Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (4 page)

Marin County

San Quentin was California’s oldest prison and had the state’s only death row for male inmates, the females being shipped off to Chowchilla. “The Q” had used the gas chamber all the way up until 1996, when the little room had been shut down in favor of lethal injection. Squatting on a finger of land that jutted out into the bay, its imposing concrete walls and miles of high double fencing topped with razor wire housed 5,200 inmates, well over capacity.

Now it was on fire.

Bill “Carney” Carnes and his cellmate, TC Cochoran, sat next to each other inside the transport van, both wearing bright orange coveralls, both in leg and waist shackles. Carney was forty-four and rock-hard, with a severe gray crew cut. His coveralls did little to conceal his broad build but served to hide the colorful mosaic of tattoos across his back and chest and down both arms. He had seventeen years in on a twenty-five-to-life bit for double murder.

TC had just turned thirty-one, a former meth head who had used his time away from the destructive effects of the pipe to transform his body into something even bigger and stronger than his friend. He was also covered in ink and was proud of his thick mane of blond hair. A lifetime of drugs, theft, and violence had seen him inside state walls more often than outside, and he was eight years into a life sentence for robbery-homicide after shooting a Korean convenience store clerk in the face without provocation.

Six other inmates shared the van with them. They had all been roused early and given a chance to quickly clean up before being herded into the van for the drive to San Francisco. All had appearances in court this morning, Carney for yet another hearing in his pointless appeal process, TC to face arraignment for allegedly slashing another inmate’s face with a piece of sharpened plastic over a cigarette debt. Truthfully, there was no
allegedly
about it, and TC had been aiming for the man’s throat, not his face. The van had just reached the Richmond–San Raphael Bridge when it was stopped at a California Highway Patrol roadblock still being hastily set up. The correctional officer who was riding shotgun had spoken with a helmeted Chippie for a few minutes, and then they were turning around, heading back to the Q.

The gates were in view when the prison siren went off, and the van pulled quickly onto the gravel shoulder. Now they sat and watched pillars of black smoke rising behind the high walls, overhearing the COs up front behind their steel mesh divider talking on the radio and listening to frantic chatter.

“What’s happening, Carney?” TC asked.

“Like I know.”

“Is it a riot?” His younger cellmate craned his muscled neck to get a better look out the windshield, over the heads of the COs. “Man, that’s my luck to miss it. The perfect chance to shank that motherfucker LeBron.” Freddy LeBron was an inmate who had twice disrespected TC in front of others, and TC owed him a death. Carney elbowed the younger man hard and whispered for him to keep his voice down, but the COs hadn’t seemed to hear the comment. TC looked at his cellmate with a hurt expression. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Carney, “I’m trying to listen.”

Cochoran, physically more powerful and infinitely more violent than the older man, looked out the side window and pouted.

“Hey, CO,” called another inmate. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll let you know when you need to know,” said the driver, not looking back. The inmate flipped him off below the seat, where the officer couldn’t see it.

As the flat, single-tone siren blared through the morning air, Carney expected to see California Highway Patrol and Marin County Sheriff’s cars go racing past them toward the prison. The road was empty. Ahead, he saw thick columns of smoke blowing out into the bay, and then came the far-off crack of a rifle. Everyone in the van stiffened.

There was fast, panicked chatter on the radio now, and although most of it was unintelligible, the word
breach
came through clearly. The driver immediately put the van into a U-turn and headed away from the prison.

“C’mon, CO, what the fuck?” yelled the same inmate. The others were demanding answers too, all except Carney, who sat quietly and watched the two officers. They were tense, anxious, and something bad was happening. Frightened, armed men in charge of chained, helpless men was not a good combination.

The van drove for a mile and then turned onto a side road, traveling through hilly country of short pines and August-brown grasses. Carney read a blue road sign as they passed it:
California DOC Tactical Training Facility ½ mile.
The COs stayed quiet.

