Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (10 page)

It was green and looked ready to pop.

The creature had somehow dropped into a sitting position and become wedged between the front fender of an abandoned car and the bridge’s guardrail. It slowly kicked its bloated legs and waved its arms, unable to free itself or stand. Dean drove by slowly and carefully, sensing that if he nudged the abandoned car it would squeeze the dead woman. He could only imagine what would happen next.

The bloated green corpse behind him now, he checked in with Ed and Lenore on the CB, telling them what he was seeing, but not about the green woman. He was told to be careful and get back quickly.

Dean’s questions about what had happened to Chico were answered first by the complete absence of moving vehicles on its streets. The city’s fate was next apparent in the form of boarded-over windows, biohazard warnings, and abandoned roadblocks. The sight of a coyote loping alone and in daylight down the Skyway, completely without fear, told him more than a radio broadcast. The occasional wandering corpse seemed almost like a sideshow compared to the boldness of the coyote.

The Suburban passed beneath the Route 99 overpass, where someone had spray-painted
END TIMES
on the concrete. He continued as the road became Park Avenue, the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds appearing on his right.

He did not see that less than a mile behind him, a column of trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles, followed by a boxy military vehicle, rolled out from Notre Dame Boulevard. They turned onto the Skyway and headed into the canyon.

Dean slowed, unable to take his eyes off the fairgrounds, the place Harris MacDonald had reported was a safe zone for refugees.

When the fair wasn’t in town, the Silver Dollar was a local speedway, an oval track with spectator stands, all within a high fence. There was no racing now. Instead, the track was crowded with campers and motor homes, cars, trucks, and military six-by-sixes. There were ambulances, fire trucks, and a trio of delivery vans from a local party rental shop. The grassy infield was filled with tents of all shapes: Army field tents, nylon camping tents, canvas Red Cross structures, and white canopies from the party rental trucks, once used for barbecues and weddings, now converted to refugee shelters.

The fence had collapsed in a dozen places. The dead wandered the fairgrounds freely.

Dean’s voice caught only once when he reported the scene to Ed and Lenore, announcing that he was on his way to the MacDonald house. Again, he was told to be careful.

Harris MacDonald and his family lived just north of the fairgrounds, in a quiet neighborhood not far from the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. In fact, the old man could see the plant’s high, stainless steel towers from his front yard. Dean accelerated and left the fairgrounds behind, traveling the final distance in minutes through empty streets.

He saw all he needed to from the curbside. The bricks of the middle-class home were pocked with gunfire, windows smashed and part of the roof torn away as if by a giant’s crowbar. Bulldozer-like tracks scarred the once-pampered lawn, and what remained of the front door stood open.

Harris MacDonald had been crucified in his own yard, his corpse left to rot, the black spot of a bullet hole in his forehead visible even from the street. Dean looked at the house. He knew that searching for surviving family members would be futile, so he reversed direction toward the Skyway and headed back the way he had come.

He had just cleared the 99 overpass again when the CB burst to life with Lenore’s voice. “. . . Dean, Dean . . . oh, God!”

Dean snatched up the handset. “Lenore, come in! Talk to me!”

There was a pause, a brief crackle, and then an open mic. In the background he heard a sound with which he was intimately familiar, the chatter of an automatic weapon. Then he heard his daughter scream.

“Lenore, come in!” he screamed into the radio. “Ed! What’s happening?”

There was no reply.

Dean dropped the hammer on the Suburban and shot up the Skyway into the canyon.

•   •   •

T
he chain of events that led to what happened at the Franks ranch would have been difficult to predict, but it almost certainly began with Angie West. Angie had always thought the family bunker—so well stocked with supplies and arms—was a secret. Its existence, however, was revealed two years earlier to the wrong people by her own loose tongue.

It had been at a cocktail-fueled, after-hours get together with several of the producers for
Angie’s Armory
. When asked about the private lives of people so involved in firearms and combat shooting, Angie had dazzled the producers with tales of the bunker and the stockpile of arms within, winking and saying that her family was ready for anything. One producer suggested the family qualified as
preppers
, and a segment on the ranch and the bunker would make for captivating television.

No, Angie had said, they weren’t preppers, and the bunker was just between them. Tipsy from wine, the young woman had smiled and held a finger to her lips. By the following morning she had completely forgotten about the conversation.

The producers didn’t. There was discussion in the studio offices all that week, without any of the Frankses or Wests present. Should they push, get Angie to go along with a bunker segment? How much of a sweetener could they offer to get her cooperation? Was the value of bullying her for the segment worth making their star unhappy? In the end, a senior studio executive weighed in and ruled that Angie’s wishes would be respected, and the subject was tabled.

