"Even though you have refused to take my survey to determine your soul, it is now clear to me that you possess part of the Dormant Hero soul. I have searched for others vessels of your soul, and they are emerging all over the world, but here in America yours is the densest. This density is abnormal and it is critical to fight the coming scourge of ages.
"You must understand that Believing General has risen. This is not an evil soul by intent, but by nature. It does what must be done, regardless of who must die and who must live. He has gathered others and has taken upon himself an evil task: to drastically cull the human population. That is why he has chosen this time of year to enact his plan. Food will be a weapon."
Bertrand sat back and shook his head in disbelief. It was so obvious, why hadn't he realized it before? "Jeff!" Bertrand ran up the cellar stairs. "What about the harvest? Are farmers harvesting their crops?" When did farmers harvest anyway? Should it all be in by now: wheat, corn—certainly fruits and vegetables?
Jeff looked as startled as Bertrand felt. "Crap, I don't know."
"They aren't." Sinclair turned from the window. "Even if they are, it'll rot in the silos or whatever. Think about it: why are grocery store shelves empty? At first I thought it was just a trucking problem, but if so why aren't farmers' markets open and doing a booming business? Why is no one stepping in to profit from this huge shortage of food? Because they can't."
"Maybe they are in smaller towns?" But even Bertrand didn't believe his hope.
Sinclair shook his head. "I went to Moscow and St. Petersburg back in the nineties. The reason there wasn't famine as the old Soviet farms fell apart is because farmers from as far south as Uzbekistan would take a train all the way north, carrying all the fruits and vegetables that they could as luggage and selling it from street kiosks. And it was cheap. No, farmers are inventive. There're thousands upon thousands of farms just a few hours' drive from Chicago, and yet we're scraping the bottom of the barrel for food. Those eggs we had this morning were taken from an urban farm where the owners have gone missing. As the numbers grow at St. Mike's, we can expect more canned food and less fresh food."
"We have to bring this to a resolution before the winter," said Bertrand. "We have to hunt down this guy, this Vlad the Scourge and put him down like you would a mad dog."
Sinclair sat and for a moment put his head in his hands. He wiped his face to clear his weariness and looked up. "You know, maybe I will have on of those beers, Emile. They'll be in short supply soon too." He accepted the beer, opened it and met Bertrand's gaze. "Bert, you've got to keep getting the word out, but it's too late to save the world we knew. All we can do now is salvage what we can and start to rebuild. Even if every ripper in existence spontaneously disappeared tomorrow, it's still going to be a very bad winter for humans."
Two contrasting figures came up the back steps to the deck. Martin Morley, the tall and fit manager of the McDonalds where Bertrand had spoken, and Barry St. John, the shorter, barrel-chested contractor. Both had heavy coats on, perhaps warmer than the chilly fall day called for, but good for concealing weapons. The former flower shop owner, Helen, came up the stairs behind them, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Alison St. John was beside her. All of them wore backpacks.
Jeff reached the window first, sliding it open. "What the hell? I thought you guys were all heading up to Canada."
"We were." Barry marched straight in, noted the beer in Emile's hand and headed for the fridge.
Martin slipped the pack off his shoulders. "There're police roadblocks on all the highways and they're turning everyone back into the city, 'for their own safety.' Lying scum. On most of the side streets they've got buses and trucks and cars all piled up together, and not from no goddamn accidents. They've been put there to block the way. They're building a wall around Chicago to keep people from getting out. Thank God I sent the wife and kids up to our cabin in Wisconsin last week."
Barry opened his beer. "I never figured it would all fall apart so suddenly." He took a drink, not making eye contact with his daughter as she and Helen moved into the living room and deposited their packs. "I should've got Alison out a month ago. What was I waiting for?"
"Who would think it would all mess up in less than a week?" said Helen. "Give yourself a break."
Martin took off his pack. "St. Mike's is crammed. We hoped we could stay here for the night until we figured out what to do."
