The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (14 page)

"Everyone dies." Bertrand stepped toward them, the crucifix held high like a talisman against evil. "I'll die. You'll die. Everyone."

"That can't save you." But the teen looked uncertain. "It's not like the horror movies, you shit head. We're not afraid of crosses. We've got the bugs. We're symbiots. Just 'cause the sun'll fry the bugs doesn't mean we're scared of a lump of metal."

They couldn't go out in the sun? Bertrand tried to process this information, hoping to cram it into his cult theory and failing. He decided to put all that aside for later, because now was the time for struggle.

"Then come and touch it." Bertrand tipped the crucifix slowly forward until it was only head height off the floor, but to ease the strain he slid his hands closer to the middle of the pole, the center of gravity.

"You dumb shit." The teenager stepped forward, pulling out a switchblade from his baggy jeans and snapping it open. "I'll touch it, no problem, and then when you get it too late that a cross ain't no weapon, I'm going to cut your throat open."

Bertrand tensed, focusing all his energy and concentration into the crucifix. He remembered all of Fish's lessons, breathing to calm, channeling his energy. All the power had to come out through that crucifix. The kid stepped forward, trying to swagger and just looking afraid. Now that he was close Bertrand could see the peach fuzz, but oddly no acne. The boy stretched his arm high, glanced back to make sure his friends watched, and placed his hand firmly over the body of Christ, his fingers closing around the image's throat.

"See." The kid met Bertrand's stare. "Fucking harmless lump of metal."

Bertrand unleashed the power with his loudest karate scream, pivoting the pole of the crucifix on his right hand so that the figure of Christ swung up into the air and the lower end of the pole drove between the teen's legs.

"Ah, FUCK!"

Apparently they could feel pain. The teen fell and writhed on the ground. One of his friends charged forward with a knife, but Bertrand now held his weapon like a pole vaulter. He charged, slamming the friend in the chest with the base of the pole, driving him back off his feet as a gush of wind escaped the kid's lungs.

The third teen pulled a handgun, and Bertrand backed up as if distance could help. He should drop the crucifix and grab for his Glock, but there was no time and he panicked, freezing with the crucifix held in front as if it could ward off bullets.

"Shoot him in the gut. Save the blood!" shouted the leader from the floor as he struggled to rise.

A gunshot slammed Bertrand's ears, echoing from the walls and the vaulted ceiling as the teen with the gun dropped to the floor. A hole in the center of his T-shirt was oozing red.

Where had that come from? Bertrand looked left and right until he saw the shooter approaching, causing him to freeze again, not with fear this time but shock. A priest approached, his black cassock pushed forward by a middle-aged belly. He had a rifle presented, and as he approached he aimed it for the fallen leader.

"No! No! No!" shouted the leader, but the priest pulled the trigger and the teen's head jerked back, a hole appearing in his forehead, blood splattering behind on the floor.

The last teen, the one Bertrand had spiked in the chest, rose and ran for the back of the church. The priest took steady aim and fired, hitting the teen in the back and causing him to spill forward onto his face, the momentum from his run sliding the boy several feet along the polished stone floor after he had died.

The priest turned to face Bertrand, but his eyes went to the crucifix above Bertrand's head. "Forgive me, father, for I have sinned."

He knelt and laid the rifle aside before crossing himself to pray.

After five minutes, the crucifix grew very heavy in Bertrand's hands. How did those little altar boys manage this thing every Sunday? Bertrand didn't want to disturb the priest's prayer, since the man was probably—hopefully—going through an emotional trauma after committing a cardinal sin three times in less than a minute. Bertrand stepped backward as quietly as he could and placed the long pole of the crucifix back in its holder so that it stood once again on the right side of the altar near the pulpit.

He watched the priest for another few minutes, letting his own heart rate slow. The man was not old, but he was definitely over forty. His dark curls were thick and natural, salted with gray, but his face was very clean-shaven and his skin tone whispered of the Mediterranean or Central America, somewhere exotic and more temperate than cold Chicago.

