Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (2 page)

They didn’t slow.

More firing, and then the crowd was spreading out, tipping over barricades and pawing their way down the sides of police cars, cops falling back as the torn and bloodied commuters slammed into them like a wall, moaning and clutching and biting. Rosa stomped the accelerator and shot across the intersection. A young woman in what had once been a smart gray business suit—now with half her face torn away and her lower jaw missing—stumbled in front of the rig as Rosa hit the gas. She bounced off the grille with a thump and went flying. The medic bit her lip and kept the accelerator down.

The traffic headed her way in the opposite lane was stopped and backed up as Rosa traveled down Drumm Street, then took a pair of lefts until she reached Pine, another one-way that cut straight across the city. Straight toward home. Voices on the radio were still calling for help, a few of them even crying, and the dispatcher was demanding that all available units respond to a police and National Guard emergency on Market, not far from where Rosa’s ambulance was racing away in the opposite direction.

She shut the radio off.

A traffic accident appeared in an intersection ahead, and she swerved around it, keeping her eyes fixed forward, refusing to look at the dazed, bloody faces watching in disbelief as she drove past without slowing. At Montgomery Street a pair of SFPD cars were blocking cross traffic while uniformed soldiers uncoiled barbed wire across Pine. Rosa tapped the horn and bluffed her way through. She passed a park on the right a few minutes later, and saw shadowy figures stalking through the trees in pursuit of a homeless man struggling to push a heaped shopping cart over grass and tree roots. They were gaining on him.

Just past the Stockton Tunnel she rolled up on the back end of stopped traffic, the flames of a fully engulfed apartment house half a block beyond turning the early evening orange and red. Rosa used the siren again and bullied her way to the next intersection, driving with two wheels on the sidewalk, and then cut up two blocks before circling around and coming back to Pine, on the other side of the fire.

Her mother’s phone continued to ring unanswered, and she redialed three times with the same result. A minute later the chirp of an incoming call caused her to quickly hit the Answer button without looking to see who it was.

“Petty Officer Escobedo, please.”

“Speaking.” She was startled to hear a man’s voice, not her mother’s.

“This is the CINCPAC watch officer. Your reserve unit has been activated, and you are ordered to report immediately to Oakland Middle Harbor, USNS
Comfort
. Acknowledge the order, Petty Officer.”

Rosa took a deep breath. “Report to USNS
Comfort
immediately, Oakland Middle Harbor. Understood.”

“Very well, Petty Officer.” The call disconnected.

Rosa resisted the urge to throw the phone at the windshield, cursing softly. The ambulance reached the Pacific Heights neighborhood and she turned north, shutting off the emergency lights and quickly reaching her mother’s block. She slowed as the headlights revealed the scene.

Luggage, clothing, and cardboard boxes littered the pavement and sidewalks, and there was only empty curb on a street where it was normally difficult to find a parking space. The well-kept, three-story row houses blazed with light, but there was no movement in any of the windows. Most of the front doors stood open.

Rosa stopped in front of her mother’s building and got out, tucking the cop’s automatic in her back waistband. In the distance she could hear sirens and the thump of a helicopter, but this neighborhood was quiet. She climbed the steps and went into the first-floor apartment. That door was standing open too, and a note was waiting on the kitchen table.

Rosa,

The Army is putting us in trucks to keep us safe from the rioting. We are going to the Presidio, and should be home soon. My phone is dead, forgot to charge it. Will call you soon.

Love, Mom

Rosa went back to the street and stopped on the sidewalk when she saw a soldier standing near the ambulance’s front grille, arms hanging limp, swaying from side to side. He didn’t have a weapon or a helmet and the headlights revealed that one of his hands was nothing but ragged, chewed stumps instead of fingers. His uniform was charred, and even at this distance she could smell fire.

The soldier lifted his head, blank eyes glistening in the headlights. He made a mournful sound and then started toward her. He moved the same way as those she had seen at the scene where she lost Jimmy, and the word
plague
popped into her medic’s mind. Rosa ran into the street to the right, the soldier turning to follow her, stumbling on the curb but keeping his footing. Once she had enough distance Rosa pulled the automatic and took a shooting stance, gripping it in two hands. “Stay back.”

