Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (26 page)

She gagged. It was in her mouth, her eyes, up her nose. She gasped and heaved the body off to the right, vomiting onto the street just as the legless creature caught her head in both hands from above. It came in with its teeth.

A black boot pinned the thing’s neck to the pavement, and a rifle muzzle shoved in its ear blew its head apart.

Carney grabbed Skye by her pack straps and hauled her up, tossing her over his shoulder. She couldn’t resist, could barely breathe, retching as her fingers dug at her eyes. Carney carried her to the open driver’s door of the Bearcat and shoved her up and in, then climbed in after her.

TC was back inside and dragged Skye into the rear. Still she could only choke, her vision blurred. The inmate propped her against a stack of twelve-pack sodas, and sat on the bench across from her. Carney got the Bearcat moving again, driving over both walking and fallen bodies, accelerating away from the church and into the Oakland neighborhood.

TC handed Skye a bottle of water and a rag. She immediately got it wet, scrubbing at her face, washing out her eyes and nose, gargling and spitting, wiping at her teeth and tongue. TC watched her closely, saying nothing. When she was done she looked around, eyes darting. The back of the truck was filled with survival gear, food, and weapons, but no human heads. Across from her was a tattooed wall of a man with crazy eyes and a wild grin, staring at her as if she were an exotic zoo animal. She didn’t know where her pistol was, and the machete was gone. The rifle, still hanging on her chest, was empty. She’d never get a magazine in before he was on her. She snatched the boot knife from its sheath and pointed the blade at the man.

“Easy. I’m TC, that’s Carney. What’s your name?” the tattooed man asked.

“It sure isn’t
bitch
,” she said tightly. She saw the door at the back of the vehicle. Could she get out before he caught her? No way. She was sure she could stick him if he made a move toward her, but he was wearing a lot of body armor and it had a high collar. She would have to get him in the face or neck and would get only one chance.

“How old are you?” asked TC, his eyes roaming over her.

She didn’t respond. The vehicle was moving, the driver saying nothing. She didn’t like the way this man was looking at her, like a dog eyeing a steak on a kitchen counter, sizing up whether he could reach it. She needed to know where they were, needed to get out.

Up front, Carney had other things on his mind besides their new acquaintance. The steering had a new shimmy to it, the vibrations traveling up into his hands through the steering wheel, and he had to overcorrect to keep it straight. There was a knocking in the engine too, and that worried him more than the steering. He had used the Bearcat like a bulldozer, slamming it into and rolling over hundreds of bodies. Armored and rugged as it was, the riot vehicle was still just a truck, not a tank, and he had damaged it. How badly he couldn’t know until he crawled under it and got inside the hood, neither of which was possible right now. Even though the church was blocks behind them, more of the dead were emerging from buildings all around, drifting into the road, drawn by the sound of the vehicle.

He listened to the knocking. Was it getting worse? A breakdown here would be very bad. Carney slowed down, threading the Bearcat around abandoned cars and trying to avoid running over more of the walking dead, keeping to the same street. Hands beat at the sides of the truck, and some simply came right at him, impossible to avoid. They crunched under the front bumper.

Skye waited silently to see what the man across from her would do, but he just sat there, looking at her, no longer asking questions. It took less than thirty minutes. Skye’s vision doubled, and then tripled. She felt sick to her stomach, felt like throwing up. Minutes later she began to sweat, the inside of the armored truck quickly turning into an oven. The man morphed into her eighth-grade science teacher.

“I forgot my homework,” she said.

TC laughed.

At an intersection, Carney looked right. A block up was Peralta, the street he had crossed to get to the church, still running parallel to the street he was traveling. He saw a line of vehicles go by, led by a motorcycle, a tow truck, and a VW van. He cut up a block and stopped at Peralta, looking left, then waited until the last vehicle was almost out of sight before turning in to follow them.

Her science teacher morphed into Crystal. Her sister wasn’t bitten, wasn’t changed, and she was smiling. “You came back,” Skye muttered, and then passed out, the knife falling to the floor.

TC picked it up and tossed it behind some boxes. Then he used the gear they had loaded from the training center to cuff her hands behind her back and shackle her feet together. He cut a length of nylon rope and shoved it between her teeth, tying it tightly behind her head as a biting gag.

