"Wasn't that like hundreds of years ago?" asked Bertrand. Could it really be true? If they defeated this guy would another just fly over from Europe or China?
"I told you if you've got the bugs you live forever."
"This could all be bullshit, Bert," Joyce said. "We can't take this guy's word for anything."
"No." Bobs took back all the photos. "But there is one good thing. We've got him prisoner. Vlad must think we're sitting the night in Billings like this asshole begged us to, but we're on the way. Better yet he thinks when we do show up we'll do a frontal assault on his hideout, but from these photos I've picked out at least three different entrances. We'll hit them all at once. That is if you still think it's worth it to get this guy."
Bertrand thought of all the people who could die tomorrow, but then the image of the bodies in the satellite photo shoved that aside. "We should drag every ripper in the mine the hell out, and save any humans left, whether this is the Vlad or not."
Emile had joined them sometime during the interrogation. "All right! Let's kill them all!"
"Wait a minute," said Joyce. "What if there's another spy with the Erics people?"
Bertrand heaved a deep sigh. "We're just going to have to trust Erics's judgment. His people just got to Billings yesterday and he sent good people to us in Chicago."
Bobs rolled her eyes. "Great. I'm with ya, but I'm not happy about trusting the judgment of a guy who turned himself into a frigging torch."
Bertrand shrugged. "What choice do we have?"
Thirty-Two - The Battle of the Mountain
In the dark Bertrand went from bus to bus, and from van to SUV after they had halted on Teton Canyon Road. Flat plains spread around them, but not far ahead a heavy bulk thrust out of the earth to occlude the stars and prove the mountains close. The plains were brutally cold, well below zero, but the spectacle of stars forced Bertrand to stop in awe several times and stare up at the heavens. These were not stars dimmed by city lights. The topographic maps stated that they were at four thousand feet above sea level, so these stars were more spectacular than when viewed from Chicago even during the most widespread blackouts.
But a flush of pink on the eastern horizon kept Bertrand hurrying to organize his little army. Murray, the Erics captain that Bertrand had first met in Chicago, would lead the Erics people from Billings grouped with the Erics from Chicago. It was their job to encircle the base of the mountain to look for secret exits and to fight in through any they found. Barry St. John and Martin Morley, the former McDonalds manager, would lead Barry St. John's construction crew into the lower of the three entrances. Joyce would lead her raiders, and Bertrand and Jeff would go with her, sticking together as promised. Bobs would lead her army of St. Mike's volunteers, which included her die-hard loyalists from the community center. Bobs's people chose blue armbands, and Joyce's red. Barry's crew went with red bandanas.
"We keep in touch by walkie as much as we can," Bertrand said on each bus and at each smaller vehicle. "But remember that once inside the mountain the rock will probably block our reception. Be sure to leave rear guards along the way and runners to communicate with them."
Grimes they handcuffed in the back of the bus.
"If we fail I'm sure his ripper buds will find him tonight and ask him why he didn't warn them that we were coming a day early," said Bobs. "If not I'll deal with him."
Grimes looked terrified.
As soon as the first tip of the sun broke the horizon, they started the engines and drove for the canyon. The mountains lunged up from the plain ahead of them, the snow pink with the rising sun, the young conifers growing wherever the rock allowed. The road had hardly been paved up to this point, but as they took the north fork, it changed to gravel, but thankfully the dry air hadn't provided enough snow to block the road even this late in the fall, and for the most part there was no snow except on the mountains, whether due to sublimation or a warm spell Bertrand didn't know.
They kept a sharp eye up the hills for ambush by a Daylight Brigade as they entered the canyon; a stream on their left still bubbled along, ice free except for in a few still areas where beavers had dammed. On their right, the layers of fractured sedimentary rock rose at sharp angles, demonstrating the power of the earth's crust to heave up what was once flat.
"According to the map," said Jeff, standing beside Bertrand at the front of the bus while Emile drove. "That's Wind Mountain on our left. When we get around this corner we'll be looking at Cave Mountain."