A junior producer had been present for the talks, and he complained to his assistant that Angie West was being unreasonable. Imagine, an underground bunker packed with automatic weapons. Fans would eat it up! The producer’s assistant repeated the conversation to her roommate, who in turn shared it with her cousin, a rabid fan of
Angie’s Armory
who never missed an episode, a man named Terry Lassiter who worked as an armored-car driver up in Chico.

When the plague hit and that same Terry Lassiter fell in with some dangerous people, the story of the weapons cache was repeated. Plans were set in motion.

•   •   •

D
ean’s Suburban roared back across the bridge over Butte Creek, and he scarcely noticed that the car that had pinned the bloated green zombie was now crushed against the guardrail. He went by too fast to see that the pavement was green and wet, a burst corpse trapped and flopping beneath the car.

But he saw other vehicles on the Skyway that had been crushed, flipped over, or rammed out of the way. Corpses had been run down and torn apart, a few still twitching and trying to rise, and he saw places in the pavement where something heavy with tracks had pivoted and gouged the asphalt. Former staff sergeant Dean West recognized the passage of an armored vehicle when he saw it.

Those same tracks turned off the Skyway and onto the dirt road leading to the Franks ranch.

Trees flashed by, the heavy SUV bouncing and swaying along the dirt road, threatening to slide off the edge. Dean kept the accelerator down, gripping the wheel with both hands and fighting for control. Through the open windows he could hear the ripple of distant gunfire, and then the unmistakable triple boom of an auto-fed heavy weapon.

Suddenly the trees parted and there was the gate, knocked flat now, the metal piping bent and twisted from being driven over by something incredibly heavy. A mud-splattered Jeep was pulled off the road near the gate, a man with a baseball cap and a rifle standing nearby. He jumped at the roaring engine suddenly coming toward him out of the trees.

Dean ticked the wheel and put the right side of the grille into the man at fifty miles per hour. Blood exploded across the hood and windshield, the shattered body momentarily airborne before crumpling to the earth. The Suburban didn’t slow.

There was smoke ahead, and as the SUV crested a rise in the dirt road, Dean saw flames and chaos. Every building was burning. Pickups and motorcycles tore across the lawns, circling like Indians in an old western, riders and passengers firing wildly on the move. Another handful of men took cover behind a bullet-riddled yellow Hummer, firing around the ends or over the hood. An M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle threw turf into the air behind it as it sideswiped and collapsed a burning outbuilding, then pivoted to charge around the rear of the main house.

Dean spotted Ed Franks then, the older man keeping a low silhouette in the open doorway of the bunker, firing an assault rifle in quick bursts. One of the men hiding behind the Hummer grabbed at his throat and fell.

The Suburban chewed up the ground as Dean left the road and tore across the grass, clipping a motorcycle and sending its broken rider spinning through the air. The distinctive cracks of an AK-47 came from his right, and a line of rounds stitched down the Suburban’s side, one of them punching a hole in the fuel can back in the cargo space. The reek of gasoline filled the SUV at once.

At the bunker entrance, Ed Franks was firing, turning slightly, firing, adjusting again. Another man fell behind the Hummer, and the windshield of a moving pickup disintegrated, showered with red, the vehicle slowing instantly. Dean’s Suburban was fifty feet from the bunker’s entrance when the M2’s twenty-five-millimeter chain gun opened up. The bunker’s concrete entrance, its steel door, and Ed Franks vanished behind a storm of high-explosive incendiary rounds. Earth and cement erupted in a cloud, and Dean stomped the brakes, cutting hard left to avoid driving into the heavy weapon’s fire. One shell, however, found the mark and blew away the SUV’s right front tire and fender, wrenching the vehicle hard to the side as metal fragments tore through the engine.

Dean bailed out the driver’s door. There wasn’t time to retrieve the combat shotgun, but he jerked the MAC-10 from its custom holster and ran in a crouch through a cloud of smoke and concrete dust. A figure appeared on his right, a howling man wearing police body armor and carrying a rifle. Dean swept a burst of forty-five-caliber fire across the man’s face and put him down. He fired a second burst at a figure running behind the first, and that man hit the ground, dead or alive Dean couldn’t tell. Then he was at the bunker opening, jumping through and onto the stairs, dragging Ed Franks’s limp body down after him. Bullets chopped at the opening above, and the thunder of the M2’s big diesel drew closer.

Ed was gone, he knew it in an instant. At the bottom of the stairs lay Lenore, facedown, her back peppered with shrapnel from the twenty-five-millimeter, blood pooling on the cement floor. Leah lay beneath the lifeless body, her grandmother’s arms wrapped protectively around her.