The younger inmate stuck his head through the opening into the cab. “She’s sick, man. I think she’s got it.”

Central California

The Black Hawk cruised south, one thousand feet above the dry central valley. RJ sat with his legs hanging out the left door, clipped in with his safety strap and draping an arm over his mounted M240. Six men in combat gear, led by an Air Force sergeant, sat in the back not talking. A few tried to sleep over the roar of wind and blades.

I-5 was a gray ribbon below, cutting through a vast open country of agriculture, quickly browning from lack of irrigation. Vladimir’s eyes moved in an easy, experienced pattern across his instruments and out through the windscreens.

“Ranch House, Groundhog-Seven. Updates on our objective?”

“Negative, Groundhog. No new transmissions,” the NAS Lemoore air traffic controller said.

“
Da
, Groundhog copies.” Shit, he thought. More wasted time and fuel. Another hunting of the goose. Lemoore had picked up a brief broadcast from a woman claiming to be an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy, who gave her position as just south of Lost Hills, a tiny farming hamlet halfway to Bakersfield on I-5. She said she was at the head of a refugee column. The woman did not respond to repeated calls from Lemoore, and there were no further transmissions. Vlad had been sent to investigate.

The highway was only lightly scattered with vehicles and remained fairly open. A few lone shapes wandered the asphalt, but they weren’t refugees. He glanced at his instruments. “Coming up on objective,” he said into the intercom. “Five minutes.”

RJ and the Air Force sergeant, also wearing headsets, acknowledged with two clicks.

It didn’t take five minutes; Vlad saw them long before he reached them, a sight impossible to miss. Ahead, I-5 was packed with a dark mass of bodies, vehicles sprinkled among them. The Black Hawk descended to three hundred feet and then swept overhead. People below began waving their arms.

Dear God, how many were there? The refugee column stretched out for more than a mile, covering both the northbound and southbound lanes and the wide grassy area between. Most were on foot carrying bags and packs and small children, others pushing wheelbarrows or shopping carts, some on bicycles with small trailers pulled behind. Trucks, cars, and buses with people piled on the roofs or hanging off the sides were trapped in the surge of bodies, the whole thing creeping along at less than a walking pace.

“Ranch House, Groundhog-Seven. We have eyes on the objective. Confirm large column of refugees on foot, moving north on Interstate Five.”

“Copy, Groundhog. Can you estimate a count?” the controller asked.

Vlad shook his head. “Ten thousand plus.”

The controller at Lemoore asked him to repeat the number. The Black Hawk reached the end of the column, back where the stragglers were: people carrying stretchers, a horse-drawn wagon loaded with children, others pushing people in wheelchairs, and one actually rolling along a hospital gurney with a woman strapped to it. Refugees from who knew how far south.

Vlad whispered a single word in Russian.

The dead were following, corpses from Mexico and San Diego joined by those from L.A., many of them charred from napalm strikes but still shambling forward. A wall of the walking dead covered both lanes and spread well out into the fields on either side, the closest of them less than a hundred yards behind the fleeing survivors. Vlad climbed to a thousand feet for a better view and wished he hadn’t. An ocean of the dead went back as far as he could see. Though it might be only a hundred thousand or so, it could be as many as a million.

A ripple of nervous curses came from the back, the squad of troops peering out and down at the same thing the pilot was seeing.

“Ranch House,” Vladimir called, his voice tight, “the column is being pursued by hostiles. Estimate they will make contact in less than two hours.”

“Copy, Groundhog. Strength of opposition?”

Vlad didn’t need to consult the map strapped to his knee to know where I-5 went. He stared out at a moving carpet of death.

“Groundhog-Seven, Ranch House. Report enemy strength.”

Vladimir keyed the mic. “It is Los Angeles.”

There was a long pause before, “Stand by.”

The Russian banked and brought the Black Hawk around to the left, the men in the doorway gripping the frame extra tightly as the endless ghouls passed beneath them, fearing a fall, as if the impact from this altitude wouldn’t kill them instantly. The chopper descended and came up along the side of the column again, low enough to get a good look but not so low as to buffet them with wind. They were slow, slower than the horde behind them. It was a basic math problem that would end in disaster. Vlad saw only a few firearms among them, and no military presence. The people on the ground continued to wave their arms.

