Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (7 page)

Tricia’s voice, humming right at the edge of panic, came again. “Someone’s going to come for us. The police. The Army. Someone. They’ll know what to do.”

Pulaski snorted.

“We should just wait right here for them. Stay quiet and wait right here,” Tricia insisted.

“And get eaten,” said the skateboard kid, climbing to his feet. “I’m going with you.”

“I’m not staying here alone!” she shrieked. Everyone ducked, and Xavier’s eyes snapped to the broken window.

“Fucking shut up, you crazy bitch!” Pulaski’s voice was a hiss, and his eyes were murderous.

Tricia covered her face with her hands and made a whimpering noise. Nothing approached the window, though on the other side of the street a pair of ghouls lurched past one another and bumped shoulders without reaction, heading in opposite directions. Xavier looked at his “flock.” They’d probably all be dead within the hour. He held out his hands in a calming gesture he’d often used to defuse angry young men on the basketball court. “Alden’s right, it’s safer to be together. If we start moving”—
now
I’m
saying it,
he thought, disgusted—“we might find the police or some kind of organized evacuation, and then we won’t have to worry how to get out of the city.”

“Right,” Pulaski said, curling his lip and crushing out his cigarette. “The police.”

Alden touched Tricia’s shoulder, and she flinched. “That’s just how it’s going to happen, Tricia,” he said, his voice soft. “We walk together for a while until we find the authorities, and then they’ll take us right out of here.”

She slowly lowered her hands. “You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

Tricia wiped her nose on a sleeve. “Do you promise?”

“I promise.” The schoolteacher said it with a smile and without hesitation. Xavier liked him for that. Alden looked at the priest. “So, since we’re walking to find help, what direction would you suggest?”

“We could go to the police department,” offered the skateboard kid.

“Maybe,” said Xavier. “We could check it out on our way. I was thinking we’d head for Eighth Street, follow it under I-80, and then come up toward AT&T Park. There’s marinas there.”

Alden nodded. “A boat. Sounds good.”

“We wouldn’t need roads then,” said Xavier, “and they couldn’t get to us. They don’t look coordinated enough to swim.” He had no idea if this was true. For all he knew it was their element of choice, but they appeared as if they would sink to the bottom or, at best, bob like corks. A boat might be just what they needed. If they could find one.

Pulaski stood with a groan. “This is so cozy, I think I’m gonna puke. All your plans don’t amount to shit, because we’re gonna get eaten the first time we run into those things, which should take about a minute or two.”

Tricia started crying again and hid back behind her hands. Alden shook his head at the pipe fitter, and Xavier faced him. “Your attitude isn’t helping.”

Pulaski was taller than the priest, heavier but not as broad. He looked Xavier up and down. “What are you gonna do about it, tough guy?” His voice was dangerous, like the warning shakes of a rattlesnake, and Xavier wondered how many poor souls had heard that tone in barrooms just before Pulaski put their lights out. They would be smaller guys, of course, for that was how men like him operated. Xavier thought about how it would feel to have this jerk in the ring. Then he shook his head.
Falling away from the calling faster and faster, aren’t we? Murder last night, brawling today? What’s next?

The priest held out his hands again. “I’m just asking that you stop upsetting the girl.”

The pipe fitter snorted again. “Sure.”

“You can stay here if you like,” offered Alden.

“Not a chance.” He poked the priest in the chest with an index finger. It didn’t yield much. “Understand something. I’m not taking orders, and I’m not taking chances.” He looked at them all. “I wasn’t kidding. We’re gonna run into them, no way around it. What are we gonna do then?” He looked back at the priest. “I want a way to protect myself. That comes first.”

The schoolteacher touched Xavier’s forearm, and his voice was soft, almost apologetic. “We need to find a pharmacy too. I have a heart condition.” He rubbed at his chest without realizing it. “My meds are in my apartment, but it’s too far away.”

Pulaski rolled his eyes. “That’s fucking great.”

Alden shook his head. “I know what I need, it will only take a few minutes, and we don’t need to make a special trip. We can find a pharmacy on the way.”

Xavier smiled at him. “We’ll get your meds.”

“And I want a weapon,” Pulaski said. “You got an answer for that, great leader?”