The soldier moaned and kept moving.

Rosa fired twice, hitting him center mass. The soldier twitched with the impact but didn’t slow. She fired again, aiming right at the heart, and still the soldier lurched forward, faster now as he raised his hands and emitted a ragged hiss.

Body armor,
she thought, raising her aim an inch and shooting him in the face. The soldier dropped immediately and didn’t move. A moment later Rosa was back in the rig heading north on Divisidero Street and following the most direct route to the closed Army base at the Presidio. Whatever was going on, she had no intention of entrusting her mother to some half-assed refugee camp.

Four blocks later she realized it didn’t matter.

The convoy of four trucks and an escorting Humvee was stopped in an intersection, three of the big vehicles burning and lighting the neighborhood in a ghastly orange hue. A dozen bodies lay sprawled on the pavement amid scattered shell casings, the brass reflecting the jumping flames. Dozens more bodies blackened by fire or stumbling about with missing limbs and mortal wounds filled the street.

Other shapes were floundering amid the fire in the back of one of the trucks.

One of them tumbled out and hit the ground, hair and clothing lit like a torch, blackened skin blistering as it pulled taut. The thing crawled toward the ambulance and raised its head, the heat peeling its lips back from its teeth. It reached with one hand, and in the headlights Rosa recognized the silver charm bracelet her mother had refused to take off since her daughter gave it to her at the age of fifteen.

•   •   •

R
osa’s apartment was only six blocks from her mother’s, and by the time she got there she had almost convinced herself that it hadn’t been Marta Escobedo falling out of that truck, crawling as she burned. It couldn’t have been. That would mean Rosa had driven off without even trying to help, and she would never have left her mother like that. So she simply turned those thoughts off. It was a skill she had developed on the pole at the Glass Slipper Gentlemen’s Club: the ability to put aside the most unpleasant parts of life, to dismiss the hungry faces and drunken offers from the edge of the stage, to turn off the shame she felt every time she danced.

This neighborhood was quiet too, the streets and sidewalks empty. Rosa left the ambulance running out front while she went in. There was no roommate to disturb—she lived alone—and she quickly changed into her uniform: blue camouflage and cap, combat boots, the insignia for a Navy corpsman pinned to her collar tabs. Her sea bag was already packed and waiting in the closet, filled with clothes and toiletries, and minutes later she was back in the rig. She didn’t bother to lock her front door. She suspected she wouldn’t be back.

Rosa’s 2007 Toyota Corolla was tucked in a small garage behind the apartment, but she left it there. The lights and siren of an ambulance would get her past obstacles the Toyota couldn’t. She headed back across the city, toward the Bay Bridge.

The civilian radio channels were jammed with breaking news, talk of rioting and looters, and there were reports of savage attacks across the city. Police spokesmen assured the public that they had the situation in hand, but as midnight approached and Rosa drove through the heart of San Francisco, she saw things that strongly contradicted that statement. Buildings were on fire and no one had shown up to put them out; squad cars pushed past car accidents, leaving dazed victims waving in the street, just as she had done; looters were already at work, small groups but sometimes larger crowds smashing windows and kicking open doors, carrying their prizes into the night.

At one point Rosa was forced to stop for another accident, looking for a way around it, and a teenager with a knit cap charged the ambulance with a can of spray paint in each hand. He slid to a stop in front of the windshield, shaking the cans as he waggled his tongue and screamed something she couldn’t make out. He managed to spray a single red line down the passenger-side glass before Rosa leaned out the driver’s door with the automatic and fired a round into the asphalt near his feet. The kid yipped like a kicked dog and skittered away.

Near Fell Street she had to stop again, this time the way completely blocked by a stopped garbage truck, the driver on his hands and knees beside one of the tires, crying and vomiting. A body was pinned beneath the tire, a young man hopelessly mangled. But he was still moving, his mouth opening and closing as the fingers of one hand groped at the truck driver’s shirtsleeve.

The driver saw the ambulance. “Help him!”

On reflex, Rosa grabbed the door handle to jump out. Then a body dropped from a building on the right, hitting the roof of an Altima, crushing it and blowing out the windows. The broken figure rolled off onto the pavement and started belly-crawling toward the truck driver. Two more bodies dropped from above, one exploding in bone and blood on the sidewalk, the other slamming down onto the sobbing garbage truck driver, killing him instantly with the impact.

