Someone in the crowd started shouting, "One thousand. One thousand."
Others picked up the chant until the whole crowd shouted it to the sky.
"We've got to get out of here!" shouted Jeff.
But it was too late. The crowd charged.
Thirty-One - The Horror in the Mountain
Bobs flew off the bus like an avenging angel—a dark angel—her AR-15 firing three round bursts at the crowd, dropping the people closest to Bertrand. Terry and Emile followed close behind, but just as they opened fire, a pudgy man who had been running at Bertrand with an outstretched hand shouted, "Stop! Stop! We love you!"
Screams and shouts of horror that the crowd had not expressed at the death of Erics and his disciples now sounded, and within seconds the tide turned, the crowd retreating, some helping wounded or dead friends, others like the pudgy man begging them to stop shooting.
"Hold your fire!" shouted Bertrand at the top of his lungs, pointing his shotgun into the air.
But with the crowd in full retreat, their backs to the shooters, the order was redundant. Bobs kept the rifle leveled at the pudgy man, but she held her fire, instead marching to put her barrel right in his face.
"What the fuck is wrong with you people!" she shouted.
"It's a misunderstanding," said the man, his voice high and squeaky, his hands raised in surrender. "People just wanted to touch you, to feel your souls getting denser. Listen, I'm the mayor of Billings—was the mayor of Billings. We just want to help any way we can."
"This is help!" shouted Bertrand, pointing with his shotgun at the burning corpses. He counted the other bodies, the people from the crowd shot by Bobs and Terry and Jeff and Joyce—and himself. Seven more dead.
"It's all right," said the mayor. "The 1000 live on."
Rage and fear are a dangerous mix. Bertrand wanted to shoot him. "Get. On. The. Bus," he said instead, pointing with the shotgun.
*
Barry and Martin joined them on the front bus. They put the mayor in the first seat back and surrounded him so that they could all hear. His name was Ted Grimes, but in spite of the gritty name, he was effeminate for a balding, middle-aged man.
"Billings was lost months ago. I think the rippers raided into small cities like this before they hit you guys in Chicago, because all the news made it seem like everything was normal except for the real estate crash and the stock market. A lot of us hid out in the hills, and some tried to go over the mountains to the coast, but they came back saying there were roadblocks—border crossing type roadblocks right here in the U. S. of A. You couldn't go on unless you donated a pint of blood and signed a contract agreeing to do it every month."
"Every month?" said Joyce. "That can't be healthy. I get three months between donations."
The little man nodded. "Just when I'd decided to try heading for Grand Forks or Dakota, or maybe even Canada, Erics came with thousands of his people. They said they were making the way clear for you. That was just a couple of days ago. In one day they went basement to basement and pulled the rippers out into the sun, most of them shot dead first. It was glorious. They retook Billings, but there aren't many of us from the town left. There's a field to the east, and I seen the bodies: they're piled for acres, dumped there by dump trucks. They killed so many and they took so many away—west—I saw the trucks, people packed into them like cattle going to—"
Grimes broke down and sobbed.
"Pull it together, asshole," said Bobs. "I buried my parents and I'm not weeping every day."
"I lost my wife, three children and one grandchild," sobbed Grimes, looking up at Bobs in disbelief.
"Whoa! Whoa!" shouted Bertrand. "We'll add up the dead relative score later. Bobs, give the guy a break. Mr. Grimes, I'm sorry for your loss but you've got to bury your grief so that we can end this apocalypse now and begin to rebuild. So where are you with these Erics fanatics? Will they listen to you?"
"Yes. Erics said I contained a portion of the Jolly Leader and that they should trust me, but he said you and he are the same soul, so instructions and teachings from you are also from him. They believe you're him now. I kinda believe myself. Look what they've accomplished in Billings in just a couple of days. If only I'd known what was going on three months ago when people started disappearing, I could have got our own police to do something like go basement to basement, but by the time I became a believer the cops were all either rippers or dead."
"They go for the government and the cops first," Bertrand said. "It's not your fault, and I'm impressed they didn't get you."