Within a minute the van arrived at a turnoff and a gate set in a high chain-link fence running off in both directions into the pines, topped with razor wire. One of the COs spoke into the radio, and the gate rattled open, allowing them to drive into a small parking lot occupied by one dirty Ford Taurus. The gate rattled closed. At the edge of the lot stood three single-story cinder-block buildings with dark green shingled roofs. On the other side of them, a gun tower—identical to those at the Q—rose into the blue sky.

When the van stopped, the COs turned in their seats and looked at the inmates, who had fallen silent. The radio still crackled nonstop in the background, but they had turned it down. It was the driver who spoke, the senior man. “Listen up. The Q is in lockdown. You’re all going to be held at this facility until the situation is resolved. It is not designed to hold inmates, so we’re making accommodations. However, that does not mean you get the opportunity to fuck around. Fucking around will have severe consequences.”

Technically, the COs were not supposed to curse at them, although it happened. The driver’s tone, and more the look in his eyes, told the inmates that the rules had changed, and
he
was not fucking around.

“We’re going to exit you from the van in a minute,” he continued, “where you will line up in close single file. Don’t get out of line. Then we’re going to all take nice little shuffle steps to the middle building, to that green metal door.” He pointed out the windshield so every inmate could make no mistake of where he meant. “Another officer will open the door and you will file inside. You will cross the room and sit down on a long bench against the far wall. It’s the only one in there, so you can’t miss it. Once you are seated, you will each be handcuffed to a bar.”

A few of the inmates began to grumble. The CO in the passenger seat lifted a shotgun and racked it.

“Understand this. If you deviate from my orders in any way, it will be considered an escape attempt and you will be shot. Are there any questions?” the officer finished.

There were none. Several minutes later the line of men in orange was shuffling across the lot, the two officers walking slowly on each side watching them, shotguns ready. No one got out of line. The green metal door opened as promised, and an overweight CO in his fifties and wearing khaki, also armed with a shotgun, motioned them in. Soon, all eight inmates were seated on a bench in the main room, a classroom of some kind, each with his right wrist handcuffed to a bar bolted into the wall. Their waist and ankle chains had not been removed, and the position was both awkward and uncomfortable.

With the men secured, all three COs moved to a corner of the room and started speaking quickly and quietly. At the far end of the bench, Carney strained to hear but was unsuccessful because of the constant complaining of the other seven men seated beside him. He looked around the classroom instead. There were bulletin boards covered with official-looking documents, notices of upcoming athletic and shooting competitions, colored flyers announcing picnics and family outings, and a few photographs. Some flip charts leaned against walls, and posters with silhouettes of weaponry and statistical data were mounted to others. On the wall near the officers someone with at least a little artistic talent had painted a cartoon of a ridiculously muscled guy in a corrections uniform, with the words
NO PAIN, NO GAIN!
stenciled over it. The rest of the wall was covered in a detailed diagram of San Quentin and the surrounding area.

“Man, I just know someone is gonna get to LeBron before I do,” whispered TC. Carney ignored him, watching the officers closely. The two COs from the van looked pissed, and the fat guy just looked scared. He was some kind of put-to-pasture caretaker, certainly not one of the buff, aggressive tactical officers who trained here. Carney had a good idea they were all busy up at the Q. There was some sort of brief disagreement, which the van driver seemed to win. All three then approached the inmates, who quieted down again.

“Officer Zimmerman is going to watch over you for a while,” said the senior man, indicating the fat caretaker. “We’ll be back when things settle down. In the meantime you will remain on the bench, without exception.”

The inmates started moaning. “What if we gotta go to the john?” one of them asked.

“Yeah, I got to go right now,” said another.

“Then you’ll have to piss yourself,” said the driver, “but you’ll stay on the bench. Officer Zimmerman will use deadly force on anyone who gets out of line.” The driver and his partner left the building to cries of “
Fuck You!
” Zimmerman went into another room, where Carney could hear another official-sounding radio talking.

He was almost certain he heard gunfire in the background of the transmissions.

