"Wow." Joyce shook her head in amazement. "I mean, what can you say but wow. And the police didn't even bother to come around?"
"After last night I wonder how many daytime cops there are." Bertrand led the way out of the basement. "I just keep thinking about that command center."
After the tear gas had cleared out of the mobile unit, Bertrand had backed up the five-ton so that they could open the door. Joyce had gone in first and found bodies in uniform and plainclothes, policemen and woman who had been at work when Bertrand rammed the command center, but none of them looked as if they had died from the accident. There were gashes and hurts that could be attributed to the crash, but each corpse had had their throats cut, and all had clearly been bled out. It was the scene of a massacre by a powerful ripper.
"That police chief," Joyce had said. "The one Bertrand and I had so much trouble putting down. He did this rather than let them fall into our hands."
Jeff's voice brought Bertrand back to the present and dispelled the memory of the corpses. "Hey Bert, there's still beer in your fridge, and it's actually pretty cold—here." Jeff passed them both brown bottles.
They sat in the red booth in Bertrand's kitchen, Joyce's elbow just touching Bertrand's on the table. He found himself very aware of that touch, and wondered if she was oblivious or aware of his new found passion.
"To a moment of sanity." Jeff raised his bottle. "Now if only we had some chicken wings it would feel like old times."
Bertrand relished the cold fluid flowing down his throat, but he knew it would only make him sleepier. "Seems like a hundred years ago, doesn't it? If you told me last spring that you and I would be packing heat and doing house-to-house searches up the street for vampires, I'd have told you that you were smoking too much weed."
"If you'd told me all these houses would be empty," said Joyce, "I'd have told you that was impossible. How many do you think have died? We haven't come across a single living soul, ripper or human, all day."
Bertrand had wondered about that ever since he and Father Alvarez had dumped the teens' bodies. "I'm hoping that a lot of people did like Barry was planning to do, headed for the hills."
"But Barry's still here." Jeff pointed the top of his beer bottle at Bertrand.
"Only because he couldn't get out and then found out the border to Canada has been closed. There're a lot of places people could have gone, like Martin's family who got out early and are hiding at their cabin in Wisconsin." But the hand sticking out of the shallow grave on the beach flashed through Bertrand's memory. "But I admit it's got to be in the thousands. I could write a program to figure it out, but I'd have to know how many rippers we started with and when."
"The first Chicago Ripper murder I remember was right after Christmas last year," said Joyce. "That's when I bought my Taser."
"How many rippers did we start with?" Bertrand's question was rhetorical. "Vampires have been with us in legend for centuries, but they're supposed to be lone stalkers, so I guess the big question is what changed?"
"Red-eye jet schedules?" Jeff took a sip of his beer while he pondered. "Hell, for all we know it could be sunspots."
"Remember that guy, the one in the garage that we interrogated." Bertrand's ears burned self-consciously. He was still uncomfortable with being an 'interrogator.' It made him think of waterboarding.
"Yeah, the one who tried to kill Bobs," said Jeff. "The one you guys fried with the sun."
"What struck me was that he said we'd want to go into camps controlled by rippers, to protect us from rogue rippers. He said some of them don't adapt well to being rippers, that they prefer to hunt alone and don't take orders from ... whoever ... this Vlad guy I guess."
Jeff's phone chimed. "Sorry guys, it's Emile again. Hi yeah? Hang on." He looked up. "He's inviting us to spend the night in his blockhouse, says they've got the ground-floor windows bricked in, a new steel door taken from Home Depot, the works. Alvarez says they need every person they can to man these outlying forts. There's a bunch of them. You in?"
Bertrand shook his head. "I'm going to stay in Nolan's bunker again tonight. I've kinda turned his computer into mine, loaded my e-mail settings and stuff. I think I'm going to talk to this Vlad the Scourge tonight, and I want to get in touch with Erics."
"You shouldn't stay alone. Is the regular crowd staying there?" Joyce looked as exhausted as Bertrand felt, in fact Bertrand had wondered if she had been nodding off over her beer, for she looked as if she'd just been shaken awake.