Emile hauled over on the steering wheel as they made a sharp turn around the shoulder of a hill. Suddenly, less than a mile away, a strong mountain rose two thousand feet above the road. It had many shoulders, and its peaks had been worn down enough that several competed to be the highest part of the mountain, although one on the north side—the side farthest from them—looked to be a bit higher than the rest.
While most of the mountain had a thin forest of spruce, the southern face of gray rock was too steep and smooth to hold soil or trees. Near the bottom of the bare slope, the rock had fractured and a deep cavity showed the natural cave that gave the mountain its name.
Emile brought the bus to a fork in the road where a folksy wooden sign with snow white lettering declared:
Lewis and Clark
National Forest
Recreation Area
Cave Mountain
Department of Agriculture
"There's the scout." Bertrand pointed to a black SUV that powered toward them on the left fork, crossing a narrow Bailey-type bridge over the river. It flashed its headlights and performed a quick U-turn to lead them back across the bridge. They followed it through flat approaches to the mountain, snow and ice on either side of the road now as they passed through swampy areas and thin spruce, the few hardy deciduous trees bare of leaves.
A new road gouged its way to their right, climbing straight through trees ripped away by heavy equipment and tossed aside. The road leveled in a wide area, which had been made into a flat pad with the use of hundreds of tons of gravel. On one side, six helicopters sat smashed and burned, clearly destroyed where they had sat rather than while in the air. Several pieces of heavy construction equipment, including a bulldozer and a Bobcat skid-steer loader had been spared the air strike.
"It looks like Webb got a hold of either Malmstrom or Minot and closed Vlad's escape route." Bertrand pointed at the helicopters, hardly able contain his excitement. "This is just great."
The superhero inside him rejoiced. Bertrand had felt that heightened inner strength for so long since Needleman's that he had come to accept it as his normal self, but in the last day it had grown much stronger. Was it a psychosomatic reaction to seeing Erics die? Was he stronger because he secretly believed Erics and so believed he must be stronger, or had his soul truly become denser?
Emile brought the bus to a halt and opened the door. Bertrand leapt from the bus.
People formed up quickly, easily over four-hundred souls all ready to risk everything. They were regular people. Some were teenagers. Some were middle-aged. They were all ready to die if they could just end this apocalypse and leave a normal world for others to repopulate.
Bertrand wanted to just run up the mountain trail that wound through the trees and rock, but Bobs hurried up and caught his arm.
"You have to say something to them, Bert. You have to inspire them."
"Time is everything!" But even as he said this, he knew she was right.
He turned to the crowd, standing uphill from them so that they spread out below him. He could see every face. It irritated him for a moment that Terry stood in front with a video camera. They didn't need another YouTube video. This was it! He ignored the camera and summoned his courage. Inspire them. Why were they there?
"The worst evil in the world," he shouted, "is in that mountain." He pointed up the hill behind him. "I intend to go and get him, kill him, and drag him into the sun or burn his stinking corpse. I do this for my friends, in memory of my parents, f
or my city and for the world. Will you come with me so that we can take back our world from the rippers?"
Their shouts of "yes" broke the stillness of the morning, and shouts of "The 1000 live on!" were added by the crowd on the right with the white armbands.
"Our blood may be spilled today, but not to feed the rippers!"
More cheers rose to the sky.
"Let's go now and do what must be done!"
He turned and charged up the hill.
Cheers and pounding feet told Bertrand that the army followed him, and he thanked the sunlight that he could be sure the rippers wouldn't be able to shoot at them as they ran up the trail, but he kept a sharp eye for the Daylight Brigade. Surely they'd fire down on them now?
But as the thin mountain air slowed his charge and robbed his lungs of oxygen, no shots forced them to take cover. They could have been the only people for hundreds of miles.
Men and women started to pass Bertrand now, for even though he had lost a lot of weight in the last four months, he was far from ready to start running races.
"Hold back! Hold back!" he shouted. He wanted to be first into the mountain, was exhilarated to be able to finally truly do something, to come to grips with the source of all the frustration and fear. This was why he had been born.