Napa Valley

He was supposed to be the new Jack Kerouac. He was supposed to write the next great American road novel, and had in fact handwritten two-thirds of it in the notebook he kept in his old Army surplus backpack. Now, as Evan Tucker looked out the window of the tiny efficiency cabin he was renting, he realized his dream of becoming the novelist of his generation might have to be put on hold for a while.

The cabin was right on the edge of the road, the first of six in a row along a tree-lined dirt drive, gold-and-green rural Napa wine country spreading out like a postcard in each direction. A blue 2002 Harley Road King sat just outside the door, dusty and heavy with miles but still dependable, saddlebags mounted behind the seat. Evan wore faded Levi’s over black work boots, and a gray T-shirt bearing the image of a fish skeleton and an advertisement for Captain Hobbs Ale. He was average in height and build, with blue eyes and black hair that hung to his collar, twenty-five and not bad looking. He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the window frame. Yes indeed, it did appear that a book about his experiences on the roads of America had just become irrelevant.

There was an intersection out in front of the cabin with a blinking yellow light suspended by crossed wires overhead. Squealing brakes and a crunch of metal had brought him over to the window, and he had now been here for thirty minutes watching it all unfold. A bread truck had broadsided an older Taurus station wagon at high speed, right where the two roads crossed. His first thought had been to call for help, but the cabin didn’t have a phone, and Evan didn’t own a cell. He had stepped out onto the little porch, intending to jog over to see if he could help, but quickly changed his mind. A man in some kind of fast-food uniform—who was missing one of his arms—staggered into the intersection and over to the open door of the bread truck, where the driver was alive but pinned behind the steering wheel. The fast-food man began hauling on the driver’s leg, ripping away his trousers and tearing into the flesh with his teeth.

The scream reached all the way to the cabin, and the biter clawed his way up and tore open the driver’s belly, backing away with a fistful of intestines stringing out between them. The screaming stopped. When three more people arrived, all moving in a lurch with torsos held at odd angles and crowding in to feed on the bread truck driver, Evan stepped back inside and closed the door, going back to the window. Two of them moved toward the station wagon and crawled inside through broken windows. The vehicle rocked, and there was more screaming.

A jacked-up black pickup appeared at the intersection, rumbling to a stop as a young man in boots and a cowboy hat jumped out, talking into a cell phone as he ran toward the station wagon. He stuck his head through a window, and then Evan saw his legs jerk as the cowboy was pulled into the car.

He knew he should try to help, try to do something, but the survival instincts he had developed after four years on the road were on high alert, warning him that being a Good Samaritan right now would get him killed. He stayed put, feeling guilty about it, but too afraid to do anything but watch.

Sirens began to wail off to the left. Soon a green-and-white sheriff’s car pulled to a stop at the intersection, an ambulance right behind it. As the cop stood at his car door talking into a radio, two medics jogged past.

One paramedic went down at the bread truck. The other got yanked into the Taurus by one arm, started screaming, and then stumbled backward, without the arm. He staggered a few steps and fell, and a moment later one of the bread truck eaters reached him and fell on his body. The cop walked forward, firing as he went. Bullets hit the ghoul kneeling over the medic, but it only twitched from the impacts, not giving up its meal. Only when one of the cop’s rounds hit it in the head, blowing a pink puff into the air, did it fall and lie still.

Head shot,
Evan thought.

It was too late for the medic, however. The cop dropped an empty magazine and slapped a new one in just as another bread truck ghoul took him down from behind, finishing him quickly. Then it was just sparkling emergency lights and the crackle of official radios in the quiet morning countryside. No other vehicles approached the intersection.

Evan didn’t feel guilty anymore about not going out to help. He lit a cigarette, ignoring the
No Smoking
sign screwed into the back of the door, his hand shaking. Outside, things got worse.

