Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (4 page)

In the cab of the rumbling Bearcat, Carney glanced at his cellmate. TC just grinned at him, planted his boots on the dashboard, and cracked open a Red Bull.

Naval Air Station Alameda—now called Alameda Point—closed in 1997. Before that, its 2,500 acres had served naval aircraft and provided a berthing for Pacific Fleet ships since before World War II. It was made up of over thirty miles of road and three hundred buildings, from hangars and machine shops to barracks, administration facilities, and on-base housing for military families, as well as the infrastructure to support them: shopping, theaters, barbershops, food service, laundry, and recreation centers.

Over the years since its closing there had been several attempts to create modern housing developments. It was, after all, prime waterfront real estate in a densely populated area. In each case, developers had withdrawn—or been asked to—and so throughout the base were signs of partial demolition and halted ground clearing. Many places were still occupied by silent heavy equipment parked next to towering mounds of gravel and broken brick. Repurposing the base had met with numerous complications. There were issues of soil and groundwater contamination as a landfill in the southwest corner had been found to contain PCBs and was the subject of a Superfund project, as well as concerns over flood plans, local wildlife, and legal issues. There were existing leases to consider, and a stubborn historical society that had hired some expensive lawyers and planted its feet, determined to hold its ground. The Naval Air Museum, which included stewardship for the World War II carrier
Hornet
, had proven a worthy adversary in the battle to reclaim the valuable property.

The old base wasn’t entirely abandoned. Some buildings had been converted to fitness clubs, design studios, tech companies, auction houses, and nightclubs, as well as a training facility for the City of Alameda Fire Department. Several reality shows—
Angie’s Armory
among them—regularly filmed out on the old runways when working with explosives. A plane crash had been staged there for one movie, and still another film company had actually constructed a great looping road around the airfield in order to film a car chase.

Most of the three hundred buildings, however, were vacant and decaying in the sea air. Cavernous hangars were home to pigeons and gulls; two- and three-story barracks sat behind dead, brown lawns while weeds grew unchallenged up through sidewalk cracks and asphalt. Vandals had had their way, broken windows and graffiti marring what had once been clean, uniform structures.

Back when it was a naval facility, a high, sturdy fence topped with razor wire had encircled the base, well maintained and regularly patrolled. Now, decades after the closing, the fence was in disrepair: cut or pulled aside in places by curious explorers, rusted and sagging in others, or missing altogether to permit demolition and the passage of bulldozers and dump trucks. The roads into the vacant blocks of the on-base housing sections were closed off only by sawhorse barricades and
No Trespassing
signs.

NAS Alameda was not secure. Despite its empty and remote nature, it was not free of the dead.

Calvin and his group followed the slow-moving Bearcat on foot as it traveled through the evening streets, keeping close together. They stopped only once, when they found a trio of landscaping trailers parked along a curb, loaded with lawn mowers and tools. They collected whatever they could find: spades, hedge clippers, long-handled limb saws, and scythes. Ragged and armed with these primitive weapons, they resembled a small, medieval army marching behind a siege engine, heading off to war.

In the rear of the armored truck, Xavier sat on a bench watching Rosa as she knelt beside the infected girl on the floor, cooling her forehead with a damp rag and checking her pulse every so often. He knew he should be praying for the girl, but he wasn’t. He had told Rosa he was a priest, but was that really true? While ministering to Alden as he died, Xavier had thought that maybe he hadn’t lost his faith after all and could possibly reclaim what he thought he had forsaken. When the dead had him cornered on that San Francisco dock, he had begun to pray, but did that mean anything? Was it only reflex, a habit? There had been no stunning revelation of faith, no sense of God’s return to his life. As Rosa had pulled the patrol boat into the Alameda dock, he had stood ready with the shotgun not because he feared he would be facing the dead, but because of the armed strangers arriving on the barge ahead of them, his fellow man.

No, still not a priest. And now he was a liar as well.

He wondered what would become of the girl on the floor. She would turn, most likely, and have to be put down. Who would do it? Could he? Not if he had any hopes of regaining God’s grace. He wondered about the men up front too. They didn’t feel like corrections officers, and they had almost certainly come across this van and made it their own, filling it as they scavenged on the move. There was a hardness to them, a dangerous feeling with which he was familiar, and he decided it was more than a little likely that both they and the riot vehicle had come from the same place. They would require watching.