"I spent the summer in the mountains camping." Grimes radiated shame. "I wasn't here for them, for my town, for my family. My wife and I ... since the kids left home things haven't worked out so well, see? She asked me to move out, so I went to our cabin out near Wind Mountain."
"Is that anywhere near Cave Mountain?"
Grimes looked up, surprised. "It's just up the road."
Bertrand turned to Joyce, who stood beside Bobs in the aisle. "We should aim to get to Grand Forks just before dawn in case the rippers own the town. Bobs, try and get a call through to Colonel Webb and ask him if we'll get any protection from Malmstrom."
"You won't." Grimes' voice had risen to a squeak. "The rippers took Grand Forks before they even took Billings. I found out the hard way trying to come back and barely got out of there alive, and only because I've got a four-wheel drive and I got the heck off the roads. I ended up coming through Helena, south of the Lewis and Clark Forest. It takes a couple of hours longer but it's a lot safer. Malmstrom's totally cut off and fighting with the rippers every night. During the day there's like this volunteer ripper army of cops and college kids and stuff that keep them bottled up. At first it didn't work so well, but I heard they're running out of jet fuel."
Jeff called from the driver's seat where he'd been keeping watch. "Bert, people are coming back."
Bertrand yanked Grimes to his feet. "You go out there and tell them that I'll speak to them soon, but in the meantime they're to keep the hell back from my buses."
Grimes hurried out of the bus and Jeff closed the door.
"So we camp here for the night?" he asked, not looking like he thought it was a good idea.
Bertrand shook his head. "We can't keep this a surprise if we take too long to form. We should drive on asap, taking as many of the Erics people with us as we can, and get to the mountain before dawn. They won't expect us to arrive during the middle of the night."
"The Erics people?" Bobs looked outraged. "You still want to hook up with these lunatics after what that freakazoid just did?"
"Yes, yes, yes." Bertrand fought his frustration with the arguments. "You're the one who said we need to encircle an entire mountain. That means numbers, right?"
Bobs nodded. "Okay, you got me there."
Joyce spoke up. "But if we arrive in the middle of the night, rippers will be out and can see us coming. Buses are loud and we're going to need headlights."
"You just heard him: they've got daytime help. Once we start driving up that isolated mountain road—what's it called again?"
"Teton Canyon Road," said Jeff. "They could ambush us in the mountains and rain fire down on the buses. I don't like this."
"I thought it was open prairie until the last few miles." Bertrand turned so he could see Jeff. "Didn't you Google terrain it before we left?"
"I did, and it is. Wide open ground until the last few miles."
"Good, then we drive through the night and hold up a few miles back in open ground. At the crack of dawn we start up and drive in."
"How do we get the Erics people there?" asked Joyce.
"They got here just a couple of days ago, so they must have rides of some kind, maybe buses like ours to move that many people. We've got our generators and pumps, so we'll help them get fuel from gas stations on the way."
Joyce looked pensive. "Bert, what if we suck all the gas stations dry? How are we going to get back?"
"We'll worr
y about that tomorrow night."
Joyce nodded and pursed her lips together, and the bus went silent, because the unspoken hung in the air: if there was a tomorrow night.
*
The Erics people did have buses, and vans, and SUVs. Joyce organized them into a convoy, with Bertrand's buses following a dozen SUVs, followed by the buses of the Erics army, followed last by more SUVs that could run information to the front of the column if necessary.
Jeff drove the bus, relying on the GPS and going by Grimes's southern route that took them far from Grand Forks and Malmstrom Airbase. Emile squeezed up and down the bus making sure people had properly cleaned their firearms. No one slept.
Bertrand and Grimes sat together, and Joyce and Bobs knelt on the seats in front of them so that they could face back and plan.
"There's only one entrance to the old mine and it's pretty hard to find," said Grimes. He'd initially begged them to stay overnight in Billings, apparently afraid of the highway after sunset. Then he'd suggested he drive his own van, but Bobs had insisted he ride with them and Bertrand had agreed. Having someone who knew the mountain was better than he could have imagined.