“
Da
, I see you,” he said quietly.

In the back, the Air Force sergeant spoke over the intercom. “Don’t even think about setting this crate down, Ivan. We’d be overrun.”

Vladimir clenched his teeth. “Sergeant, if I choose, I will shake this bird until you all fall out the doors. And I will fly us straight into the side of a mountain before I take orders on my own aircraft.” He shook his head, instantly regretting the rebuke. The man was just scared, and with good reason. If the Black Hawk touched down, thousands of terrified people looking for a way out would swamp it in seconds. Vlad didn’t descend further, simply held position off to the side of the column and waited. There was no response from Lemoore.

He could imagine why. Right now, naval officers of assorted senior rank, including the base’s commanding admiral, would be in a tense discussion about the refugees. NAS Lemoore was already bursting with displaced civilians, and more were flying in daily. The dead continued to pile up at the fence line, and the repeated claims of the briefers that it would hold was getting harder and harder to believe. These new refugees, assuming a way could be devised to get them through the creatures encircling the base, would stretch Lemoore’s resources to the breaking point. Vlad imagined stern-looking men debating around a table, throwing out ideas, and not all of them in the interest of the refugees. Might someone even suggest using them as bait, to draw the masses away from the fence? The situation grew increasingly dire each passing day, and frightened men made frightening decisions. Most likely, however, they would do nothing, and hope the column simply continued moving north.

The flaw in that hope, Vlad knew, was that the refugees no doubt had maps and could clearly see that the air station was the only military installation in the area. It was probably their intended destination.

He banked the helicopter so he could see the endless, hungry mass closing from behind. The dead would catch up, attacking from the rear and working forward, driving the front of the group north . . . right into the waiting teeth of the horde outside the base. And when the dead of Los Angeles reached the fence line . . . ?

“Groundhog-Seven, Ranch House,” the controller said. “You are ordered to make no contact with the column and return to base immediately.”

He looked once more at the people standing and waving below, hoping that his was only the first of many helicopters coming to carry them to safety. “Keep moving,” he whispered. “Do not stand and wave, keep moving.” He turned the Black Hawk north, climbing and staring directly ahead so he wouldn’t have to see their faces as their salvation flew away.

“Groundhog-Seven copies, we are RTB,” Vlad said in the mic.

No one spoke during the twenty-minute flight home.

Vladimir approached the base from the southwest, and at two miles out he could easily see the dark smear that represented the bodies packed around the fence, fifty deep. How many now? A hundred thousand? Two?

“Ranch House, Groundhog-Seven coming in at two-one-zero, two miles,” Vlad said.

“Roger, Groundhog, you are cleared to land at pad seven-alpha.”

The Russian was about to copy when he saw the C-130. The big green transport aircraft, driven by four massive turboprops, was lumbering in from the north, landing gear down, one hundred feet off the runway. Another load of refugees from who knew where. As he closed the distance to the base, he saw the wings suddenly waggle, the nose drifting left to right. Vlad immediately pulled on the cyclic and collective at the same time, the Black Hawk’s nose coming up as he settled into a quick hover directly over the horde.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?” RJ called.

“Aircraft in distress,” Vlad responded, watching as the big cargo plane wobbled, began to rise as if it were going to wave off, then dropped, slamming hard onto the runway before leaping back into the air, crippled and on fire. One engine broke free and shot across the field in a ball of flaming, twisted metal, taking out a large Navy helicopter sitting on a pad, exploding it in an instant. The rest of the C-130 reared up into the sky, nosed over, and began to pinwheel through the air, pieces of tail and wing breaking free.

The doomed plane spun straight into the cluster of hangars serving as housing for refugees, streaking wreckage and gouts of burning fuel ripping through the adjacent tent city. The sound of the explosions was muffled by the Black Hawk’s rotors, clouds of black and red ballooning silently into the sky.

“What the Christ was that?” the Air Force sergeant yelled over the intercom.

Vlad’s eyes followed the fireball erupting from the refugee hangar. How many had been on board the plane? How many thousands on the ground? With the airspace now clear, he was about to move the helicopter forward when he caught new movement below and to the right.

The fence was collapsing.