"Of course," said Bertrand. "You can stay as long as you want." The house would be crowded. They couldn't all fit in the basement anymore, but they also had enough people for sentries—not that Bertrand planned to stay safe.
But Helen was studying Bertrand, her head cocked at an angle as if she were listening to a voice. "You're planning to go raiding again, aren't you boy."
Emile shouted, "Right now!" He laughed and drank.
"Actually I was going to wait until after sunset."
Several people spoke up in alarm, but Joyce cut through all of them.
"Not without me. In fact, I won't let you the hell out of this house unless you promise to listen to me. Emile told me that Father Alvarez saved your guys' butts last night, that you would have charged straight at them and never known that there were five rippers at the back of the house."
Bertrand looked to Emile, who shrugged without guilt. "It's true. You'd have made a mess of it if Alvarez hadn't made you stop and think."
He wanted to argue, wanted to point out how well it all worked out, but Bertrand remembered that superhero monster in his chest, the one that just wanted to charge recklessly into battle. "Fair enough." He turned to Joyce. "You can lead us if you think you can do better."
Joyce didn't look pleased or triumphant. She just nodded and said, "As a matter of fact I think I can." She looked around the room. "Whoever wants to go should get something to eat and then go pick up some weapons and ammunition from this guy's bunker in the basement. We'll leave just after sunset."
Twenty-Three - Massacre at St. Mike's
They wore dark clothing. They wore soft sneakers. They had Emile's walkie talkies with ear pieces so that they could keep in touch. They carried a lot of weapons. Emile had opened up his secret stash of guns in the basement of Helen's Flowers.
The first night they were careful, they found a house besieged not far from DePaul University. Over a dozen rippers were in front preparing to burn it when they arrived. Joyce split her people into two groups: one led by Bertrand with Jeff, Emile, Martin and Barry and another with her and the former cops. Helen stayed with Alison in the bunker.
Joyce attacked the rippers at the back of the house first, and when those at the front turned to respond, Bertrand attacked. It was a rout, and even though the house burned, a family with a young son was saved. During the day, Bertrand and several others fortified a house across the street under Barry's direction, stealing cinderblocks and mortar mix from an abandoned Home Depot so that they could seal all the ground-floor windows. Bertrand intended to use Bobs's tactic of mutually supporting forts. They gave it to the family to use, and that night the father joined Joyce's Raiders. Emile had given them that name with a laugh.
The next night they weren't so lucky, arriving at a house too late, the second floor already in flames and rippers inside feeding on a husband and wife. Bertrand had charged in at the screams, and the fight had been short and sharp, but not without value. Before the woman had died, she had pointed to a closet and whispered in Bertrand's ear, "save my son." Bertrand, his stomach pressed to the floor in an effort to stay under the smoke and heat, found a saucer-eyed boy, who lay on Bertrand's back while he crawled from the house. They took the child to St. Mike's, and he was placed in an orphanage that Helen oversaw.
The next night, they ambushed two different parties of rippers. A total power failure for the day apparently made it difficult for the rippers to get out the word of these ambushes. This time Joyce hit the jackpot: many people had taken refuge in both houses, so her ranks swelled. By now no one had any doubt who
should lead them into a fight. Whitlock came to join them, bringing his marine training and his teenage sons. Fish, the karate sensei, joined them and they found a safe house for his wife and two young sons. His nineteen-year-old daughter joined the raiders. Many others heard about them and flocked to their protection. The sunsets, oddly, were magnificently orange and red, even when there were no clouds to catch the dying rays.
Bobs visited them once, demanding Bertrand get online more when the power was up. "Who knows when we'll lose this tool to spread the word, and you're the god since you went viral."
Bert was forced to spare time to record messages warning about Vlad and the rippers, which Terry uploaded whenever the power was up. But each time the young man left, he would say, "This might be your last message. If it weren't for the fact that California is all rippers, the internet would be gone. Don't know how much longer they'll let it stay up."