Rosa reversed the rig and found another route.

Her ability to switch off her thoughts went into overdrive, trying to keep her from facing the how and why of what was happening. She knew this was a childish and foolish way to deal with a dangerous reality, but another part of her insisted that to face it would lead to madness. Instead she locked thoughts of Jimmy and her mother and the rest of tonight’s horrors into a room deep inside herself and focused on getting out of the city. She would report for duty in Oakland and lose herself in her work, safely immersed in the structure of military authority.

At the entrance to Highway 101, her access to the Bay Bridge, she was handed a reality check about her ideas of safety and structure. Traffic was bunched up in every direction, people flashing their lights and leaning on horns. At the on-ramp, a desert camouflage M1 main battle tank was backing off a flatbed tractor-trailer behind a sandbag barricade still being erected by hurrying soldiers. To the right, police and fire lights spun as a team of firemen trained a high-pressure hose on a crowd of people trying to reach the bridge. Bodies fell and tumbled away from the stream. To the left, an eight-wheeled armored vehicle with a small turret, a Marine LAV-25, armed with a twenty-five-millimeter Bushmaster chain gun, rolled slowly toward the roadblock.

A bloody man and woman staggered in front of it. The LAV rolled over them without stopping, crushing their bodies beneath its big tires.

Rosa hit the emergency lights and sirens, thinking she might get the stopped traffic to part, bluffing her way through another roadblock. The cars didn’t move, but the turret of the battle tank rotated in her direction even as the armored vehicle backed off the truck, settling the cavernous muzzle of its 120-millimeter main gun on Rosa’s windshield.

The sight of that death-bringer nearly released her bladder, and she reversed quickly, turning and heading back the direction she had come, finding her way to Mission Street. She headed for the water and the ferry plaza, just off the Embarcadero.

It was after 1:00
A.M.
when she pulled into the packed lot, and she left the rig in a fire lane as she grabbed her sea bag and hurried inside. Rosa immediately saw the troops and cops, heard sounds from the main terminal room with which she was familiar: cries of the wounded and calls for help. The high-ceilinged chamber echoed with shouts and groans and smelled of blood and antiseptic.

A man in green-and-gray camouflage with brushy silver hair and a doctor’s coat saw Rosa, spotted the medical insignia on her collar, and pointed at her. “Corpsman! Over here, now!”

Rosa dropped her bag and dove in.

“How long were you there?” Xavier asked.

Rosa guided the harbor patrol boat across the bay, windshield wipers slapping against the rain, her eyes moving between what lay ahead and what was revealed on the green surface radar mounted near the wheel. She was surprised at the way she had opened up to this man she had just met. He was in his forties with close-cropped hair, his upper body a V of imposing, packed muscle, and his brown face was marred by a long, cruel scar. At first glance, he was someone to be feared. His eyes, however, held a gentleness that pulled her in. He reminded her of Jimmy in subtle ways, his ability to truly listen, not just wait for his turn to talk like most people did. Attractive women could easily tell when a man was listening and when his mind was elsewhere. Xavier listened. He made her feel that nothing in existence was more important than what she had to say. It was a trait she had experienced with only one other person in her life, a beloved uncle long since passed, thankfully before all this.

“Weeks,” she said. “I lost track of the days; they blurred together.” She thought about the big ferry terminal, transformed into a trauma center. “It was a nightmare. We tried to help, but nothing could turn back that fever. Every single person who got bitten died, no matter what we did, and then they turned. All of them. We lost medics and doctors to our own patients before we figured it out.”

Xavier tried to picture what she was describing. The horror of it was easy to imagine. More difficult was imagining going through the experience without being scarred, as she most certainly was. How could she not be?

She went on. “For a while the soldiers just started executing anyone coming in with a bite. The doctors went crazy, ordered them to stop, and one Army surgeon even pulled a sidearm. We almost had a war right there in the terminal. It didn’t matter. We couldn’t save them, not the bitten ones.”