Leah was crying.

“Daddy’s here, baby,” Dean said, choking on the words. He shoved the MAC-10 into its holster and pulled his daughter free. Holding her stuffed walrus to her face, Leah began to shriek and kick, and he held her tight, pinning her to his chest. The small body shuddered, and the screaming stopped, but not the tears.

“Daddy’s here,” Dean kept repeating, hurrying through the bunker to the sleeping chamber. The four of them had been spending their nights down here, buttoned up against the darkness. Daytime had seemed safe enough, so they used the house when it was light, able to see anything approaching before it got there. They had been expecting the dead, and Dean cursed himself for being a fool. Ed Franks must have seen the bandits coming and quickly hustled his wife and granddaughter down to the bunker before making his stand.

Dean grabbed the bright orange go-bag from the spot on the floor where he had dropped it three weeks ago and threw the nylon strap over his neck. He checked the bunker’s main chamber before emerging, saw that it was clear, and hustled for the armory door, holding Leah close.

Voices behind him, the scrape of boots on the stairs, and then the clatter of something metallic hitting the floor. There was a
whoosh
and a hiss as smoke began filling the main chamber.

No time for the armory. Dean slipped into the rear chamber and found the exit hatch, snatching a can of black spray paint off the top of the generator before crawling through the opening, Leah under one arm. Using his fingertips, he pulled the hatch as far closed as he could, then turned and began a fast crawl through the darkness, keeping his head low. The go-bag dragged behind him, and Leah fussed and cried under his other arm, calling for her mommy.

“Hush, baby, we’re okay,” Dean whispered. “We’ll see Mommy soon.”

The distance felt endless in the absolute dark, and despite his best efforts Dean cracked the top of his head twice on the low tunnel ceiling. He felt that at any moment, dead hands would reach for him out of the black ahead, or the hatch behind would open and the tunnel would be sprayed with gunfire. He crawled faster.

Then he banged his head against metal once more, cursing until he realized he had crawled right into the hatch at the far end of the tunnel. He turned the wheel and broke the rubber seal with a soft hiss, pushing outward as daylight fell on them. Leah let out a soft sigh between her sobs.

Quiet woods waited just beyond the tunnel opening, green and fragrant, whirring with insects and dappled with sun and shadow. Dean scanned the trees as long as he dared, then shook the can of spray paint. “Daddy has to leave Mommy a note,” he told his daughter, then scrawled a single word on the tunnel wall. He knew—hoped—Angie would know what he meant. If she ever saw it.

LEWIS

Dean scooped Leah into his arms and ran into the forest. Behind him, the Franks ranch burned.

January 11—East of Chico

A single candle rested on the coffee table, the little house’s curtains drawn to prevent the light from being seen outside. Skye and Carney sat together on a sofa, and Angie was perched on the edge of an armchair across from them.

“Dean enlisted the day after 9/11,” Angie said. “That was long before we met.” She was staring into the candle’s steady yellow flame. “He did three tours in Iraq by the time he was twenty-five, and then they sent him to Fort Lewis, Washington.”

Skye sat close to Carney, warm against his muscled body. The former inmate’s arm was draped around her shoulder.

“That was where the Army trained him to be an urban warfare instructor,” Angie said. “Dean always said he was glad to have the chance to teach what he had learned. He said urban warfare wasn’t like regular Army.”

They were drinking instant coffee, the remains of their meal on the nearby kitchen table. Outside the temperature had dipped below freezing, and they had been fortunate to find this little house—someone’s summer place—down a short gravel drive off Stilson Canyon Road. Searching half a dozen similar places between here and the ranch had uncovered no signs of Dean’s passage, and no other survivors. They had found only drifters, which Skye quickly put down with her silenced M4.

Carney sipped coffee from a mug bearing a football team logo. “Is that related to what he left on the tunnel wall? Lewis?”

Angie nodded. “The urban warfare center at Fort Lewis. I think he was letting me know he was going into the city instead of the wilderness.”

“Why would he go there?” Skye asked. “That’s probably where the raiders came from, and there would be a lot more drifters.” She gestured with her coffee mug, chipped with a faded purple flower on one side. “Why not a place like this? Or even stay out in the woods? With his training, he could make it.”

Angie smiled at her friend. “He’s got a little girl with him. He can’t keep her out in the woods.”

Skye nodded.

“And a place like this is no good,” Angie said. “If he’s on the run, he’d have no place to go if he was discovered. A city has more places to hide, more resources.” She said it with a certainty she didn’t feel. It was all conjecture, and the simple truth was that she just didn’t know. Maybe Dean had looped around and gone up to Paradise. She didn’t think so, couldn’t say why, but it was a possibility. They might be looking for him in the wrong place.