Bobs loved what Joyce was doing and assembled her own little army with her followers from the community center and volunteers from St. Mike's. They went on house-to-house daylight raids, clearing basements of rippers and scavenging canned food for the church.
Within a week—between Joyce's Raiders and Bobs's Army—they had cleared Old Town of rippers. The power went back up for two days, but it was no reward. Twitter and Facebook suddenly came alive, and it was all about the 'terrorists' who were attacking at night, led by the maniacal Bertrand Allan, deemed by the news media as the greatest evil since Osama bin Laden. The rippers were being warned that they were hunted.
By the end of the second week, they could patrol for miles at night and come across no rippers. Whole streets in Old Town were fortified, but they had no news from the outside world other than what the ripper-controlled media fed them. Bertrand's greatest fear was the army. November approached, but no one was prepared to give much thanks other than for being alive.
It turned out it wasn't the army they needed to worry about. It was the Chicago P.D. who came to attack.
*
Dinner/breakfast at four p.m. was Bertrand's favorite time of day. They all crowded around the dining-room table—extended into the living room now with the aid of some pilfered folding tables—and ate as if they were a very big family. The food was usually simple, although Emile had successfully brought down a few Canada Geese that were late on their way south. People chatted, laughed and exchanged gossip, and Bertrand basked in the sense of family, something that had been absent from his life since the accident.
But tonight, Emile's cell phone broke the silence and startled everyone, its ring tone the Ride of the Valkyries. It was the ring tone he had chosen for Bobs.
"Yeah, whatsup?" Emile at first seemed happy to receive the call, but as Bobs relayed her news his eyebrows went up in surprise. "Okay, just keep it locked down and don't let the bastards in. We'll round up who we can and try to get there before sunset."
He slapped the phone closed. "The cops have surrounded St. Mike's and are using bullhorns, telling everyone to come out. They say the people in the church are breaking some new anti-assembly law the state passed last month, one that totally violates the frigging constitution."
Joyce said what Bertrand was already thinking. "But it's only a couple of hours to sunset. Why would they order them out now unless—"
"They're planning a massacre." Bertrand had never been so sure of anything in his life. "Before Father Alvarez can get organized to defend St. Mike's for the night, they intend to isolate them and hand them all over to the rippers. We can't let that happen."
"No shit," said Jeff, exhaling smoke. Helen had got him hooked on cigarettes again.
"Okay." Joyce turned to Jeff. "Can you pull up a Google map of the area around the church? Alison, Helen, would you please head out right now and call everybody up. Be sure to get others spreading the word. We're going to need more people than we've ever taken on a raid before."
Joyce moved to sit in front of Jeff's computer, studying the map. Bertrand resisted the urge to run out the door and steal the first car he could find to drive to the fight.
"Okay," she said finally. "We're going to need trucks, big ones. We come at the from three fronts in the dark."
"No," said Bertrand. "The rippers will be there by then."
Joyce shook her head . "Bert, we can't just charge in there without guns or people anyway, and it'll be a couple of hours before we can organize all that, so it'll have to be after dark anyway. Think about it: they aren't planning to arrest these people, they're planning to feed on them. Remember what Malcolm said, about you being designated fodder? This congregation has been designated fodder, and the only good news for them is that it means none of them will be made into rippers."
"But if we wait too long—"
"Give that little hellion some credit. She can hold them off for a couple of hours. My guess is that those daytime cops don't mind doing what their masters tell them, but I bet none of them will stick their necks out while waiting for the rippers to come out after sunset. They'll just keep them pinned up in there. We're the ace in the hole! I bet they think we're all at the church. They don't know that we're in the clear."
Bertrand stood and pulled out his cell phone. "But we need numbers if we're really going to make this work. We're going up against trained men and women, not disorganized rippers."
"Who are you calling?" asked Joyce.
"Erics e-mailed me the other day to say that he can make hundreds available to us at a moments notice. He sure as hell did at McDonalds Let's see what he can do tonight."