Jeff shook his head. "Emile says that everyone's going to stay in these blockhouses to cover the church. Helen's going to be feeding the crowd there tonight." Jeff looked from Bertrand to Joyce. "Why don't you guys take a night off? You both look totally bagged." He turned back to his phone. "Hey Emile, I'm going to join you guys. I've still got my Ruger, but have you got any rifles I could use? Great. No, don't worry about Joyce and Bertrand, don't want to say over the phone, but they're good. See you in a bit."
He stood and pulled a couple of beers out of the fridge and slipped them into his coat pockets. "For the road," he said with a grin.
"Why don't you come with us?" asked Joyce.
Bertrand's heart sank just a little. The idea of spending a night alone with Joyce produced a rapid succession of erotic images, but there was no danger of an unwanted erection right now. He was just too tired. He did, however, fear that Joyce's concern was that she didn't want to be alone with him—didn't want him to make a pass at her. Well fine, he wouldn't. He needed her as a friend and a comrade-in-arms more than as a lover, but still, it irked that she wasn't interested in him. Had she guessed he'd fallen in love?
Jeff retrieved his open beer from the table but didn't sit. "Thanks for invite. But I left my laptop back at the church with Father Alvarez, and if the power really is up, I want to do some surfing to see if I can find out when this all began and see if we can guess where it's going."
"Listen." Bertrand stood now, also going for the fridge and the last four beers, handing two to Joyce for her pockets and pocketing the others. "You call us from Emile's before sunset so that we know you're good, and vice versa. Cool?"
Jeff presented his fist and they knocked knuckles. "Get some sleep before you talk to Mr. Anti-Christ."
No one laughed.
Twenty-Five - A Night at the Bomb Shelter
Dinner was romantic but the food was basic. Bertrand had boiled some pasta in Nolan's kitchen and found a jar of prepared spaghetti sauce—a meat and herb combination that wasn't bad for processed food. Joyce found some apples in the bottom of a pantry cupboard, and two of them were still okay, so she sliced them for desert. It was odd being in the house alone, but it was also a relief not to be jostling elbows for the first time in a two weeks. The sunset out the back window was a spectacular red, and they both commented that it was the most beautiful they had ever witnessed.
They did have a bottle of red wine, and they ate by candlelight even though the power was still on, keeping the house dark just in case the rippers, or just a rogue ripper, happened to pass down the street. Who knows how many from last night were roving their neighborhood, starving because the promised massacre at the church had been reversed?
They talked trivialities, inanities about their former lives, things that would have been important a few months ago but had been buried by recent events. Joyce spoke again of being raised by her aunt, then, before turning sixteen, losing her to the same disease that had taken her mother.
"My dad wasn't a bad guy, but after mom died he really didn't pay me much attention. He never got married again, but he was always on the make, whether it was selling a house or bedding the owner if she was hot. He loved divorce cases, you know when people were selling the house to split the assets. He got laid a lot with angry divorcees."
"And he told you this?" Bertrand poured more wine for her and then him. He wasn't trying to get her drunk and doubted that alcohol would change her mind about love. She was still all bristles and points.
"Bummer. But I thought you said your dad was dead too?"
"One too many drinks and his car finished him." She had a gulp of wine and returned to her pasta as if it was the most important thing in the world.
"Oh, right, I remember. I'm really sorry." Bertrand cursed inwardly that he'd brought up her unhappy childhood. What had he been thinking? Must be the booze— his head did have the haze of a good drunk after a few beers on an empty stomach.
"I'm not so much." Joyce twirled spaghetti onto her spoon, still turning long after it was ready for eating. "He always poked fun at me because of my weight, and it got worse after Aunt Rach died. He'd say things like: how's my little porker today." She shoved the pasta into her mouth.
"What a bastard!"