The priest looked at the floor for a long moment, and then nodded, sighing. “I know a way to take care of that too.”

Berkeley

Taylor nearly pulled Skye off her feet. “Get in the truck!” Gripping her arm, he hauled her to the rear door and shoved her inside. The floor was a carpet of rattling brass casings. In the turret, Hayman finished off the ghouls that had torn Martinez apart, and Simpkins popped open the broad rear hatch of the Humvee before joining Sgt. Postman in dragging the man’s body to the back and lifting it up and in. The two college kids skittered to one side as the limp body was pushed in next to them, and the boy started crying.

Without all of them firing, the streets at all four points of the intersection were rapidly filling with the dead, moving steadily nearer, the group with Skye’s mother the closest, only a dozen yards away. The moaning rose from all directions.

“What the hell, Sarge, he’s dead!” Hayman said, slapping a new magazine into his rifle.

The sergeant slammed the hatch closed. “No one left behind. Start that sixty up and give us some breathing room.”

Hayman swore and handed his rifle back down to Skye, then began raking the M60 across the nearest crowd, his mounted weapon jumping as he tried to steady its aim, searching for heads. Some shots hit the mark, and bodies dropped. Most thudded harmlessly into cold flesh. Doors slammed as the squad climbed aboard, Sgt. Postman now driving. Skye found herself next to an open window, with Taylor sitting shotgun in front of her.

Damaging the Hummer no longer seemed to matter to Postman. He spun the vehicle hard right and gunned it, heading for First Platoon, smacking the grille into a handful of moving bodies, the big tires thumping over them and cracking bones. Skye searched for her mother, praying she wouldn’t see her. She didn’t.

“Keep up your fire!” the sergeant yelled, and at their windows Taylor and Simpkins snapped off single rounds, cursing wild shots as the vehicle bounced and swayed.

Above her, Skye heard the machine gun stop as Hayman shouted, “Reloading!” To her left, Simpkins cried, “Last mag!” and slapped in his final full clip.

“Honey,” Postman said, risking a glance back over his shoulder while the Hummer drove over four shuffling bodies, “I need you to reach back over the seat. That soldier back there has some Velcro pouches with magazines of ammo in them. I need you to get as many as you can, and distribute them between Simpkins and Taylor. Can you do that?”

Skye said she could and set down Hayman’s rifle, kneeling backward on the seat and looking into the rear. The boy and girl were useless, holding one another and sobbing. She shook her head. She had just seen her dead
mother
coming at her in the street, and
she
wasn’t going to pieces. She leaned over, ripping open pouches attached to a harness the man wore, finding the magazines. She grabbed as many as she could, nudging Pvt. Simpkins’s back and giving him half. She pushed at Taylor’s shoulder and handed him the rest. He gave her a smile and a wink.

The Hummer banged into a stumbling woman in a yellow housecoat, sending her flying to bounce off a telephone pole, and then the sergeant was accelerating. Through the windshield she could see the Army truck now only two blocks away, the street between here and there filled with an obstacle course of abandoned cars and walking corpses. The Hummer’s hood and windshield were streaked with gore.

“Outstanding, honey,” Postman said. “Do it again, look for more magazines, and this time bring his rifle back with you. Be careful, though.”

Skye reached back again. She found three more magazines and gripped his rifle by the strap, pulling it over the seat. The dead corporal lifted his head and looked at her with milky, yellowing eyes. Then he snapped his head to the left, seeing the college kids, and a second later he was on them, snarling and tearing at flesh. Screams filled the vehicle as Skye jerked back, a jet of arterial blood first streaking across the side of her face and then spraying up across the roof like a red sprinkler.

“Simpkins, deal with that!” the sergeant shouted.

Pvt. Simpkins pulled his weapon in from the window, twisted in the seat and aimed, then froze. He watched his friend push the dead, glassy-eyed boy to the side and scramble after the girl, sinking teeth high into the thigh of one kicking leg.

“Simpkins!”

The private squeezed off three quick rounds, one of them catching the corporal in the back of the head. New blood pumped across the interior of the vehicle as the girl’s torn femoral artery shot it out in long gouts. She sighed and sagged against the wheel well, hands fluttering uselessly at the wound. It was over quickly.