"How did you find this mine if it's so hidden?" As Bobs spoke, her friend Terry stood behind her, busily clipping away at her long hair. Bobs wanted short hair for the fight so that enemies would have less to grab if they got close.
"I was hunting up that way last year," said Grimes. "Lucky thing is it's not a shaft you can fall in but a drift. They found a vein of copper and they just followed it into the mountain, winding down and up and anywhere it took them. There's no railroad tracks or anything like that, because they just hauled the rock back with wagons and mules."
"So you've been in there." Bertrand could hardly contain his excitement. "How far in does it run? Are there caverns?"
Grimes shuddered and his voice rose an octave. "I didn't go far in there. It's real spooky, even with a good flashlight. Stuff got left behind, tools and stuff, and every corner I turned I expected to run into a body or something."
"But it's just got one entrance." Bobs said this with a tension that caused Bertrand to look over at her. Bobs's eyes had that ferocious look—that attack look Bertrand had come to know. What was she on about?
Grimes didn't know her and blathered on without sensing the danger. "Just one. It's going to be really hard for you guys to fight your way in, even in daylight."
"You're not one of the 1000 Souls." Bobs's eyes bored holes into Grimes's face, but still he was oblivious. "You even said yourself that they just showed up a couple of days ago. What brought you back to Billings, a city you said was controlled by the rippers? I'd have stayed in the mountains myself."
At last Grimes understood that this had become an interrogation, and his whole presence sharpened like a deer that hears an engine from around a curve on a highway.
"I was out of food!" It was a protestation of innocence.
"A hunter, in the mountains and you're out of food? You prefer to drive six hours into a ripper town and jostle elbows with the Daylight Brigade to clean out the grocery stores of canned food?"
"I'm not a really good hunter. I'm too fat to climb the hills these days."
Bertrand now smelled the rat and he admired Bobs's sense. He should have seen these inconsistencies.
"Anything else Bobs," Bertrand asked, because she had the look of a prosecutor who has yet to play the trump card.
"Terry." Bobs gave her friend, her lieutenant, a glance that spoke more than words could. He put down the scissors and started rummaging through a portable file folder while Bobs turned back to Grimes. "So you were up there all summer, right? Your cabin's near the road, right?"
Grimes definitely sensed his danger. "I'm not that close to the road, really not that close."
Terry pulled an eight-by-ten printout of a satellite photo from the folder and passed it to Bobs.
"These are sat photos provided to us by the Illinois National Guard. Show me on this photo where your cabin is." Bobs leaned over the seat and held out the photo but didn't let go.
Grimes hardly looked at it. "Oh, you can't see my place here because it's way under the trees."
"Bullshit!" Bobs's shout galvanized attention on the bus. "This whole area got logged out years ago. All that nice green we can see on the sat photo is new growth way less than a hundred years old, so they aren't big enough to hide a house."
"It's a really small cabin!" Grimes's voice had risen an octave.
"Is this your place right here? The one with the nice new metal roof?"
Grimes looked at the photo this time, but Bertrand noted that the man's fat fingers trembled as he reached for the paper. "Oh yup. I guess that is my place. It's just so nice and treed I figured that they were all over the house."
"Right by the road. So how come you didn't notice this big drill rig go by in July?"
Terry passed Bobs another satellite photo showing several vehicles at the base of Cave Mountain. She pointed to the yellow rectangle as she spoke. "Or how about all this waste rock that just appeared in August? Did you notice that?" She pointed to a scar through the green on the side of the mountain.
"I never go up there." Grimes's eyes were wide and his voice had managed to rise even higher.
"Not since you found the entrance to the cave."
"Like I said, it's spooky."
"And you never saw this cattle truck full of people go up the road?" She handed him another photo, and Terry began feeding one after the other that she passed on to Bertrand and Grimes.
"Or this one. Or this one. Or this one, you lying shit!"