The two ambulance attendants and the cop were all back on their feet now, shuffling around the accident scene despite their mortal wounds. The disemboweled bread truck driver jerked in his seat, still pinned. The people who had crawled into the Taurus had crawled back out and wandered away, followed by the cowboy, missing his hat and most of his face. A little girl in a bloody pink jumper, gore matting her blond hair to her head, crawled out next and just stood at the edge of the road, facing the cabin. Her mother, the driver of the Taurus, tried to climb out her own window, but she was a huge woman and became wedged. Now she hung half in and out, flabby arms with hunks of flesh bitten away reaching outward, fingers grasping.

Evan smoked and watched the little girl. She swayed gently from side to side and seemed to be looking at him. He knew she couldn’t possibly see him at this distance, not through the glare on the window, but he still didn’t like it.

I don’t like a dead girl looking at me,
he thought.
Imagine that.

The madness of it all didn’t paralyze Evan Tucker the way it would many people that August morning. He was bright and blessed with a vivid imagination and an adventurous personality; he had always been able to quickly adapt to new situations. This, however, was something of a stretch. To himself, he admitted that it might take some time to accept that the dead were walking and feeding on the living. But he knew he couldn’t take too long to wrap his head around it, not if he wanted to survive.

What did he know? He couldn’t stay here, that was easy. Half a can of Pringles and a bottle of Diet Coke wouldn’t last long. He’d need to find food and water. He’d need to get on the move. If this was widespread—and he had the feeling it was, although he couldn’t say why—then the authorities would try to put together crisis centers, like Red Cross shelters. He’d try to find something like that. He had a big folding knife, but that wouldn’t do. He’d need something more effective, because he would need to protect himself.

Evan Tucker had been in only a few fights in his life, most of them in school, and only one as an adult, where he and his opponent had been outside a bar in Ocean City, Maryland, both of them so drunk their wild swings had failed to connect ninety percent of the time. This would be different, and he wondered if he could do it, wondered if he could hurt, or kill, one of them.

Them.
What were they? People? They looked that way, certainly had been, but they had changed. They killed without hesitation, and those they killed soon rose to join their ranks. The mathematics of that quickly processed, and the word
legions
popped into his head. They could be put down, however, as the cop had demonstrated. They looked slow, which meant they could be outrun or evaded. Were they all slow? He wondered if they could think, perform simple tasks, or use tools and weapons. Could they run, climb, problem-solve? How strong were they? What else could kill them? How did they pass along the infection, if that was what it was?

Many more questions than answers. He had no doubt he would learn what he didn’t know, and at least he had a start. Across America in those first days of the apocalypse, few people would ever get the chance to discover what Evan did in that half hour. Most would not survive first contact, and would only swell the numbers of the dead, just as he envisioned.

There were a few things Evan was going to need.

He shoved his few belongings in his Army backpack, making sure his notebook was nestled in the bottom. Relevant or not, it was four years of work and he wasn’t about to leave it behind. Although the weather was too warm, he pulled on a denim jacket and shrugged into his pack. The Harley’s tank was three-quarters full, and he made sure the keys were secure in the left front pocket of his Levi’s. He checked the window once more before stepping onto the porch, and was glad he did.

Mr. Adelman was walking past the cabin, on his way to the road, wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts. Evan had met the man a few days ago, a middle-aged, paunchy restaurant manager recently thrown out of his house by his wife, holing up in this place until he could settle into something better. Adelman was short and balding, a nice enough guy who showed interest in Evan’s writing, assuring him he would buy a copy when the book was published. He was also dead. His right leg had been gnawed down to the bone, and he dragged it behind him through the dirt as he shuffled past. Evan felt bad for him as he watched the middle-aged corpse wander by, but he stayed inside until the man was out of sight, and only then went onto the porch.

The bloody little girl in the jumper started toward him at once.

Evan jogged toward her and the intersection, gauging her speed and movement, giving her a wide berth as he passed. Mr. Adelman had his back turned and was heading for the bread truck. Evan picked up speed, running past the two smashed-up vehicles and swinging wide around the reaching arms of the fat woman in the car window.