Up front, the sergeant cursed steadily as the vehicle slalomed up another block, and Hayman’s M60 began chattering again, for what little good it was doing. Both Taylor and Simpkins were firing out their windows again, so Skye set the extra magazines she was holding on the seat beside her and held both the dead corporal’s and Hayman’s rifles.

Crystal had come back. Mom had come back. The soldier, the woman in the jogging suit. They bit you and killed you and you came back, you . . . Skye jerked forward as grasping hands came at her from the rear, the boy and girl crawling over the seat. The girl grabbed Pvt. Simpkins’s head from behind and bit off his left ear. The boy dragged himself over, took Hayman by the waist, and sank his teeth into the soldier’s hip.

Both soldiers shrieked, and Skye screamed for the sergeant to stop. He did, stomping the brakes and throwing them all forward. Hayman dropped from the turret only to have the boy grapple with him, pulling him down and biting his face. The girl had a firm grip on Simpkins and was working on his neck. The soldier’s arms and legs danced in erratic twitches.

“Out! Out!” Postman and Taylor piled out their doors, and Skye followed, still gripping the rifles. On the left, the sergeant exited so close to a pair of corpses that he had to hit them in the face with his rifle butt just to clear some room to bring it to his shoulder. He shot them both in the head, then looked inside the Hummer at his two men. They were gone. “Move to First Platoon’s truck!”

Taylor was already jogging that way, rifle held to his shoulder, tracking everywhere his head moved. He squeezed off rounds as the dead stumbled out of doorways, between cars, and emerged farther up the street. Skye stayed close behind him, the rifles in her arms like pieces of firewood.

“Keep up with me, Postman!” Taylor yelled.

“I’m at your six,” came the reply, boots pounding behind Skye. The three of them ran like that the last block and a half, both soldiers firing as they went, Postman often walking backward to drop targets approaching from the rear. As they approached the intersection with the truck, there were no more ghouls coming at them, only motionless bodies in the street. When they got there, however, they could only stand and stare.

The olive-green, canvas sides of the truck were splashed with blood. Thousands of shell casings littered the pavement, rifles lay on the ground where they had been dropped, and the still bodies of people in civilian clothes were everywhere. The walking dead, killed a second time. No one else was here, not a single body in uniform, walking or otherwise. Silence blanketed the intersection.

“Where are they?” Taylor whispered.

“Hell if I know,” the sergeant whispered back. The big truck sat in the center of the intersection, and he walked slowly around the front and looked in that direction. There were only abandoned cars, fallen bodies, and a building burning in the distance. Nothing moved.

Taylor touched Skye’s shoulder, and she jumped. “Sorry,” he said, smiling. “Will you stay right here and keep watch the way we came? In case some of the ones we shot were only knocked down? They’ll head this way.”

Skye looked. She could see a couple in the street, but they were a good distance away, beyond the last intersection, little more than heads moving behind cars. “Sure.”

Taylor nodded and turned away, then looked back. “What’s your name?”

“Skye Dennison.”

He smiled. “Skye. I like that.” Then he moved off, rounding the back of the truck. The street in that direction looked the same, empty except for a couple of moving figures far off.

“Taylor.”

The soldier answered his sergeant’s summons, coming up to stand beside him on the far side of the truck. Postman pointed up the last street. Two blocks away, a mass of bodies was swarming over another deuce-and-a-half cargo truck and a pair of Humvees, while more crawled on their hands and knees, tearing at whatever was on the ground beneath them. The dead were a mix of civilians and people in camouflage.

“Overrun,” whispered Taylor.

Postman nodded. “Radio said First Platoon put together a collection point for refugees, remember? What do you bet that’s what they’re feeding on?”

“Which means there’ll be more of them in a few minutes.” He shook his head. “We need some high ground.”

“Copy that,” Postman said. “Let’s gather ammo, look through the truck”—he jerked a thumb at the big vehicle—“and seize one of these rooftops.”

Taylor began ejecting magazines from rifles he found on the ground, shoving them into a shoulder bag. Sgt. Postman moved around to where Skye was still standing watch. “Hey, Taylor’s girlfriend, you’ve been doing good.”

She blushed. “It’s Skye.”

“Okay, Skye, we’re going to need your help, and we need to move fast. We’ve got a whole mess of tangos . . .”

