Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (19 page)

The damage was more severe on the Oakland side. Sagging, abandoned warehouses and poorly constructed apartment buildings collapsed, and the downtown section, decimated by unchecked fires just as San Francisco had been, saw office buildings crumble like matchstick towers. Just to the north, a refinery pipe that serviced tanker ships ruptured, dumping petroleum into the bay at a startling rate. Within western Oakland, up the length of Peralta, the pavement buckled and split, leaving a jagged, three-foot-wide crack in the earth, one side two feet higher than the other. Cars, trucks, and a pair of city buses slid into the crack and came to rest on edge, wheels tilted upward. More than two hundred zombies disappeared into the crevice as well.

Their absence didn’t make a dent in the legion of walking dead moving through Oakland.

•   •   •

M
aya was a Californian. She had been through earthquakes before, knew what they felt like, and although this was the biggest she could remember—she had been born after the killer in ’89—and eight seconds of shaking was a very long time, she wasn’t nervous. Part of this was that for her, it was a silent event, one of sensation. And she recognized that had the warship been floating free and not snugged up tightly against the pier, she probably wouldn’t have felt it at all.

Her binoculars went immediately to the crowd of people gathered at the end of the pier. Though she couldn’t hear their cries of alarm, she saw their looks of terror as they clustered tightly together until the shaking stopped. When it did, they were none the worse for it. There appeared to be no injuries, and the pier was just as solid as it had been. She turned the binoculars toward the naval base in time to see a hangar at the edge of the airfield silently drop from view, replaced by a rising cloud of white dust. Her breath caught at the sight, wondering if that was the hangar in which they had all taken refuge. If so, it was now a grave marker for her mother and uncle, tightly wrapped in plastic tarps and laid gently in the shadows of a back wall.

She did not notice how the dead stopped moving for the duration of the event.

Thinking about loss turned her attention back to Evan, her father, and the others, and the binoculars sought out the aircraft carrier. It was now a long shadow on the water as the day faded into twilight.

Come back to me, Evan.
The words had turned into a silent prayer.

On the carrier, the earthquake barely registered. Only a small portion of the carrier was dug into the sea bottom near the bow, and the sheer size of the vessel displaced the rest of the vibrations. Down in the hangar bay, Carney had bigger problems than odd trembling. There were just too many of the dead and by the time Carney realized that, he was reaching for a fresh magazine that no longer existed.

The two inmates had managed to push forward nearly half the length of the hangar, drawing even with a space between a pair of giant aircraft elevators on one side, and the first in a row of helicopters against the wall on the other, rotor blades folded back for tight storage. TC had cast aside the empty automatic shotgun in favor of the Navy M4, a weapon that required more accuracy. In his fury he had switched to firing full auto, quickly burning through his ammunition.

The dead fell, but new corpses took their places.

“I’m empty,” Carney shouted, reversing his M14 so he could use its heavy wooden stock as a club.

“Me too,” yelled TC, thirty feet ahead of him. The younger inmate dropped the rifle and pulled the long wrench from his belt, caving in a corpse’s head, rushing another, putting it down, and searching for more.

They were going to be surrounded and overrun. Carney looked around desperately, spotted an open hatch on the wall, headed for it. “TC, this way!” He drove his rifle’s butt plate into a gray face, knocking it aside but not killing it. “Now, TC!”

TC swung the wrench like a home run slugger and crushed the side of a sailor’s head, just as two more leaped upon his back, making him stagger forward. One bit into the Kevlar body armor; the other chewed into an empty pouch on his shoulder where a radio would normally sit. TC whirled, shaking them off, beating them both down with the wrench.

Carney reached the open hatch, finding a space with sets of rising and descending stairs, and another corridor. A zombie stumbled through after him from the hangar bay but tripped over the knee knocker and fell flat. Carney finished it with the rifle butt.

“Any fucking day now!” he shouted through the hatch.

TC swung, crushed a collarbone and made a corpse’s head flop to one side, then ran for the hatch. A dozen zombies lurched after him, hundreds more angling in from the far reaches of the hangar. TC jumped over the body in the opening, boots sliding in gore. “Up or down?”

Carney started up a stairway, his cellmate close behind. In less than a minute the dead from the hangar bay began pouring through the hatch, moaning and clawing at each other in their eagerness to climb the stairs. The inmates reached the next deck, which offered the option of three hallways or more stairs.

Corpses began stomping down the metal risers above them.

Carney took off at a jog down the center passageway, another poorly lit tunnel that looked like every other one on this goddamn ship, passing doors marked
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
and
JAG
, some with an officer’s name posted to one side. When he came to the end of the hall, he was facing a door marked
STUDIO
.