"Wait a sec there, Bert," said Emile. "Can we trust all those people not to give us away to the pigs? Oh, sorry guys, present company excepted, but trusting a couple of hundred strangers?"
"I'm only trusting one," said Bertrand. "So far, he's proved to be pretty clued in despite his wacky religion."
*
Bertrand hadn't expected a Skype chat, but Erics had already sent an e-mail wanting to be listed as a Skype contact, and for the first time, he and Bertrand met electronically face-to-face. Erics turned out to be old, very old. His accent was distinctly Jamaican, his hair and beard long and white. It wouldn't have surprised Bertrand if the man had appeared wearing biblical robes, but instead he wore a three-piece gray suit that a Wall Street banker would have been comfortable wearing in the 1980s.
"Hello Mr. Allan," he said. "I have great need to speak with you. My followers in Chicago warn me that a great disaster is planned for tonight."
"Are we talking about the same thing? Are we talking about St. Mike's?"
"Verily, we are. Good. You will go to their rescue, no doubt?"
"That's the plan, but we need more people."
"Marvelous. If I had any doubt that you possess a big portion of the Dormant Hero soul that doubt would be vanquished, but I was already convinced." He leaned forward, holding a carved walking stick in his hands for support even though he was sitting. "But now is our first great task, and I am ready. I have prepared squads for you, people who have heard my words and yours and are prepared to follow, even at great risk."
"What sort of people?" Bertrand couldn't keep the suspicion out of his voice. Leading a crackpot mob of religious fanatics could only result in a blood bath.
"Good people. You must remember that I have made it my life's work to catalogue and recognize the 1000 souls. For this task I have prepared companies, three of them, each numbering near one-hundred people, and each company has roughly equal numbers of fighting souls: there are warrior souls, brave souls, selfless souls and ralliers. The ralliers are sometimes the most important, for when the battle is failing they will rally your troops to one last great effort that can win the day."
Bertrand wanted to believe, craved to believe, but he feared a dozen or so hopeless sheep would show up rather than the hundreds promised. "How can you be so sure?"
"My friend. I have been preparing for this since my own soul became mysteriously more dense over a year ago. When all of my followers experienced this to one
degree or other, I understood the truth. Where were these soul portions coming from but other people, and why were the absorptions so obvious to the new hosts except because of violent death?"
Bertrand considered his options. "Do they have guns?"
*
Bertrand fought with the five-ton truck's gear shift, grinding the gears a few times before he was able to get the truck to roll forward. They'd found it parked along with three others at a public storage locker, a For Rent $19.99 sign painted on each truck. Emile had liberated the keys by smashing into the office, waving at the dead surveillance camera. For once, a power failure had worked in their favor, and Bertrand wondered if the office's alarm system came back on when the streetlights popped back to life an hour later. A beautiful sunset painted high cirrus clouds pink and orange and finally red.
"You sure you can drive this?" Joyce belted herself into the passenger seat, her Uzi machine pistol on her knees. Emile had given her one quick lesson and four spare mags two weeks ago, but since then they'd lucked out into a house filled with boxes of ammo. Who had collected it and where that person went was a mystery.
"Well it's not exactly my GTI, but I'll do my best."
Bertrand had gotten used to a shotgun to go along with his Glock.
"Nice choice, Bert," Emile had said, pumping the slide and checking the breach. "This is a Winchester 1200 defender. I don't know who sawed the barrel short and put on the pistol grip instead of the stock, but it makes it a good close-quarters-combat weapon—like for up close and personal with bank security guards." He gave a smile. "I'm pretty confident it was never used in the commission of a felony, but I wasn't totally sure, which is why it ended up in the hot inventory."
"Why is the power up tonight?" Bertrand asked as he turned onto Sheffield to head back toward Old Town.
"Isn't it obvious? They need it for the streetlights, so that if people make a break for it from St. Mike's like they did that night at the community center, they won't be hidden by the dark. It's cloudy up there now." She leaned to the side to look up through her window. "We may see some rain before long."
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 21