He needn't have worried. A square hole had been blasted into the rock as if a railroad company had begun work on a tunnel, the scoring showing that this was new work. Bobs led her people left, heading higher up the mountain for the natural cave. Bertrand ran into the mouth, but only a short way down the tunnel they found a cinderblock wall with a heavy steel door. Several people, including Joyce and Jeff, had already stopped in front of it, turning to Bertrand to see what he'd say.
"First challenge. I should've known they'd block the way."
Joyce waved her arms at her troops. "Everybody get to the sides of the tunnel. I have help coming along." She turned to Bertrand. "While you were making your speech, I was talking to my scouts. Emile's bringing up that Bobcat, and he says it'll go through here no problem, but we're not going to knock on the front door until everyone's ready."
She adjusted the microphone of her walkie and spoke, but an engine—growing louder by the second—buried her words. The small front-end loader rolled into the cave on its four big tires, Emile in the protective cage. He stopped and waited for Joyce's signal.
"Come on! Everybody get against the walls," Joyce called, running up and down the tunnel to push people back. "We charge in pairs right behind the loader. Take that side, Bert." She pointed to the right where Jeff already waited. "You and I will lead."
Bertrand pressed against the gray rock, feeling oddly like they were rehearsing for a wedding procession with Jeff as his best man. He checked his Glock for the tenth time that day and put it back in the holster. He pumped a round into the breach of the Winchester, trembling with anticipation. The enemy he had wanted to face at Needleman's so many months ago was here. The monster he'd wanted to attack against all odds at Goth Knights was here.
Joyce had one hand pressed to her walkie earpiece to hear, and Bertrand mimicked her so that he could listen in on his walkie.
"Barry here. I've got the cat lined up to smash our way in here. Let me know when to roll."
"Bobs here. My boys have put a whack of C4 on the door up here. Let us know when and we'll blow it."
Joyce looked across at Bertrand and he nodded.
"Go! Go! Go!" Joyce waved Emile forward even as she shouted into the walkie.
The Bobcat roared ahead, belching fumes and choking the tunnel with foul air. It slammed into the cinderblock wall and pushed it and the steel door well into the next chamber.
"St. Mike's!" Bertrand had no clue where he got the idea to shout this, but even as the words left his lips he knew a lot of the people behind him would identify with that call. Back at St. Mike's were their families, their children and their hopes.
He charged through the gap, stumbling on the cinder blocks but righting himself in time to avoid tripping, his shotgun pointing the way. He gasped on fumes from the Bobcat even though Emile had shut it down as soon as he had cleared the wall.
Florescent lights on the ceiling, two four-foot bulbs, illuminated the little white-and-black machine through a haze of dust thrown up by their violent entrance, so Bertrand shut off the flashlight he had duct taped on top of the Winchester. He hurried past the machine, staying close to the rock wall. Farther along, another florescent light, the cheap kind that could be found in any hardware store, lit the next section of tunnel, which curved off to the left. Dark shapes clung to the walls near the curve, and even as Bertrand took aim, muzzle flashes from the enemy lit the tunnel with dazzling staccatos of light, creating a strobe-like effect.
Gunfire in a tunnel is loud. Gun reports from their enemy blasted Bertrand's eardrums, let alone the blasts from his shotgun. He should be afraid. Battle and death is what people feared, but he had never been so calm in his life, burying the exhilaration to aim and shoot at first one and then another ripper.
It didn't bother him that they looked ordinary, that one man reminded him of his high school librarian, another of his bartender. Rock chips and ricochets flew around the tunnel, nearly as dangerous as the bullets that whizzed past. First one and then another of the rippers dropped, others fled back down the tunnel.
Bertrand was aware that there was shouting in his walkie earpiece, but even with the volume turned to maximum he couldn't hear much of what was being said. He caught the words "heavy resistance" once, and another time he was sure he heard Bobs shout, "Fucking pussies!" He was vaguely aware of Joyce shouting across the tunnel, waving people forward as the rippers ran, but he was now in his own deafened world, the slow thud of his heartbeat the only thing proving to him that he wasn't a robot.
