The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF

unfriendly. He was so skinny he looked rather like a mop with all the hair and beard.
    Basil—that was his name, Basil Macintyre or Macintosh or something. He drank with Jeff a lot. He wasn’t treating her like an idiot for nothing, because now he raised the hammer, his eyes on Martin. Basil didn’t want her in the way of his swing.
    Martin’s next hand signal was clear: a finger in the air, sharply turned to point at the wall.
    Basil slammed the hammer into the concrete block with all his might. It took him three swings to smash into the block, not breaking through, but making enough of a hole on the outside of the block that Kayla could see into the manufactured core of the block below. Other hammers rang out along the wall.
    “Now quick, there.” Basil waved her back to the wall, grabbing the C4 and shoving it into the hollow core of the cement block below the one he had broken. He and Martin moved along the wall, reeling out wire as they went and urging Kayla with impatient waves to join them.
    “Now’s the time for your Uzi.” Martin put his back to the wall. Kayla and Basil took up similar positions on either side of him.
    Kayla let the fear rise as she unslung her Uzi and checked the mag: full clip.
    “You okay?” Martin’s question was more of an accusation.
    “I’m fucking great.” She chambered a round. He should just fuck off and let her deal with her fear her way. Already she could feel it changing to anger. How dare the rippers murder her family and ruin her life? Now she would make them pay, as she did every time she encountered them in a fight. Like she did the night they lost the manor house, when she thought she would die, when she thought Joyce had miscalculated.
    “Kill any ripper that moves in there, but don’t kill our raiders. Watch for armbands.” Martin pointed to the white armband wrapped around his biceps. Kayla had dressed like the raiders for this day: black shirt with a white armband.
    Martin moved out from the wall so that he could look up and down, checking the status of his other troops. They must’ve been ready, because he raised his fist to shoulder height and pulled down as if yanking on a rope. He barely had enough time to turn and crouch beside Basil before the explosions ripped out along the wall, sending chucks of concrete block flying out.
    The blast dazed Kayla for a moment, but Basil and Martin lunged up immediately and charged along the wall to the new hole, prompting her to run after them, more terrified of being thought useless than she was of any ripper that might be waiting in the college.
    The C4 had knocked a hole about four feet in diameter, and Basil widened it as he went through, kicking out a loose block with his boot. Kayla followed close behind, plunging into a world of white dust kicked up by the explosions and now highlighted with the sunlight that streamed through new holes. Shouts and gunfire echoed up down the corridor, and in less than a second she lost Martin and Basil in the white cloud. She ran toward the gunfire.
    As the fog thinned, she discovered it was not the light, airy college she remembered. Bones littered either side of the corridor, as if a great battle had taken place years before and no one had survived to bury the dead. Yellow paper drifted in the air, blown off the floor by the blast, perhaps term papers or the rough drafts of some graduate student’s thesis. A stench mixed with the choking scent of concrete dust, a stench that promised that somewhere nearby there were fresher corpses.
    A shadow emerged from the fog, a knife in one hand. Kayla aimed the Uzi and let the anger flow, but she was careful to search for a white armband.
    “Let me by!” It was a ripper all right, his clothing ragged, his face gaunt.
    Kayla fired into the ripper’s chest, one shot straight through the heart. He made a last desperate rush at her, but she sidestepped and tripped him as he passed. She followed up quickly, putting a second shot through the