But Emile had already circled to the far side, his movement hidden by the flames and Bertrand's attention-galvanizing shooting. Even before Emile could shoot, however, a crossbow bolt hit the teen in the back, dropping him in a sliding sprawl on his face along the sidewalk.
Gunshots from the back suggested that Alvarez was being liberal with his interpretation of the Fifth Commandment. Bertrand was about to run that way to help when two men—not teenagers but middle-aged men, balding and pudgy—rounded the corner, one with a sawed-off shotgun presented and another with a handgun held properly.
Bertrand froze for a moment in his panic. Were they humans or rippers? Should he shoot? The shotgun's muzzle flashed. It no longer mattered which side they were on because they were firing on him. Bertrand pulled the trigger, taking the man with the handgun in the chest and dropping him to the ground. The shotgun bearer didn't have time to pump before Emile's shot blew through the man's skull.
His heart pounded so hard in his chest that Bertrand feared a heart attack, and he took deep breaths as if he had been running the whole way here, even though their last charge had been a very short sprint. Emile appeared on the sidewalk past the end of the burning car, his .357 aimed at the teen with the crossbow bolt in his back. He writhed and reached back, fighting to yank the bolt free.
"Don't shoot him yet!" yelled Bertrand, putting on hand out to warn Emile. "We want a prisoner. Don't move, dude!"
A movement by the lead teenager—the one Bertrand had shot first—snagged Bertrand's peripheral vision. He turned even as the teen, still on the ground by the burning fluid, raised a handgun. A rifle cracked and the teen collapsed and didn't move. Father Alvarez stood at the corner of the house, the rifle still aiming at the lump on the ground. It cracked twice more, bullets tearing through the corpse.
"I'd say he's dead this time," Emile said. "And if you don't want to die in about two seconds, kid, you won't move either or I'll turn you over to Father Death there."
"Please, I can't die." He spread out his hands, staying face down in the dying light of the flames that burned low—both on the car's hood and the front walk—as they consumed their fuel. "If I die I'll go straight to hell."
Father Alvarez walked up and knelt close by him. "Not if you repent your sins." He made the sign of the cross. "I can still save you before you die."
Twenty-One - Interrogation
The young woman appeared at the window, her crossbow presented and her tall friend aiming over her shoulder in case he was called upon to shoot.
"Whatssup?" she called to Bertrand. "You guys want to come in? I could use the extra guns tonight 'cause the city's really going to rat shit. Lost my base and my partner house last night."
"You can't let us in." Bertrand walked onto the lawn, careful to stay out of reach of the corpse just in case the teen wasn't really dead, and looked up to the window. "We could just be competition for these guys for all you know. Only in the sunlight can you be sure we're not rippers."
She nodded. "Rippers—like vampires—got it. Fair enough, but you should go to ground till sunrise. I don't want you attracting anymore attention this way." She tossed a key to the grass at Bertrand's feet. "That's for the garage behind my house. I fixed it up as a fall-back position, so you'll find it's pretty defensible—bars on the windows, that kinda stuff."
"Thanks." He picked up the key and turned to Emile. "Lets bring that one with us for a chat."
"Hey dude," called the woman. "You better pass some lead through my math teacher's head there and that other creep. I've seen these pricks come back from some really bad wounds, and don't use the fat guy's cannon. Use your Glock."
Emile looked up at her in adoration. "Who the fuck are you?" he asked.
But she and her boyfriend had disappeared.
"She's right, of course," Emile said to Bertrand. "My .357 is loud."
Bertrand nodded. They were already dead. It was not a sin to shoot someone to keep them dead. He went to each corpse in turn—ones that hadn't already died from head wounds—and 'passed some lead' through their skulls.
"Let's go to ground," he said.
Father Alvarez led the way, his rosary dangling from his left hand, which held the barrel of his rifle, leveled and ready to shoot as he headed for the alley behind the house.