And the rage. There was a rage building that had nothing to do with Vlad or the rippers. It was a rage fed by his sense of abandonment. How dare his parents die. How dare God or fate damn him to loneliness. He should have had years more with them, their guidance, their help. Part of him knew this was trivial compared to the dangers of the day, and maybe that's why it surfaced now.
"Come on!" He waved people forward as he ran down the tunnel, seeking to avenge his parents' random fatality. Jeff outran him and stopped to crouch against the wall and fire.
Bertrand waited until Jeff was reloading and ran past him, rounding the curve to find many more rippers, but even before he could shoot, many discharged their weapons and turned to run. He tripped, saving his life as dozens of poorly aimed bullets went over his head, although one tore at the shoulder of his leather jacket, but even this near miss didn't provoke fear. He was invincible. He would destroy them all. He would find Vlad and drive a stake through his rotten heart.
The tunnel wound down into the bowels of the mountain, rippers waiting at each curve, at each bend, Bertrand deafer with each gunshot. They fired wildly at him, but Bertrand's calm side remembered Emile's admonishment.
"You can't carry infinite frigging ammo. Make your shots count. Don't just spray and pray." That was Emile's often-repeated prayer.
One ripper, an older man when he had changed, stepped out in the middle of the tunnel, so bold that as Bertrand's shot took the man in the chest and dropped him, he had to wonder whether the man was committing suicide.
"Count your shots," Emile had said. Somehow, despite the chaos, Bertrand had been counting. Eight regular rounds. He could either draw the Glock and shoot with that or stop to reload, but he had no way to carry the shotgun. He should've thought of that, have made some kind of holster for it. With the barrel sawed short and the pistol grip, it would've been easy.
He stopped with his back to the rock, the gunfire from the rippers wild and over his head. Was it a trap? Were they just leading them in? He looked across at Joyce on the other side of the tunnel, who went down on one knee to drop the mag out of her Uzi and slam another home. He could see her shouting across the tunnel but heard her through the wa
lkie rather than over the gunfire.
"Don't stop! Keep them running!"
He would make love to her again, and it wouldn't be rushed and urgent and in a basement. They would take their time and he would get to know her body.
Emile's heavy bulk rushed past, followed by Jeff's lanky figure.
Bertrand fed the shells into his Winchester. Perhaps a gun with a magazine would be better right now, but he had become comfortable with the weapon. In seconds he was in pursuit of the others, and when they stopped to reload Bertrand rushed past them.
A face peeking around a corner warned Bertrand of a new danger. An intersection. If they ran through this, the rippers could fire on them from one side or the other. This was why he had brought grenades. Bertrand stopped a couple of car-lengths short, firing at the pale face to make the ripper duck and hide.
He yanked the grenade from his jacket pocket and pulled the pin, looking across at Joyce who had also stopped and taken out a grenade, shouting into her walkie.
"Fire in the hole!" She nodded to him.
Bertrand tossed his grenade at an angle and down the intersection tunnel on Joyce's side, and she did the same on his side; the paths of the grenades crossed and they nearly collided. Bertrand made a flash note of that. Next intersection, they shouldn't throw at the same moment, because if the grenades had collided they would have dropped right in front of them. Instead they got lucky and the grenades bounced down the perpendicular tunnels as intended. He put his head down and covered his ears and closed his eyes.
The explosions were brilliant and deafening, even with his eyes closed ears covered. He rose up and charged the intersection, but the explosions had thrown up rock dust that rose to create an impenetrable cloud. He breathed in the acrid scent, and it reminded him of the dust from a bag of unmixed cement that he and his father had poured into a wheel barrow when doing renovations in the back yard, before they'd added the water. He had complained that day because his father had neglected to purchase particle masks, but now he took great lungfuls, letting the memory of that sunny afternoon help him with his calm. Who cared about lung disease now, with bullets flying?
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 30