As the boat thumped over low swells, Rosa’s eyes keeping on the alert, she told him about the horrors she had witnessed. Xavier just listened, keeping his own horrors to himself. Rosa talked of seeing men in biohazard suits, soldiers gunning down looters, buildings on fire and cars exploding, even watching as a helicopter suddenly dropped out of the sky and crashed somewhere in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, its fireball climbing above the rooftops. She spoke of seeing the exodus of ships and smaller boats from San Francisco Bay, about how she and a few others had tried to signal from the roof of the ferry terminal, and how none of the boats detoured from their escape.

Rosa spoke of the dead, sometimes thousands of them in the street, crashing into the terminal in relentless waves, soldiers firing out every door and window to the point that she thought the gunfire would never end. Yet other times they were scattered or gone altogether, leaving the barricaded survivors with no answer as to their whereabouts. She described the eerie sight of their silhouettes moving within the fog, lonely moans echoing through empty streets.

Her cheeks were wet by now, and Xavier rested a big hand gently on her shoulder. She didn’t pull away. “Little by little there were fewer people at the terminal,” she said. “There were casualties during the attacks, of course. And when the streets were clear, cops and soldiers would go out to gather supplies or look for survivors. Most never came back. The doctors began slipping away in the night too, taking food and weapons and sneaking out.” She wiped at her eyes. “Except for that older doc, the one who first called me over to help, the same guy who pulled his weapon on the other soldiers. He was a colonel. He didn’t sneak away. He found a janitor’s closet and put that pistol in his mouth to make sure he didn’t come back.”

Her voice shuddered at the edge of more tears, but she fought them back. “After a while there were only a few of us left.” She nodded at the pregnant couple and Darius. “There were a few patients too. When they turned, I took care of them.”

Rosa didn’t speak for a while, and there was only the growl of the motor and the whispery thump of water on fiberglass. Xavier didn’t speak, only stared out at the bay and felt ashamed for the times he had pitied himself these past weeks, as if he were the only one who had lived through the nightmare.

The young woman suddenly brightened. “One of my patients was a cop, a horseback officer, or whatever they’re called. He and his unit had been doing mounted crowd control, and they got hit by a wave of the dead. It ended up being hand-to-hand combat, and he got some of their blood in his eyes. He had the fever, all the symptoms, but by then the doctors weren’t letting anyone kill them until they turned.”

“If he was down with the fever,” Xavier asked, “how do you know what happened to him?”

She smiled. “Because he made it! He pulled through. That’s when the doctors started talking about something they started calling the slow burn, when we discovered that sometimes a person who had been exposed but not bitten could survive. Most of the time they didn’t, but it could happen.”

Xavier thought about that. Was it cause for hope? Or a setup for even greater disappointment and grief?

Rosa laughed. “Do you know that when he came out of it, the first thing he asked about was his horse?” She laughed again, but it turned into a choking sob.

Xavier kept his arm firmly around her. “What happened to the officer?”

There was a pause, and when she spoke her voice was flat. “As soon as he could walk, he left. Said he had to find his wife and kids. He made it fifty feet into the street before they took him down.” She pulled away then, though not abruptly. “They tore him to pieces, and all I could do was watch.”

The harbor craft hit some steeper waves, rising and falling more sharply. Alameda grew in the windshield before them. Above, the sky was a brawling mass of black and charcoal clouds, and the rain began to fall faster and with more strength. The new intensity of the downpour was more than Darius and the pregnant couple could tolerate, and now that the newcomer on the boat appeared to pose no threat, they hunched against the slashing rain and moved between Xavier and Rosa, going down into a small cabin in the bow.

“How did you come by this?” Xavier asked, rapping his knuckles against the fiberglass.

“We’ve only had it since this morning,” she said. “It was adrift and just floated into one of the ferry berths. There was no one on board, just a lot of blood and a half-full fuel tank.” She shrugged. “I guess all that basic seamanship training is finally paying off.”

The priest gave her a small smile. “Lucky for me. Thanks again.” After losing Alden—the schoolteacher with a heart condition and Xavier’s last friend in the world, it seemed—Xavier had quickly become cornered by the dead at a San Francisco marina. Corpses had swarmed toward him down a narrow dock, trapping him at the end, and it looked like he would go down swinging a tire iron. Then Rosa had appeared with her boat, saving his life. Of course once he was out of the water and on the deck, Darius had tried to take his life, but the shotgun was empty, and Xavier had been spared a second time.