Bertrand didn't want to hurry the man, but three bodies lay in the aisle, and unlike the vampires of the movies, they weren't getting up. Just when Bertrand had decided to at least pull them away to the side, the priest crossed himself and stood.

"I'll need your help to get rid of the bodies." The priest's accent hinted at Spain or Latin America.

"Father, shouldn't we be calling the cops? I mean, if you are really a priest you'll be a great witness."

"I'm sorry." The priest extended his hand. "I really am a priest, and I'm the new pastor of this parish. I'm Father Pablo Alvarez. I apologize for my abruptness, but you saw what they were, and so it is too dangerous to trust with the police."

Bertrand shook Alvarez's hand. "Okay, I just gotta ask: do you always wander around your church with a rifle?"

Alvarez picked up the rifle and hung it over his shoulder on a well-worn sling. That was Bertrand's first clue that this was a very old weapon.

"One of my parishioners gave it to me after saving my life. Please, we need to get rid of the bodies. Sometimes my sheep flee here at night, and I must guard them against these devils. That's why I carry a gun now." Alvarez stepped forward and placed a hand on Bertrand's shoulder, meeting his eyes. "We are at the end of days here, but I can't hide and pray. I watched people do that in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas or the Contras were coming, and it is not helpful. God helps those who helps themselves. Hurry, grab this boy's feet. Later I will pray for his damned soul."

Moving a body was more difficult than Bertrand ever imagined. It was heavy, there were no convenient handholds and it had a tendency to shift its weight in unpredictable ways. But Father Alvarez proved he was still strong, and there was a toughness to the priest that spoke of deprivation and hardship endured, the kind of life middle-class Americans hadn't known since the dirty thirties.

They shoved the bodies into a closet in the basement, and then they mopped up the blood with janitorial mops, cleaning up the stairs and finally back to the altar. All the while, Alvarez kept the gun slung over his shoulder, and the comfort with which he wore it didn't fit with the typical training for a priest.

Afterward Alvarez insisted Bertrand come back into the rectory. "You cannot go out at night without great reason. It is far too dangerous."

He led Bertrand to a small kitchen, one that looked as if it had last been renovated in the seventies, and installed him at a Formica-topped table. Alvarez had said very little so far. When he put the gun aside in the corner, it was again a movement too familiar, too practiced.

"You've used a gun before—a lot," said Bertrand.

Alvarez nodded as he ran water into a kettle, but he didn't look back at Bertrand.

"I was with the Contras in Nicaragua."

Bertrand tried to remember who they were and when they had existed, but Central American history had never been part of his studies.

Alvarez snapped on the gas stove and turned to Bertrand. "That was before you were born. We were guerillas and we fought the Sandinistas."

"Wow, I mean, I don't know who the Sandinistas were either, but you must've been young."

"I was sixteen and very foolish. There was no need for that fight, and I watched many die. Later I turned my back on the wars of men and sought God's forgiveness."

"But now you're again killing men."

Alvarez turned and opened a cupboard, reaching up for mugs and a box of tea.

"Those were not men. They're devils—blood drinkers—vampires."

"Murderers, yes, I'm sure of that, but supernatural vampires? One kid put his hand right over the crucifix and he didn't bat an eye, much less look afraid."

"One needs faith to fear the symbols of faith." Alvarez dropped tea bags into the cups. "But even then, these are not the vampires of legend. They are very real."

"But those kids, how can you be so sure they were vampires. I saw the knives—no doubt they were going to cut me, but that makes them rippers just like the Chicago Ripper. It doesn't make them vampires." But even as he said this, Bertrand remembered the teenager saying he couldn't go out in the sun or "the bugs'll fry." What else had he said? Something about feeding on his parents.

"My flock comes to me with their fears and confessions. One man begged forgiveness for murdering people and drinking their blood. He said he had to because he was starving. He said he'd become a vampire."

"Okay but—"

"Wait. After he received his absolution, he left the confessional. I realized too late what was happening when I heard him shout to God, 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.' I rushed from the confessional but it was too late. He shot himself through the heart."