Joyce finished chewing before she replied. "He was, and not just to me. I don't remember what he was like with mom, but he was a creep to me. I used to just eat more to get back at him, and I knew it was self-destructive and all. I just felt like I had no reason to exist, no challenge, and that went on for a year or so after he died. But then I was stuffing my face in the cafeteria at college one day as the cheerleaders went by, and I thought, fuck it. I'm as hot as they are, and now that dad's gone I can just let it out. I signed up for my first fitness class the same evening and I've never looked back."
"Well you sure are hot now." Son-of-a-bitch! It must be the booze. Why the hell else would he say that out loud? She'd think he was making a pass at her. Bertrand braced for that angry glare, but Joyce actually smiled, meeting his gaze while she chewed another mouthful.
"You've done really well over the last few months, Bert. Even before the rippers, you must've lost twenty pounds, but I'd say you've lost another ten or fifteen just in the last month."
Bertrand's ears burned, but he straightened his shoulders, the alcohol inspiring him to puff out his chest. "I've been forced into a less sedentary job with lighter meals, but the hours suck."
They both laughed, but it quickly trailed off.
"So what about you?" said Joyce, the wine glass teasing her lips, her pasta complete. "Must've been a bummer when your folks died."
"Total, complete, devastating bummer. I was just hanging around after they died, trying to move on but not wanting to let go. Stayed in the same house, but one day I got crazy and reno'd the kitchen. It cost me a fortune, but I didn't care, because I wanted to change something but I didn't want to leave. Never went into my parents' bedroom except to dust now and then, until the night Destiny got all naked and tried to coax me in. Seeing her in my parents' bed was a complete turn off, by the way."
"You're not like my dad then. He'd have banged her on top of my mom's coffin if he'd had half the chance. My shrink used to say I should give him a break, that maybe sex was his way of dealing with grief, but I say bullshit. He didn't have that much grief."
Bertrand wondered what look he had on his face, because she suddenly met his eye and froze.
"Sorry," she said. "On about my dad again." She took a drink of wine, but Bertrand kept his mouth shut, sensing that she wasn't finished. "My shrink also said it's had a negative effect on my ability to form relationships with men." She studied her empty pasta plate now, her wine glass still close to her lips, ready to fortify her nerve. "She said that until I move on, past my dad I mean, I'll never deeply bond with another man." She let the silence hang.
"Well you made friends with me and Jeff, and we're both men."
"Yeah I did. It felt right, didn't it? Like fate, like we were meant to be a team."
"We make a good team." Bertrand reached for the wine bottle, but as he held it up he discovered it was empty. "Oops. I think I've had enough."
Joyce drained her glass. "Me too. Let's retire to the bunker and get some sleep before you call Mr. Anti-Christ. I am deeply and completely bagged. But Bert, I haven't forgotten that you asked me out for Thanksgiving. I still intend to keep that date."
Bertrand smiled, delighted that she remembered. "Me too."
They left the paper plates and cups they had used in order to save time on doing dishes. Bertrand had ceased to worry about landfills full of garbage—full of bodies, yes, he worried about that, but not garbage.
"So is there really ventilation down here?" Joyce had gripped the pull bar on the bomb shelter's door, but waited for an answer before closing it.
"Yeah, Nolan had to cut through a foot or so of concrete to put in a connection to the furnace. The other bomb shelter builders had some little pipe going to the surface and a pump to run it, but Nolan wanted heat and wasn't worried about nuclear fall out."
Joyce yanked the door closed and shot the bolt. "Still seems pretty cold in here." She had her Uzi slung over her shoulder, but she took it off and hung it by the sling from one of Nolan's gun racks. "I'm so keeping that forever," she said before turning away from the gun.
Bertrand took off the holster and his Glock, wondering how much more he should take off before bed: his shirt? His jeans? It wasn't as warm in here as the rest of the house, granted, but it wasn't that cold. Perhaps that was Joyce's way of telling him to keep his clothes on. He fought to keep the look of disappointment off his face, knowing that alcohol often reduced the barrier between thought and expression.