A twenty-foot section sagged inward as tons of pressure moved against it, the dead spilling in behind it. Those creatures at the fence fell to the ground as it gave way, only to be walked over by a wave of bodies. An adjacent section folded as well, chain link torn away and metal support posts bending in half. More fence went down in a line beyond that, and the dead trudged onto the base by the thousands.

Looking out the left door in the opposite direction, RJ called, “The west gate just fell! They’re inside!” The gunner watched as not fifty yards to the left of the aircraft, thousands of the dead pressed through the mangled gates and walked into gunfire coming from several sandbagged bunkers and a pair of machine gun–mounted Humvees. Tracers lashed out at the moving wall but didn’t even slow them down. They flowed over the bunkers and vehicles like high tide, burying the defenders even as they fired their weapons, their mass tipping over a Humvee. A few men in camouflage managed to break away from the breach, half of them running without rifles.

It’s over,
Vlad thought. There would be no putting the genie back in the bottle now.

“Get us down there,” the Air Force sergeant said.

“Not a wise idea,” said Vlad. “They cannot be contained.”

“Goddammit, those are our guys down there! Put us down right now!”

The Russian pushed the cyclic forward between his knees and nosed the Black Hawk over the fence, over the sea of bodies, looking ahead for a safe landing spot. In the back, the sergeant was telling his men to lock and load.

“Ranch House, Groundhog-Seven,” Vlad said into his mic.

No reply.

Vlad repeated the call and received only silence. He took the bird in fast and low, ensuring that his landing zone was clear of flaming debris, then flared and pivoted sideways, touching the wheels down a hundred yards ahead of the first wave of walking dead. Without a word the sergeant led his tiny squad out the door, taking off at a run toward where a small knot of men were kneeling and firing. Vlad lifted off at once and took the Black Hawk back toward the collapsed fence.

The Air Force sergeant and his squad were dead within ten minutes, and back up walking several minutes after that.

“Ranch House, Ranch House, this is Groundhog-Seven. I am taking station over the western breach, awaiting instructions.” Behind him, RJ went to work with his door gun, sending long streams of automatic fire down on the heads of the crowd.

Ranch House did not respond.

The view from the cockpit revealed that the situation was far worse than Vlad had originally thought. He could see a half dozen other places where the unrelenting pressure of the dead had finally flattened the fence, and that was just on this side of the base. Reason assured him there would be many more. Fixed defenses and mobile patrols had been overwhelmed immediately, and the dead flowed in like the lava that Rocker, the young Navy pilot Vlad had spoken to, had described: slow, spreading, unstoppable, and absolutely fatal. They flowed across streets and manicured lawns, between buildings, and out across the tarmac. This was not an infantry base; there were no armored vehicles and only a small percentage of the personnel were armed.

RJ soon exhausted the ammo supply for the left gun, with little measurable effect, but still unhooked and moved across, snapping back in at the right door and getting that M240 rolling. It sounded like a chainsaw. Vlad rotated the Black Hawk to give him the best exposure as the bullets chopped into the mass below. Bodies went down in little groups, heads disintegrating under the high-power fire, but the gaps were instantly filled by more.

There was some radio traffic, though nothing from the tower. Another inbound C-130 ten miles out announced that it was turning back toward Nevada. A pair of Navy helicopters that had gone down to Bakersfield this morning transmitted that they would head south and try to reach the USS
Ronald Reagan
, supposedly now somewhere off the coast of the Baja Peninsula. One pilot reported that he didn’t think he had the fuel to make it and might have to set down so the other chopper could pick up his crew.

Vlad looked at his own gauge. The trip to Lost Hills and the subsequent time over Lemoore had cost him a third of his fuel. If the
Reagan
had moved south as the Navy bird reported, it was beyond his reach. Even if the ship was still somewhere off the coast of L.A., it would be cutting things close, tight enough that an unexpected headwind could bleed off the last of his fuel right over the city. The additional problem would be finding the vessel in the first place, since the Black Hawk had no direct comms. An aircraft carrier might seem exceptionally large, but in the open ocean it was very small indeed, and every minute spent over the water visually searching for it would burn precious fuel. As a pilot, Vlad had imagined his own death many times: fire, crashes, combat. Drowning or being eaten by sharks, however, was not one of the ways he would choose. It didn’t matter; the carrier was too far away.