The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution (38 page)

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."

"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?"

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.