"Well it is a bit of a tomb, but we've got the sleeping bags so we should be good." He sat on the left-hand couch, unzipping the sleeping bag so that he could use it as a quilt rather than squeezing inside. Joyce did the same, but to Bertrand's surprise she got up and moved behind the right-hand couch, shoving it toward Bertrand's, forcing him to lift his legs so that they wouldn't get crunched.
"What the—" He looked up, hopeful but confused as to why she was turning the two couches into a double bed.
Joyce's cheeks flamed red and she didn't meet his eyes, looking instead at her sleeping bag as she opened it up. "It'll be warmer if we're close together."
Bertrand nodded, trying to find words that would make this sound normal, like he didn't feel an erection rising in his jeans to press urgently for freedom. "Yeah. It'll be good if it gets cold."
Joyce reached for the pull string of the light and snapped it off, plunging them into a complete blackness. Now the world only existed in sounds and touch, for no light penetrated the concrete and steel.
Bertrand listened with growing hope and alarm. What should he do, just go to sleep? What did she want or expect of him? The zipper going down spurred Bertrand's imagination: she was undoing her jeans. Clothing slid to floor, and feet stepped over the back onto the right-hand couch—Joyce's couch. Old springs creaked as she slipped under her sleeping bag, already opened and ready for her.
"Good night, Bert," she said, and more creaking hinted that she'd turned on her side, her back to him judging by the sound of her breath as she sighed in relief to be going to sleep.
Bertrand lay back for a moment to swallow disappointment. What had he expected anyway, to get laid even though they lived in the middle of an apocalypse? But she had taken off her jeans, he was sure of that, and he didn't relish sleeping in his, especially with the erection that wouldn't die. He undid his belt, the buckle clinking to announce his actions. Joyce didn't say anything, so he unzipped them and slipped them down, tossing them off the end of the couch. Fuck it, he'd lose the shirt too, because he preferred sleeping in his underwear. He sat up and yanked the shirt over his head, tossing it in the direction of his jeans. Sure, she might see him in his boxers in the morning, but this had been his personal trainer. She knew his body better than any woman alive, the size of his love handles, the turn of his shoulders—she knew it all. It just didn't matter. He turned on his side, his back to Joyce, and let the exhaustion bury the arousal. He fell into a deep sleep.
*
>
The hand on his shoulder had been there for some time before the fog of sleep receded enough for Bertrand to be aware. The warmth proved the hand's persistent grip, and Bertrand spent a few moments wondering why he wasn't afraid of this grip until he remembered where he was: the bomb shelter. Joyce had turned in her sleep, and her breath exhaled onto his biceps. Somehow during the night, he'd rolled onto his back and she'd turned to snuggle against him, perhaps for warmth, although Bertrand didn't think the bomb shelter was that cold.
Joyce's hand moved, shifting on his shoulder, moving closer to his chest. Oh my God, she was waking up, cuddled up to him! Would she be angry? Would she blame him? But wait a minute: she had pushed the couches together; she must be the one who moved toward him, for he was still on his couch. She was the encroacher on his territory.
Of course he immediately pitched a tent. That would be embarrassing if there were any light, and it might be a problem if she expected him to get up and turn on the light, but a quick glance at his watched proved it was only midnight, hours before their appointment with Mr. Anti-Christ.
So for now he could just enjoy the closeness, the scent of her, which he loved even though it had been days since either had showered, had deodorized. The pheromones had free reign.
Her hand slid to the middle of his chest and into his thin chest hair, and Bertrand began to wonder if it was a controlled movement, or if her hand just wandered in her sleep. Every muscle froze, because he feared waking her, breaking the spell of her touch. For a moment he could pretend they were lovers.
Fantasy turned to reality when her thumb and forefinger found his right nipple and gently tugged and pulled. His breath escaped in a rush of surprise and excitement: that was not the wandering hand of someone half-asleep and unaware of her actions. The touch had been carefully designed to arouse. But Bertrand had no idea how to respond. Should he turn to her now and sweep her up in a kiss? Should he let his hands wander to her body? He stayed frozen, but now with indecision.
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 24