“Tangos?”

“Targets . . . T for
tango
, bad guys. There’s a bunch of them a couple blocks that direction, and we want to be gone before they decide to come this way.” He asked her to climb into the truck and throw down anything that looked like it was medically related, and anything marked
MRE
.

“Meal, Ready-to-Eat,” he said, then left to rummage through the cab. Skye set the rifles on the ground and climbed up into the cargo area of the big truck. Right away she found a heavy, green plastic box with a red cross on it. The sergeant said to throw things down, but she didn’t think that would be a good idea with this, and spent several minutes figuring out how to drop the tailgate. Then she climbed out and lifted the box down, carefully setting it on the street.

She went back up inside and resumed her search, and a couple of minutes later Postman joined her. He had a new, olive-green bag hung across his chest now. “There,” he said, pointing to a stack of cardboard boxes. “Toss those out.”

Skye saw they were indeed stamped
MRE
. “It won’t hurt them?”

The sergeant picked up a pair of heavy, rectangular metal containers stenciled
5.56mm
and shook his head. “Nope. The damage comes
after
you eat them.”

Soon they had a small pile at the back of the truck. Taylor rejoined them, his shoulders heavy with belts of Velcro pouches, a pair of rifles on his back, and a long, padded case. He unzipped the case and showed the contents to Postman. To Skye it looked like a science fiction hunting rifle with what looked like a long, black can at the end of the barrel. Postman nodded. From the back of the truck the sergeant produced three camouflaged backpacks. He hung one on Skye’s back and began packing it with individual MREs from the cardboard boxes. Each looked like a brown plastic bundle about the size of a paperback.

“That’s food?” Skye raised an eyebrow.

The soldiers both shrugged. “So they tell us,” said Taylor. He and Postman stuffed medical supplies and more MREs into their own packs, then unsnapped their body armor and let it fall to the pavement.

Taylor saw Skye’s question before she asked it. “They’re not shooting at us. It’s unnecessary weight.”

Skye nodded, nearly staggering under the weight of her own pack and one rifle. Then she looked at these men, especially at Taylor, who was close to her own age. They were carrying extra rifles, ammo pouches, helmets, even metal cans of what she figured were extra bullets, and both bore it easily, without complaint. Skye decided she was going to have to toughen up.

“High ground,” said Postman, nodding at Taylor, and the younger man led off, motioning for Skye to follow. He took them down the street left of where the undead civilians and soldiers were swarming, his rifle pointed ahead and sweeping from left to right and back again as he advanced. Skye stayed close, paying attention to the way he moved, how he placed his feet, how he handled his weapon. When Taylor and the sergeant spoke, she listened to their brief, clear way of communicating, picking up on what had sounded like slang at first, but to them was a language unto itself:
Tango
meant target. Directions were expressed in terms of the face of a clock,
your six
meaning “behind you.” Letters were expressed in words:
alpha
for A,
bravo
for B, and so on. They spoke in
meters
and
klicks
, kilometers, and it made her wish she had paid more attention to learning the metric system, beyond knowing the size of a two-liter bottle of soda.

It didn’t take Taylor long to find what he wanted. Without warning he angled from the center of the street and headed to the sidewalk. A Starbucks with some metal chairs and umbrella tables outside occupied the ground floor of a building next to a flower shop, and between them was a door with a frosted glass window, the street address stenciled on it in gold numbers. Taylor moved to the door, found it unlocked, and led them inside.

They were in a small foyer with black-and-white tile on the floor, facing another door with a frosted glass window. One wall held a row of built-in mailboxes with name labels stuck to each. The interior door was probably the kind that had to be opened by someone in an apartment above by pressing a buzzer, but since the power was out, Taylor simply forced it. He then led them up a stairway into a hallway lined with doors that a battery-powered emergency light showed was empty. Stairs on the left led upward, and the soldier climbed, moving on the toes of his boots, rifle aimed high as he crept up the steps.

Another hallway, another stairway. Taylor led them up quickly. On the next landing they heard something snarling down the hallway, and both soldiers moved in next to each other, rifles pointed. Skye tensed, waiting for the crack of their weapons, but whatever it was must have been inside one of the apartments. Nothing moved in front of them.