"No! No! I just don't pay much attention to the road. I like music and I play it real loud when I'm lonely."
Bobs looked to Bertrand. "My folks had a cabin in Wisconsin, and I can tell you that if one truck—let alone dozens—went up the road during the summer we'd have noticed. This guy's in with the rippers."
"I am not!" Grimes shook his head wildly.
Terry calmly handed Bobs a .45 and she shoved the barrel against Grimes's left nostril, pushing his head back painfully.
"No, no, no! Please! It wasn't my fault. I can still help you!"
Joyce took a hold of Bobs's gun arm and gently pulled it back, but when it was clear Joyce punched Grimes in the face with enough force to provoke a nosebleed.
"Jesus Christ!" shouted Grimes, pressing his fingers to his face, somewhat muffling his protest. "Why'd you have to do that?"
"Because you're leading us into a trap that's designed to kill us all," said Joyce.
"No!" But he saw the look on Joyce's face. "Okay, wait, wait!" He held up one hand to ward off another punch. "Okay. It is a trap, but if you guys would just give in and join with the rippers you could all live."
Terry passed Bobs another photo.
"Like these people?" She passed it to Bertrand.
It took him a minute to resolve the grainy image because it just looked like another scar on the side of the mountain like the pile of rock, but a human torso and legs stuck out from one side, and Bertrand sucked in his breath. "There's got to be hundreds."
Bobs handed another photo. "That was from last week." She said. "If you flip through these you can see it growing all summer. They didn't even bother to hide the bodies. They just dumped them out their back door."
"Please!" Grimes still had one hand clamped over his nose, the blood leaking between his fingers, his voice nasal in tone. "I had no choice. I was in one of those trucks! You can't imagine it! They rounded us up like cattle right out of a city hall meeting. My own chief of police waving a gun in my face and telling me I'd been declared fodder. I didn't even know what that meant, and then they stuff us into the trucks and drive all night to Cave Mountain. Even in July that's a freezing ride and the only good about being packed that tight was that it helped us stay warm, but there was nowhere to go to the washroom or sit down and people were sick and then we got there."
He stopped weeping now, and someone from
farther back in the bus passed him a box of Kleenex. He took a moment to stuff two of them into his nose to stop the bleeding, but hurried on when he saw the look on Joyce's face.
"They spilt us up and told the men, guys like me, that we could volunteer for the Daylight Brigade or die. You have to understand, if you're in the Daylight Brigade you get a lot of rewards like good food, pick of the women, booze and drugs." He saw the look on Joyce's face. "It's good for the women too, 'cause if they can get pregnant they don't get bled out. You just have to do your job during the day, and you get all that at night. And you get to live forever. If you get cancer or you get old they'll make you into a brid and the bugs'll cure you of anything. They can find and rip cancer cells right out."
"So that you can murder people." Bertrand's voice was low, but the rage was high.
"Wait Bert." Joyce put out one hand to stop him from attacking Grimes. She knew Bertrand well. "We can use this. Tell us about Vlad. Why's he doing this?"
"Which Vlad?" Grimes looking genuinely puzzled.
"Vlad the Scourge, the frigging Anti-Christ himself."
But Bertrand had a different question. "What do you mean, which Vlad?"
"Don't you guys know?" Grimes looked to each in turn. "There's like a thousand or more all over the world. There's Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Angry. In India he goes by the name of some Hindu god, in China it's some ancient horror I don't even know what. You people have just got to join them. They're remaking the world."
Bertrand resisted the urge to hit the pudgy little man. "Which one is at the mountain right now?"
"Vlad the Scourge. He's the guy for North America. Some say he's the guy and that the others are his disciples. God, you guys don't really know much, do you?"
"Educate me." Bertrand had to fight to keep his voice calm, his anger in check.
"One of them his the real Vlad, the Romanian prince that Count Dracula was based on, only he wasn't a count, see? He was a prince—he makes a big deal about that—and he fought the Turks like crazy. He's patient zero, the guy who started all this and spread the disease all over the world."
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 29