“Finding you was an accident,” Rosa said with a shrug. “We were looking for a fuel pump, and then we were going to try for San Jose. There was talk of a refugee center down there.” She pointed forward. “An actual helicopter sighting trumps a rumor, though, don’t you think?”

“No argument.”

“Are you really a priest?” She wanted to say that his size and frightening scar made him look more like a gang enforcer, but she didn’t want to be rude. She held back a smile. Even at the end of the world, being polite was still important.

“Yes. . . . I guess.” When she raised an eyebrow at that, he pushed on. “Are you really a paramedic and Navy Reservist about to enter med school and paying the bills with exotic dancing?”

She laughed. “When you put it all together I guess it’s a lot. You sound like Jimmy. He’s—was my partner on the rig.” Rosa looked sideways at him. “Are you going to lecture me about how my dancing is a sin and all that, Father?”

“Let’s stick to Xavier, okay? I’m not the person to judge another on what she does to survive. I’m more interested in your medical training.” He told her he had been a Marine in Somalia and said the grunts had nothing but respect for the corpsmen that went into combat with them. He did not tell her that while over there, he had shot down two boys not even old enough to be out of elementary school. They had AK-47s and meant to kill Xavier and his squad so it was considered a justified shooting by many, but that was small comfort for a young Marine overcome with guilt. His inability to reconcile himself with the killing had ended his military career.

Rosa told him her unit had spent a year in Iraq, and that although female medics weren’t allowed out on the patrols, an aid station she was operating in a supposedly “secure” town was suddenly hit by insurgents, and she found herself firing back right alongside the men.

“Did the Navy give you your Combat Action Ribbon?”

She nodded.

“Well, then Semper Fi.” That made her smile, and the priest smiled back. “So why don’t you try to call me Xavier?”

“That’s going to be tough,” she said. “I’m Catholic.”

Xavier nodded at that. “Do your best. I’ll call you Doc, if that’s all right?”

“Sure,” Rosa said. She pointed at the landmass ahead of them in the fading light, a darker strip against a turbulent sky. “The helo set down on the west end of the island, where the naval air station used to be. Somewhere up ahead are the piers where the ships came in, where the
Hornet
is now. I figure we can dock there, and go on foot to the airfield.”

Xavier nodded. “And the dead?”

“If it doesn’t look safe at the docks we can cruise the water’s edge,” Rosa said, “maybe tie up at some rocks and force our way through the perimeter fence.”

“That sounds good. And if the dead get too numerous . . . ?”

“Then we haul ass back to the boat,” she finished.

“Okay, Doc, what do you need from me?”

“Tell Darius to give you that shotgun and the extra shells. No offense, but it’s better off in the hands of a former Marine than with a sociology professor who can’t manage to kill a man lying on the deck in front of him,” Rosa said, recalling the moment Xavier had climbed out of the cold waters of the bay. He had been shaking and Darius was convinced it meant that the man was infected. He aimed and pulled the trigger on his shotgun, but hadn’t realized he had fired his last shell. Xavier took the weapon away from him, and Rosa thought the man showed tremendous restraint by not giving the professor a beating or simply throwing him over the side. She winked, revealing that there was still some humor and life left in her. “After your little moment together on deck,” she said, “I don’t think he’ll give you a problem about it.”

Darius didn’t. He handed over the weapon, half a box of shells, and another round of apologies. Xavier gave him a smile and told him to relax, which seemed to make the man feel better. When the priest returned to the deck, Rosa pointed to ten o’clock.

“We’re not going to be alone,” she said.

Ahead were the Alameda naval piers, marking the entrance to a sheltered bay Rosa had described. The silhouettes of retired cruisers and destroyers were overshadowed by the much larger shape of the USS
Hornet
, a World War II aircraft carrier permanently moored at the piers and transformed into a museum.

Approaching the small bay from the left, staying close to the shoreline, was a barge coughing out a cloud of black diesel. At their present speeds, both vessels would reach the mouth of the little bay at the same time. The barge’s flat deck was packed with people crowded around a blue truck. All of them were looking at the patrol boat, their weapons raised.