The cop and ambulance attendants shifted toward the sounds of his boots and moaned. Two of the ghouls near the accident reached for him across the hood of the Taurus, and Adelman turned. Evan kept moving. He reached the police car and yanked open the passenger door, kneeling on the seat and looking inside. Nothing. He dashed around to the driver’s door and reached in for the trunk release. It popped, and he looked up to see the cop and medics heading toward him. Two of the bread truck feeders and Mr. Adelman appeared around the back of the truck.

Evan found what he was looking for in the trunk, a pump shotgun with a dozen red shells pushed through nylon hoops along its sling, the weapon cradled in a metal floor rack. A rack with a keyhole. A locked rack.

“Shit.” The dead were closer, feet sliding over the asphalt, their moans rising and falling. He eyed the cop’s belt, expecting to see keys dangling there. They weren’t. Had they fallen off when he was attacked? Then the smell of exhaust and the sound of the idling motor made him curse again. He went back to pull the keys from the ignition, just as the first of the dead men bumped into the police car’s hood.

In seconds he was back at the trunk, flipping through keys, looking for one that might fit. He heard scraping feet along the side of the car. His fingers jammed a small silver key into the bracket, turned, felt resistance, and then it moved. The shotgun came free and years of duck hunting with his father were put to good use as he quickly checked to see if it was loaded, saw that it was, and racked a round.

One of the medics let out a wailing sound as it rounded the corner of the car, reaching for him. Evan leaped back as it grabbed and snapped, and then backpedaled down the road, gaining distance, putting the stock to his shoulder and sighting on the medic’s slack face. He saw a wedding ring on one of those grasping hands, and though his finger tensed, he didn’t squeeze.

The thing that had once been a man lurched toward him, gaining ground, a gurgling coming from its torn throat. It moved its tongue as if to speak, but Evan thought it might just be reflexive, hungry jaws working and pulling back lips. He took more steps back as it came on. Did it have a worried family waiting somewhere? Its gurgle turned to a frustrated snarl.

The medic’s partner, the cop, and the others were moving steadily, all passing the sheriff’s car, focused on Evan as he continued backing up, weapon still raised. They gasped and made mewling sounds, like hungry children or animals. A distant moan came from the right, and Evan glanced over to see three more stalking toward him across a field.

He sighted on the medic again but still couldn’t pull the trigger. It had seemed so simple before: assess the situation, come up with a course of action, exploit opportunities, and eliminate any opposition. Sure, if he’d been some guy in an action movie this would have been no problem. The action hero probably could have gotten himself laid in the process. But Evan wasn’t that guy. These were people, and he couldn’t kill people, could he?

The dead didn’t stop, kept coming on and backing him up, and the figures in the field were getting closer. He decided there would be a better time and place to assess his sudden attack of morality, when he could berate himself for being stupid. He had to stay alive to get to that point, though.

Evan started moving right, toward the field and the edge of the road, and was pleased to see his stalkers angle in his direction. Once they had moved sufficiently to one side, Evan bolted left, swinging wide around them and running back toward the intersection. Arms reached and angry moans came from behind him as he sprinted back to the open trunk of the deputy’s car. He had seen a small first-aid kit and a long black flashlight held to the deck by Velcro straps, and he slung the shotgun across his chest as he grabbed both.

Then he was running again, back to where the fat woman was still wedged in her car window, croaking and gnashing her teeth at him. Evan stopped again where the deputy had dropped his automatic when he’d been attacked, and he shoved the handgun into a jacket pocket before racing back toward his cabin.

The Harley was waiting, sitting there with the midmorning sun gleaming off its chrome. He was almost to it when the little girl in the pink jumper lunged out from the narrow, weed-choked space between the cabins. She made a high-pitched growl as she caught hold of his left leg and went in fast with her teeth.

Evan screamed and twisted, bringing the flashlight crashing down on her head, trying to pull away. She hung on and bit hard, but her teeth only sank into the seam of his Levi’s. Evan swung again at the top of her head, dragging her little shape with him as he tried to escape, hitting again and again and again.