The seat rumbling beneath him, Xavier thought again about the God he had served for most of his adult life. Had He done all this and ended mankind? That was what he had been taught to believe, that everything was God’s will, whether it made sense or not to men. It was all part of the mystery. But this . . . this nightmare. It flew in the face of the idea that He was a loving and merciful God. But then didn’t most terrible events do that? School shootings and genocide, war and famine, even the gut-wrenching poverty and homelessness he had seen in the Tenderloin. Now this, the eradication of mankind at the hands—teeth—of the walking dead. It was enough to make a faithful man doubt. What chance did he have, a man with no faith at all?

The Bearcat rolled slowly through the base.

In the cab, TC glanced into the back, then leaned toward his cellmate, speaking in a whisper. “What the fuck are we doing?”

Carney glanced at him. “Looking for a helicopter.”

“We’re supposed to be looking for Mexico, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“So what the fuck?”

Carney looked at him from the corner of his eye, still keeping his attention on the road ahead. “What are you talking about?”

TC glanced in the back again. “It’s supposed to be you and me, putting distance between us and high walls, man. How did we end up babysitting all these motherfuckers?”

“TC, you been sleeping this whole time? You know goddamn well how we got here.”

“We’re supposed to be free,” the younger man pressed. “On the road and taking whatever we want. We don’t answer to nobody no more. Now you’re taking orders from that hippie like you were his—”

Carney’s eyes turned to slits as he stared at his cellmate. “Say it. Go on, call me his bitch and see what happens.”

TC looked away and said nothing.

Carney shoved the back of TC’s head hard. When the younger man whipped back around, Carney bared his teeth. “You little punk. You think you’re strong?” His voice was a snarl. “You think you’d even be alive if it wasn’t for me? You’d still be cuffed to that bar, as dead as the rest of them.”

TC started to say something, but Carney cut him off. “Any time you want to try me, boy, you just jump. Any . . . fucking . . . time.”

The younger man looked back out the passenger window, his head down. When he spoke, it came out as a whine, but didn’t quite sound genuine. “It ain’t like that. You’re my bro, and you know I appreciate everything you done for me, inside and out. But, you know, I’m just worried that you’re gonna forget.”

“About what?”

“Me. That you won’t need me around.”

“Oh,
bullshit
. Just keep playing with me, TC. I’ll fuck you up for the fun of it.”

The younger man looked at him then. “I’m afraid you’re gonna forget that you can’t trust
none
of them. You get that? These are the people who put us inside, these straight-up, law-and-order motherfuckers. Just don’t forget that they don’t give a shit about people like us, man. Don’t you ever forget it.” He looked at his feet.

It had to be the most Carney had heard his cellmate say at one time that wasn’t nonsense or just brainless chatter. But the dog was pulling hard at the chain, and Carney worried what would happen if it broke. “Look at me.” TC did. “I run this show, boy. If I decide to give them our food or guns or any other damned thing, I’ll do it. If I decide to drive away or steal that helicopter or waste the hippie, that’s my decision. It’s my show. If you don’t like it, you can get out right now.”

TC looked back at his boots.

“And the next time you act like you want to throw down with me, you get ready to bleed. Now don’t talk for a while.”

Carney watched the headlights crawl down a vacant street that a sign at a corner identified as Avenue F. He suppressed a shudder, relieved that his cellmate was properly cowed once more, at least for the moment, and reminded himself to never forget what TC was: an animal, violent and dangerous, and most of all unpredictable. He could go from smiling to rage in a finger snap, and despite his hot-tempered challenge to the younger man, Carney wasn’t at all convinced that if they went to war, he would come out on top.

And then there was the matter of what Calvin had told him, that he had interrupted TC when he was alone with the girl. Had something happened? Carney had warned his cellmate to stay away from her, threatened retribution if he didn’t. How far was he prepared to go? He decided now wasn’t the time, and besides, the girl was safe. That black dude with the scar looked like he could give TC a good fight if it came to that. And as for the girl, Carney still wasn’t sure why he felt so protective. Was it because she was about how old his own daughter would have been if she hadn’t choked to death as a toddler? No, he hadn’t even known her. Was it because, inside, Carney had never been able to abide seeing the helpless have no one to take their side?