“They’re coming,” TC said, looking back. A mob of shadowy figures pressed up the hallway, their moans reverberating off the steel.

Carney worked the dog handle on the hatch and entered the dark room. TC followed without hesitation, slamming the door behind him. They stood in the blackness, unmoving as they waited for their eyes to adjust, straining to see, trying to listen over their own heavy breathing.

A low croaking from somewhere in front of them said they were not alone.

Carney dropped his rifle and shed his pack, digging through it. He came out with a handful of loaded pistol magazines, a nine-millimeter Beretta, and a heavy Maglite. He switched it on, and not ten feet away was a rotting female sailor galloping at him.

Carney shot her in the face, then let out a ragged breath.

TC rummaged through his own pack. He hadn’t brought a pistol, but he produced his own flashlight. Together they panned their beams around the room. There was a blue banner on the far wall with
Nimitz
’s emblem sewn into it, a lectern standing in front of the banner, and a pair of large television cameras on wheeled caddies, cables snaking off toward the walls. To one side was a glassed-in control booth, on the other a row of doors.

A corpse pressed its face against the control room window, smearing it with gore and biting at the glass. Behind them, bodies slammed into the hatch, and TC threw his weight onto the dog handle just as it started to come up.

“Hold that,” Carney said, moving into the room.

TC laughed. “Yeah, no shit.”

The older man quickly returned with a coil of heavy cable, and they lashed the handle down tight. When TC let go, the handle wiggled a bit, but no more than an inch.

TC nodded at the pistol in his cellmate’s hand. “Wish I’d thought of that. Don’t guess you got another one.”

“Nope,” said Carney, “and you wouldn’t need one if you hadn’t blown off all your ammo like you were Bruce fucking Willis.” Carney walked to the door of the control room.

“Yeah, but what a rush,” TC laughed. A single pistol shot put the control room zombie’s brains on the glass. “Sweet,” TC said, grinning and watching pieces of gray matter slide down the window.

Carney checked the other doors. One opened into a long electrical room, the other two into an office and a small conference room respectively. None had exit doors.

“We’re in a dead end,” Carney said, walking back into the studio.

TC dropped into a wheeled office chair and lit two cigarettes, passing one to his cellmate and tipping his head back, blowing smoke at the acoustic-tiled ceiling. “Fine with me,” he said, stretching out his legs. “I need a break anyway.”

Carney took another chair.

“We should have cut out for Mexico when I suggested it,” TC said, huffing smoke through his nose. “That idea’s fucked now.”

“I told you to take off if you wanted to,” said Carney.

TC tilted back and ran his fingers through his long hair. “Nah, this is more fun.”

“Yeah,” Carney said, looking at the cabled hatch, listening as dozens of fists pounded against the steel on the other side. “Fun.”

TC yawned and dug a can of warm Pepsi and a bag of pretzels out of his pack. “I’m gonna eat, jack off, and take a nap,” he said, popping the can and shaking the foam off his hand.

Carney nodded and pulled a pouch of jerky from his own pack, looking at his cellmate.
You go and take a nap, TC.
There was no way he was going to let himself fall asleep in this room with that rabid motherfucker.

But after listening to TC snore for twenty minutes, Carney did just that.

•   •   •

D
espite her impairments, weeks of physical conditioning sent Skye up the exterior superstructure ladder like a gymnast with Angie close behind. By the time she reached the opening to the lowest catwalk level, her left hand had stopped shaking and her headache had subsided to a tolerable buzz.

Advancing slowly along the tight steel gridwork, elbows nearly touching the railing on one side and the tipped-out blue glass windows on the other, the women moved to the seaward side of the superstructure.

The view from up here was spectacular. Twilight had at last broken through the clouds, turning both sky and sea a dark pink. A strengthening breeze rustled their clothing and threatened to lift Angie’s ball cap off her head. The air was salty and clean, and for just a moment it was possible to imagine the world that was fresh, clean, and not an ever-expanding crypt.

The glass encircling the interior of this deck was thick and polarized, not permitting them to see what lurked within. They used the catwalk to make a complete lap of the tower, finding that on each side of the superstructure was a hatch to the interior and a set of stairs up to the next catwalk, seaward side and flight deck side. The hatches were stenciled
FLAG BRIDGE
. The only zombies they found were those Angie had shot earlier from below, and they couldn’t hurt anyone now.

Angie looked at her partner. “You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

Skye nodded. “The pain’s almost gone. I’m okay.”

