near midnight, and only a skeleton crew managed the day.
Destiny was their anchor: sarcastic, witty and preferring to make sexually suggestive comments rather than talk about work or news. She seemed to enjoy shocking Bertrand or making him blush.
Whitlock looked more harried each day as he tried to find daytime temps to fill in when needed, and rumors said that his workouts in the club downstairs had taken on a new ferocity. Jeff spent every lunch with Bertrand at Flynn's, where they compared notes on the latest weird events and discussed theories, which usually revolved around a widespread Satanic cult, although Emile's plague theory still lingered, for the chaos did seem to spread like an epidemic.
Each morning for a couple of weeks, the news opened with reports about another house fire, the occupants all lost, sometimes murder-suicide the suspected cause, but then even those reports ended. Jeff, Joyce and Bertrand had all come across fire trucks and hoses encircling the burnt shell of some home—on different days and in different neighborhoods—but like the Ripper murders, the news media stopped covering these unpleasant events.
Bertrand sat at Malcolm's chair and booted his terminal, planning a little surfing before everyone else arrived, and it wouldn't be wise to do it from his own terminal, since his browsing history would be available if Whitlock wanted to check up on him.
The Chicago Police Department's website had changed a lot since Bertrand had written a paper about it back in high school for a civics class. Back then, he'd been able to see the images of every Chicago police officer ever murdered in the line of duty, and the focus of his paper had been about how many of those deaths had occurred during prohibition, numbering in the hundreds per year. The new website stuck with recent history, only listing all murder stats for the last few years, comparing them year-over-year to show a drop in violent crime.
Bertrand clicked on the murder rate but instead of a PDF of pie charts and bar graphs downloading, it popped up with a 404 error. The page was missing? He tooled around the site while puzzling this glitch. Why were the murder stats missing? Was it negligence or had someone intentionally pulled them off. This called for a little hack.
Bertrand began by looking for weakness in the site, but it was all new and well built, not like the old site from the nineties that had all kinds of backdoors into the server. He would need help with this one, so he went to some of his favorite bulletin boards, ones the F.B.I probably looked for unsuccessfully. You had to know a guy, and things changed almost daily, but Bertrand was one of the guys.
He didn't hack for greed or mischief, but for education and entertainment, so he had access to a number of servers, and he'd been careful to keep that a secret from the owners, slipping in and out without notice just for fun. It didn't take long to find out that someone had already been into the Chicago P.D. server, and they'd made notes that Bertrand understood. So he carefully breached one of his previously hacked servers and carried on from there, intending to destroy the logs when he was done, so that if anyone detected his hack they'd reach a dead end at this server when they tried to trace him.
The notes from his fellow hacker were great. Bang! He was in! Now where to look for the crime stats? The firewall prevented him from getting any farther than the public site without some serious hacking, but then Bertrand remembered Climategate. Someone on the inside at the University of East Anglia calling himself Freedom of Information Access had set up a file of all those climate scientist's incriminating e-mails and left it on the server for anyone to find.
A quick search proved the theory correct. There was a file of crime stats, just in a different directory that prevented the public from seeing it on the website. There would be no need to hack through the firewall. Someone had left them there to be found. Perhaps the police weren't all in lock-step cooperation on this issue. Maybe there were good cops out there too.
Bertrand burned the statistics onto a CD—proud that he was in and out of their system in less than ten minutes. He was about to destroy the server logs for his hacked server so that he couldn't be traced, when he heard the elevator ping, announcing that someone, maybe Whitlock, was arriving on their floor.
Bertrand quickly logged off of Malcolm's computer and headed for his own cubicle. He pulled on his headset and got in the queue, opening up a chat while selecting a call, dual-tasking to clear a minor backlog. Later he tried to call Nolan to tell him that maybe his government conspiracy theories weren't so crazy, but the man didn't answer his phone. Was he down in his bomb shelter?
Bertrand went back to work, but he was distracted from his job several times by the CD that waited in his bag. Why had these stats been pulled from the public server?
Tonight, he would check them out. Someone had wanted them hidden, and Bertrand couldn't wait to see why.
Eleven - The Last Warning from Thomas Nolan
Bertrand had planned to leave work early so that he could get home well before dark, but the call volume kept him late. He was just about to log off when he received an e-mail from Erics—plural—the guy who claimed on his website that there were only one thousand souls and that the seven billion people on the planet shared only a small portion of each soul among many bodies.
Bertrand had to scroll down through the e-mail to remember that he'd asked this guy how he knew it was a thousand souls and not a million.
"We have performed many complicated calculations and personality assessments in order to determine that there are approximately one thousand souls. There is a margin of error that could mean there are slightly more or less, but it is close enough to one thousand souls that I use this as a teaching point. People need round numbers.
Why don't you take the test and determine which soul you possess a portion of? I suspect you have a strong soul or you wouldn't have contacted me. Has it gotten denser in the last few months? Do you feel bolder?"
This gave Bertrand pause. How many times in the last few months had he surprised himself with bold statements, the kind that were getting him a reputation as a no-bullshit guy? Why did he always want to fight? Like the time at Goth Knights when he'd had to repress the desire to attack "the boss" against all odds. Only common sense and Joyce's wisdom had prevented him from taking on the man in his own lair.
"I'll take the test," Bertrand wrote back. "Just not today. Must get indoors before dark."
Jeff had agreed to work late and was still in the queue, guiding someone through the software with his eyes rolling to the ceiling. He feigned stabbing himself through the heart with a pen. Bert raised one hand and high-fived him on his way out, thankful that he was done for another day.
But as he rolled north on the train, a restlessness took him, the thought of his basement with the bars on the windows unappealing, even though he'd moved the flat screen down there and turned the wet bar into a mini-kitchen by bringing out an old hot plate that his parents had stored away years ago. It was his night of rest from the gym, Joyce insisting that he take at least two nights off each week to allow his muscles to heal and grow. No exercise machines and no karate tonight.
As the 'L' train rocked its way north, Bertrand tried Nolan again on his cell. It would be more fun to open those crime stats with a friend who was on the same page, but still Nolan didn't answer. Where the hell was the guy? Sunset was less than a couple of hours away, and Nolan would never go out after dark.
Bertrand hurried down the stairs from Armitage station, but on his way to his home, the loneliness took hold. He didn't want to go into that empty house and be reminded that his parents were gone. At Nolan's he could pretend that he still had parents somewhere not far away, and although the guy was a bit scary with his paranoia, he was one of the few people who didn't take Bertrand's multiple ripper theory—the cult theory—with a grain of salt.
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 9