The garage proved to be everything she'd promised. It was modern, built of cinder blocks although the roof was a wood-frame construction with asphalt shingles. That could burn. The windows were barred, but the glass was still intact, and Bertrand was glad of that when they got inside, because the pre-dawn chill had settled in, warning of Chicago's approaching bitter winter.
Once inside they found the garage to be even more of a bunker than Bertrand had thought. The garage door looked normal from the outside, but from the inside more of the amateur bricklayer's work was evident. A head-high cinderblock wall had been hastily constructed on the inside of the rolling door, again with little regard for neat mortar. If anyone succeeded in prying up or smashing through the garage door, they would simply find the new wall.
"She built this as a trap," Emile said as he looked at the wall. "The rippers would pry up the garage door thinking they were about to find a bunch of hopeless dweebs, and instead they'd find this wall and a couple of people firing crossbows over the top. She's just great! Give these kids some firearms and training, and I'll give you back a couple of captains."
Father Alvarez had more immediate concerns. He went to a bench of tools at the back and searched in the gloom by the light of a match. First he found a candle and lit it. Then he pulled a coil of rope from the wall and turned to their prisoner. "Please get in the chair."
The teen trembled with fear or cold. "What are you gonna do?" He was freckles and clear skin, pushing twenty with sandy hair cut into a faux-hawk. A tattoo of a snake rose up from his shoulder and licked under his ear—all the toughness and gangsta attitude had evaporated.
"You are sick." Father Alvarez pointed to the chair. "I will hear your confession."
"I don't wanna die. Please Father. I'm not Catholic. I don't need no confession. Can't you just let me go?"
"Get in the chair." Bertrand pointed his Glock at the teen's head. "Or I put you down right now."
He sat and Alvarez secured him, hands behind his back, ropes around his chest. Emile closed the pedestrian door of the garage, shaking at the bars someone had screwed over its window. "Not pretty but good and strong," he said.
"You have to cover the windows before sunrise." The ripper looked as if he might weep. "Otherwise I'll die."
"You already are dead." Bertrand found a large plastic paint pale—the five-gallon size—and pulled it over in front of the prisoner so the he could sit facing him. "What's your name?"
"Ted. Ted Walcott. Please don't kill me."
"I'm not going to kill you, Ted. But you need to tell me everything. Start with why you chose to attack this house tonight—why here?"
Ted looked left at Emile, who had taken a seat on another paint pail, but found an unsympathetic expression. He looked right to Father Alvarez, who had pulled up an old wooden chair splattered with paint, and found pity, which didn't seem to make him feel any better. He again faced Bertrand.
"Harrison, Steve Harrison—the guy she stuck first with her crossbow—he had a thing for her, see? I mean like she's hot but she never puts out, and she was a grade above in our high school but then she got into college and we didn't, so I guess her nose turned up even more. Then the boss said we each had to evolve someone every night, make a quota you know, and Harrison thought of her. Like that wasn't really the rules, 'cause we're supposed to find people who can adapt to the change—you know, people who want to live forever no matter what you gotta do."
"Murderers." Bertrand resisted the urge to immediately shoot Ted.
"No, no, it's not like that." Ted leaned back in the chair, apparently sensing Bertrand's anger. "See like it's just for a little while that we have to, you know, take people out to surviv
e. But when things get reorganized, when the new world order gets going, we won't have to kill anybody anymore because you guys will be in camps and stuff and will be donating blood, right? So we get this blood like at a blood bank and nobody has to die."
"You'll put us in camps!"
"No! I mean yes but it'll be for your own protection. Some guys don't adapt well see, even after the evolution. They go rogue and don't join with the rest of us brids, but just go hunting alone all the time—so see, it would be good for you guys to be in the camps. We can take care of you and all."
"It'd be better for us if you stopped making people into rippers."
"Rippers? You mean brids? We're not rippers."
Emile leaned in, looking like he wanted to hit Ted. "The fuck you aren't. What were you gonna do to that little girl tonight and her friend?"