"Okay so he was nuts—"

"I've known him for years, and I can assure you that he was a man of God and very sane and practical. He worked on our fundraising and was preparing to join the lay clergy. You must open your eyes to what is going on around you."

The kettle whistled.

The two men sat in silence with their tea. Bertrand kept replaying Nolan's theories about blood drinkers, trying to rectify it with the teenager's hints about feeding and fear of the sun. "They're not horror movie vampires," Bertrand said after his last sip of bitter tea.

"No. There are far more of them than in the movies."

Just after sunrise, Father Alvarez brought his rusting Jeep Cherokee around to a side door of the church, one on the laneway and discreet. They shoved the teens into it—Bertrand sweating despite the cold—and Alvarez drove them to a golf course on Lake Michigan. He had brought shovels, and they dug a shallow grave in the beach sand. Once it was deep enough, they dumped the bodies out the back of the Jeep and covered them up .

Farther up the beach, a hand was sticking out of the sand. Bertrand pointed to it. "Did you do that?"

Alvarez shook his head. "No. One of my parishioners, a jogger, discovered that they were burying thousands all along this shore. Another says that bodies are in parks everywhere, hardly buried, and others are in the graveyards. One man who works in a graveyard told me that a fresh grave may contain as many as ten bodies—no coffins, of course. The police don't go to these places anymore. They don't investigate murder. No one comes to the beach. You must be very careful who you talk to."

Bertrand rode with him back to the church but elected to walk from there to his home. He needed time alone, and walking quickly in the cool air, the collar of his leather jacket turned up, helped clear his brain. He needed a shower and he needed to think. Should he call in sick? He hadn't even had a chance to look at the hacked crime statistics.

As he passed a Chicago Tribune box, he noted a screaming headline about the accelerating housing crash, the second in less than a decade. At another time, Bertrand might have kicked himself for not selling his parents' home sooner to get the maximum value, but Father Alvarez's words just kept coming back to him: "We are at the end of days." Real estate prices probably didn't matter.

The shower was hot and Bertrand spent a long time washing off the guilt. Were those three kids really going to kill him? Should Father Alvarez have just threatened them with the gun, driven them away? But the teen with the gun, he was going to shoot, and the leader had ordered a shot in Bertrand's belly. Don't waste the blood. By the end of his shower, Bertrand had no doubt that Father Alvarez had been right to kill.

The bathroom light failed just as he turned off the water, and it didn't take long to determine that the power failure was at least street wide. Gathering clouds promised rain and made the interior of the house gray and dull. Bertrand and the city had become used to these frequent blackouts, but the mayor's excuse that it was related to adding "green energy" to the mix of power supplies was getting thin.

McDonalds seemed like a good bet for a late breakfast, because the enterprising manager at the franchise closest to Bertrand had brought in a trailer-mounted generator—a big one—that continued to power his restaurant through these power interruptions. Bertrand was on his way there when his cell rang.

"Bert." Jeff's voice was hushed, anxious. "Don't come into work. There're cops everywhere and they've got a thing for you."

"What?" Could they have found out about the murders in the church? Did someone see them dumping the bodies?

"Yeah. Someone hacked in the Chicago P.D. website from Malcolm's computer, but it was at eighty-thirty yesterday morning. Bert, dude, everybody knows that Malcolm doesn't work during the day and you started early. Where are you anyway?"

"I was planning to call in sick today."

In the background a barista shouted, "Order up on a double latte."

"Jeff?"

"You're not really sick though, are you? Like, Malcolm sick?"

"No, no. I just had a bad night is all. I thought I'd head over to ronnies for an Egg McMuffin and hang out at my place for a bit."

"Don't go home. I don't like the way the cops around the office are talking. They didn't even want to let me out for a Starbucks run, but Whitlock shouted them down by pointing out that I got to work late yesterday morning. He even showed them a note in my file. Bastard wrote me up for that, even though I told him about the power killing the 'L' for half an hour. I can't afford to lose this job."

"Yeah, well I'm beginning to think I might quit."

"Aw, no. It'll be miserable around here without you. Who's gonna teach me programming? I can't handle these support calls forever."