“Then you decide, up or in?”

The younger woman looked up through the grillework of the catwalk above. “I’m thinking if we go as high as we can, then they can only come at us from one direction.”

“You sound like a sniper,” Angie said.

Skye shook her head. “Sergeant Postman would chew my ass for putting us in a place with no exit route.”

Angie didn’t know who Sgt. Postman was, but he was sure to be one of the many ghosts haunting the girl. Didn’t they all have more than their share of those? “I think it’s a good plan. We’ll have excellent elevation for shooting, and we can switch off on security to make sure they don’t come at us from behind.”

“They’ll come,” said Skye.

Angie could only nod.

Skye led them up to the next catwalk, a place identical to the level below. Here, however, the hatch on the flight deck side stood open. This was where Angie had shot at the dead officer, who saved himself by accidentally stumbling in through the opening. Skye raised the eyebrow over her now completely white, blind eye. It was an unsettling look. Angie shrugged, and then leaned in through the hatch, rifle first.

Even in daylight, the red battle lights of
Nimitz
’s bridge remained on, as they had ever since the supercarrier came to rest with its ruptured hull mired in the silt off western Oakland. The lights revealed that a slaughter had taken place here, splashes of gore covering the deck and control stations, black in the red glare. There was only one occupant, a short, female quartermaster standing next to a comfortable-looking, elevated chair marked
CAPTAIN
. Her arms hung at her sides, and she seemed to be staring forward, out through the blue glass.

Skye stepped up beside Angie and without hesitation shot the woman in the back of the head. The bullet passed through her brain and exited the front of her skull, punching a small hole in the window, creating a spiderweb of cracks.

“She’s alone,” said Angie.

•   •   •

L
ieutenant (junior grade) Doug Mosey no longer remembered when the ship under his temporary command steamed into San Francisco Bay. He didn’t remember ignoring the now-dead—for the second time—quartermaster demanding that he stop staring at a city in flames and attend to his duties. He was already dead and beyond noticing when the carrier first scraped against the rocks of Alcatraz and then, later, rubbed hard against the Bay Bridge.

Mosey didn’t remember graduating from Annapolis, the faces of his parents or their home in Michigan, had lost all memory of school and friends and movies he had seen, of Christmas mornings or pedaling his tricycle in the driveway. The passage of time held no meaning, and he could not appreciate the cleansing breeze coming in off the water.

Standing in the small navigator’s plot room behind the bridge, he did, however, recognize food standing just on the other side of the open doorway. Forces beyond his control or understanding compelled him to eat, and with a snarl, Doug Mosey lunged through the opening and grabbed the arm holding a rifle, sinking his teeth deep into the flesh, blood splattering what was left of his face.

•   •   •

S
kye screamed and jerked away, but the zombie hung on with his bite alone, making a groaning sound deep in his throat as Skye’s blood ran down his chin.

“Fucker!” Angie screamed, shoving the muzzle of the Galil against the officer’s temple and blowing his brains across the bridge. Mosey collapsed, his jaws still clenched on Skye’s left forearm as he fell.

Skye forced the creature’s mouth open and freed her arm, then skittered away to the far side of the bridge, her rifle hanging loose by its strap and banging against her chest, right hand clamped down over the bleeding wound. “No, no, no, no. . . .” The girl’s gravelly voice climbed octaves, sounding like the shriek of metal on metal. “No, no, no. . . .”

“Oh, God, Skye!” Angie cried, moving toward the girl.

Skye’s good eye was wide, darting about, and it came to rest on Angie. “No!” the younger woman cried, pointing at her friend.

Angie froze in place.

Skye’s finger wavered, blood from her outstretched arm dripping onto the deck. “Stay there,” she said, “you stay away from me.”

Angie held up her hands. “Honey, don’t, we can—”

“Nothing!”
Skye shrieked. “There’s nothing we can do!”

Angie’s hands went to her mouth. She wanted to cry, wanted to shake her head and refuse to believe it, but she had seen and done so much killing, had lost so many people she knew. The tears wouldn’t come. She simply stared.

“Nothing,” Skye repeated, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. She looked at the red, torn flesh peeking between her fingers. Then she bolted across the bridge and through another hatchway.

Angie ran after her, catching sight of the girl’s boots as she pounded up an interior stairway. “Skye, wait!”

Skye’s voice echoed down from above. “Keep away from me, Angie. I mean it.”

Angie stood at the foot of the stairs, heart aching not only for this young woman who had quickly become a friend, but for what would now have to be done when Skye turned.