"Hey dude that little girl is a freak, man. Harrison and some buds caught her parents in the alley like a month ago and fed on them. I mean, I know it's wrong and all but you gotta feed the bugs or it's just torture. So we figure she'll want to join and all, but Harrison says we gotta give her a few weeks so that she's not too pissed at him for doing her mom and dad."
"No shit," said Emile.
"Okay, I know, I know that it probably really sucks to lose your folks. I got evolved by my mom so I don't really know what it's like, but we figured a bit of time, and we even told other brids to stay off this street, that it was our turf, but we left her alone."
"So you killed everyone else on the street instead." Bertrand fought to keep the wrath from his face. Here was a sociopathic enemy.
Ted looked left and right to see how Emile and Alvarez were taking this story, but still found no sympathy. He nodded.
"That was the idea, but she's some kind of psycho general or something because the bitch, I mean, Bobs—that's her name, well, it's Roberta I think but everybody calls her Bobs—she like organizes the whole street, I mean the whole freaking neighborhood into forts. Most people used to hide out at the community center in the park, and it was like fucking Fort Knox, like they keep people on the roof with crossbows and a few guns and they got a generator at night for lights so nobody can get near there, and she set up houses like hers that are all bricked up, and they sort of act like outlying forts. It was so messed up that word came down from like the top, from the boss himself, and he says just leave this area alone for a while. Says pockets of resistance like this will be mopped up later and doesn't want to draw attention to them and all."
"So why are you here tonight?"
"So you guys didn't hear?" Ted couldn't keep the sly expression off his face, the pride. "Wow, they kept it off the news? The boss sent his, like, top general to take out the community center last night. He came with hundreds of brids with a grenade launcher and everything. The fodder, they put up a hell of a fight and Bobs was running around the roof. I tried to tell this general guy that she was the one organizing them and shit, but he wouldn't believe me. Said a nineteen-year-old girl didn't know crap, you know. I saw her a couple of times shooting down with that crossbow, but they had hardly any guns. The cops are our buds, right, and they've been rounding up guns for months to make sure we're good and all."
Ted suddenly seemed to be aware that the three men looked at him with a mix of horror and anger.
"Yeah, well, I guess it was kinda sad for like the families with kids and all. But Bobs was really smart at the end and even the boss's general was surprised. She let us break into the gym and a bunch of the guys ahead of me got really fucked up when all these gasoline bombs dropped from the ceiling onto their heads right in the middle of the gym. Like, she set people on fire!"
"I'm in love," said Emile. "This girl is fantastic."
"Yeah well a lot of my buds got totally like burned and messed up—just totally harsh. But I guess it was good for the fodder because they all bailed out the far side of the building while we were trying to figure out what the fuck had happened. Then the boss's general calls and says 'Go! Go! Go!' 'cause they're all getting away, but it's too late. Nobody wanted to go any farther into the building 'cause there might have been more booby traps, see, and by the time we get around the building they've all got out of the park and into the neighborhood, and that's when we find out that they've been preparing all these little forts see? So now we gotta pick them off one at a time, and they're really hard to break, and it was like nearly sunrise."
"My heart bleeds for you." Bertrand tried to configure what he'd seen tonight with what he'd just heard. Had she already set up the kind of organizations he wanted to set up? Was the burned-out shell across the street the "partner" house she spoke of? Were they choosing houses so that they could support each other through the night with cross fire?
"It's tough though, see." Ted looked shaky and thin. "When you get hungry the bugs are pretty harsh. They make you really hungry, not like missing one meal or so but just starving and starving. I'm so hungry." He looked around for mercy. "Maybe one of you guys could like do me a favor and give me a hit, you know? Just a little slice on your wrist and let me suck just a bit of blood. You'd be safe and all because it's outbound you know. There's no bugs in saliva so it's like AIDS, has to be blood into blood—or into your stomach really."
"My son." Father Alvarez leaned forward, the rosary clasped in his hands. "To feed you would be a sin."
"All due respect and all padre, but no way. Where does it say in the bible that you can't drink somebody's blood—I mean if it's all consensual and they don't get bled out?"