Bullshit,
he told himself, curling his lip. Who was he to even try on high morals like that? Wasn’t he the one who left a row of helpless men chained to a bar so they could be eaten by the dead? And hadn’t it been him with that baseball bat in his hands, beating two people to death while they slept? Right, Bill Carnes, champion of the helpless. He wanted to spit. He was a killer and a convict, nothing more. Better to keep things in the short term, stay alert and stay alive, and figure things out as they came. Leave the philosophy to people who could swallow it without choking.

Ahead, the kid and his girl were sitting on their motorcycle, surrounded by enormous aircraft hangars and stopped in the street as it made a turn to the right, waiting for them to catch up. When the Bearcat trundled up to them, the kid gave a thumbs-up and motored down the new street, apparently the last one before the hangars gave way to the airfield beyond.

Carney checked his side mirror, saw that Calvin and his people were still behind him, and followed.

•   •   •

A
re these people with you?” Vladimir asked, looking across the airfield toward the single beam of a motorcycle and the lights of a larger truck behind it. They were several hundred yards away. The Russian helicopter pilot felt exposed, and wished he were airborne.

“I don’t think so,” Margaret Chu said slowly. “Elson! Jerry!” Standing near the white seniors van and the vintage Cadillac, the two men—one a lawyer, and the other, a rotund, stand-up comic named Jerry—retrieved a shotgun and handgun, and came to stand beside Margaret and the Russian near the helicopter. A high school–aged girl named Meagan, who didn’t speak much and avoided direct eye contact, joined them. She carried a lawn mower blade as a weapon, and had refused to be parted from it since the day Angie West found her during a scouting trip and brought her into the group. The blade was stained red, and Meagan would not wipe it away.

Sophia, the self-appointed keeper of orphans, remained with the children in the van, and the others stayed close to the vehicles. Learning that the Black Hawk was not part of a larger force and was out of fuel had been crushing to every survivor who had come together under Angie’s protection in the Alameda firehouse. They had left their sanctuary in hopes of rescue, but they had also been forced to leave because of one man’s treachery.

Vladimir slipped his small automatic into his hand and held it low, just out of sight behind his leg. Extremely tall and homely, nicknamed Troll by his now-fallen military comrades, he towered over the small Asian woman beside him.

Margaret Chu checked the breech of her shotgun and put it to her shoulder, muzzle pointing at the pavement ten feet in front of her. In a short period of time she had gone from a passive, everyday person mildly afraid of firearms to a leader capable of more strength than even she thought possible. People looked to her for guidance and responded to her commands. Together, she and a man she had just met waited.

The Harley’s powerful headlamp revealed the helicopter, two vehicles, and the people lined up between them. Evan slowed to an idle as he approached, stopping within shouting distance and climbing off with Maya.

“Who are you?” a woman yelled.

Evan held empty hands out to his sides. “My name is Evan Tucker; this is Maya. We saw the helicopter land.” Headlights and the metallic banging of a sick engine approached from behind. “Those people are with us, families and children, mostly. We came from Oakland.” He wasn’t sure what else to say.

There was some conversation among the people by the chopper, and then a short woman with a shotgun and a tall man in a flight suit walked toward them. “I’m Margaret Chu; this is Vladimir.” No one shook hands. “We have children with us too, so we need to make sure everyone is respectful and careful with the firearms. Do you understand my meaning?”

Evan nodded. No one wanted a mistake or sudden misunderstanding to end up in a close-range gunfight in front of a bunch of kids. “I’ll tell the others, if that’s okay?”

Margaret nodded, and Evan squeezed Maya’s hand before jogging back toward the armored truck. Minutes later it was parked beside the Harley, and shortly after that Calvin’s hippies and Rosa’s boat refugees were mixing with the firehouse survivors. After some initial awkwardness, conversation took over. There was no aggression or suspicion, just frightened people finding others like themselves, relieved at the comfort that came from being in a large group of people with shared experiences. There was even some laughter, nervous at first, then genuine. Children from both groups found one another, and adults, strangers, stood together watching them play and interact, quietly marveling at their resiliency.