"To covet another man's possessions is a sin, and what possession could be more precious than one's own blood?"
"Please! I haven't tasted in a couple of days, and I'm so friggin' hungry. Just a little lick?"
"How often do you need to eat?" asked Bertrand.
"Well," Ted looked embarrassed now. "A good way to start your day, see? I mean a balanced diet is like every night. It used to be easy but people are starting to figure it out. They don't go out at night anymore, and you have to get them out of their houses and that can be tricky."
"Holy shit." Emile sat back, the .357 resting on his knees. "This kid murders once a night. This is a catastrophe."
Bertrand stood and walked over to the window in the pedestrian door. The first blush of purple edged the eastern horizon. He turned to face Ted. "Will the glass protect you from the sun? I heard it has to be full-spectrum light."
"Dude, I don't know. I just stay the hell away. I tried to go to the window the first morning after mom evolved me. The say everyone does, but my eyeballs just felt like they were melting and my head spilt with the worst headache of my life, so I went back to my room and hid under the bed all day. Next night I had the basement like totally ready, you know, windows boarded up and taped up so that we could party all day. Mom had already moved in with her boyfriend."
Bertrand sat in front of him. "You need to pray, okay? I figure you've got about half an hour."
Ted's eyes went wide and tears started. "No, please don't do this to me. I'm too young to die. Please."
"Terrance and Bobs in that house are also too young to die, but you were gonna do for them tonight, and we can't let you go or you'll kill, what, three hundred? Four hundred in just the next year? You're a mass murderer."
The tears were in full flood now and his head bowed into his lap. "You don't understand. The only way I can stay out of hell is to live. I mean I'm really sorry about all those people—especially Vicky, that's my girlfriend—was my girlfriend."
Father Alvarez looked up sharply. "Repentance is essential. Was she the first person you killed?"
Ted met the priest's studying gaze. "I didn't plan it, see. After I got evolved I talked to Harrison 'cause he was already up—looking for advice on how to feed and all—and he just suggested I get with Vicky like always, but that while we were doing it I should just prick her neck and suck a little bit of her blood, so I kept—like—a box cutter handy and did just what he said, just a quick little stab." He stop
ped. "Is this like a confession? Don't I have say some mumbo jumbo or something first?"
Alvarez shook his head. "Just tell me what happened. Tell me about your remorse."
Ted nodded. "She freaked when I cut her, but I held her and really apologized and said it was a kink that Harrison told me about, about sucking a little bit of blood vampire-like while we were getting off, so she went with it for a while because she's game for fun and all, but once the blood got to my stomach the bugs gave me the blowback—totally, totally awesome bang for the buck. At first she just thought I was being a rock-star lover, but I couldn't get enough blood fast enough and I still had the box cutter in my hand...." Ted's voice trailed away, and for a moment they all sat in silence. "I am going to hell, aren't I?"
Bertrand and Emile looked to Father Alvarez to answer that question.
"I believe you are already in hell and that only repentance can set you free. Let us pray together for the soul of Vicky and all the others you have murdered. Do you know the Lord's Prayer? I'll lead us."
He stood over Ted, putting one hand on his head—crushing down the faux-hawk— and holding the rosary in his other hand. Bertrand stumbled along with them through the prayer, remembering bits because one Sunday School teacher had drilled it into him for weeks until his parents decided that the class was too fundamentalist and pulled him out.
Over the next half-hour, Alvarez spoke several more prayers in success, one about Mary, something else about contrition and back to the Lord's Prayer, the rosary beads moving through his fingers to help him keep count. Bertrand sat and watched, mesmerized by the rhythm. It was like meditation, only with words to numb the mind. He'd never thought of it that way before, just viewing the beads as some sort of pagan device.
Father Alvarez stopped, kissed the crucifix and hung the rosary around his neck. "Do you repent the murders you have committed?" He placed both hands on Ted's head.
"I do." The tears started again. "I really do, especially Vicky. I never meant to do her, you know. I loved her. We talked about kids and everything."
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 19