Angie set her own cup down on the table. “I’ll take first watch. You two try to get some sleep; we’ll move at first light.” She picked up her rifle from where it leaned against the chair and moved to a spot at the front of the house, where she could look out a window and see the driveway’s approach. The Polaris side-by-side sat quietly in the moonlight.

Skye took Carney’s hand and led him into the back bedroom. They didn’t speak, and made love quietly. Afterward she rested her head and one hand on his broad chest, listening to his breathing as he slept.

Part of her felt guilty for the intimacy so close to where her friend stood a lonely watch, tormented by fears for a missing family. The other part, and, she admitted, the stronger part, cared only for getting lost in this man’s embrace, in his powerful arms and in those blue eyes that burned into her with such deep emotion.

What is this?
Skye wondered. It felt like nothing she had experienced before. The sight of him made her heart beat faster, and even in tense and dangerous moments, his presence reassured her, made her feel safe. Was this love? Or liability? A cynical voice, born during her time alone in Berkeley and Oakland, argued that this relationship with Bill Carnes was a distraction, that allowing herself to love would only lead to heartbreak.

And how did he feel about her? Carney didn’t say much, wasn’t a man to express many feelings, although he had opened up to her about his past, and she knew what kind of courage that had taken. Was she simply something to help pass the time and satisfy his needs? She didn’t think so, and Carney’s eyes said something else.

She sighed against him, listening to the steady thump of his heart, feeling herself begin to drift off. She’d turned a year older, she realized, the random thought coming to her in that fuzzy way things do on the edge of sleep. Her birthday had been in the fall, and she hadn’t thought about it until now.
Happy birthday to me.

With this in her head, she slept.

•   •   •

S
kye awoke sometime in the night to find herself alone in the bed, the blankets cold beside her. She pulled on a shirt and padded to the bedroom door, peering out.

Angie was asleep on the sofa, rifle propped nearby. Carney sat in a chair by the front window, his back to the bedroom and his M14 across his knees. He was having a cigarette in the darkness, the window open an inch to let the smoke out.

Skye closed the bedroom door and knocked out two hundred crunches followed by fifty diamond push-ups, trying not to think about the warm bed and her desire to crawl back in. And have company under the covers. When she was finished, she dressed, pulled on her boots and combat gear, and collected her weapons. Then she slipped out to join her man in his watch at the window.

Carney heard her approach, soft as it was, and smiled in the darkness. He would be happy for the company.

He had been thinking about what they had found here. It wasn’t so very different from Oakland, only less populated. Still a place of shattered life and emptiness. Still a realm of the dead. Could Angie’s husband and daughter be alive out here? He didn’t think so and hadn’t believed it during the months Angie had spoken of her family while they recovered aboard the
Nimitz
. When he climbed onto the helicopter it had only been for Skye, and to support a new friend. Faith in finding a man and a child who had survived all this destruction was a dream, and Carney was not a dreamer.

The pain Angie felt over her child was not lost on the ex-con, however, and he found himself thinking often of his own lost little one, Rhea. The similarity in names didn’t go without notice, either. Lost children; it was something he and Angie shared, two parents unable to save their little girls. Carney had used a baseball bat to focus his rage on the two people who had killed his daughter. Angie’s rage was focused on the world as a whole, and the former inmate knew where that led. Angie would burn herself out and accomplish nothing.

He wanted to believe they were out there, safe and alive.

In his heart he knew they weren’t. And yet he would say nothing, would stand by her side until she came to that realization on her own, then try to be there to pick up the pieces. He let out a soft, cynical huff as Skye’s hand trailed across his shoulders. Maybe he
was
changing.

•   •   •

T
hey investigated half a dozen more houses along Stilson Canyon Road before ten o’clock, finding only the dead or homes untouched since the outbreak. There was no sign of Dean having come this way, and no more messages like the one in the tunnel. Angie said it didn’t mean anything, and her two companions remained silent on the matter.

By the time they reached the outskirts of Chico, a point where the forest dropped behind and the road became a paved stretch descending out of the hills and into a residential neighborhood, the sun had brought the temperature up to a tolerable forty-two degrees. It was here that they decided to abandon the Polaris Ranger and go ahead on foot. The side-by-side was noisy and would attract too much attention. They parked it among some trees, gathered their gear, and set out. Angie hung the fifty-caliber Barrett and its bandolier of rounds across her back, leaving the hard plastic case behind.

By agreement, Skye walked point, machete in hand. Angie followed with the younger woman’s silenced M4, and Carney walked last with the heavier-caliber M14, constantly checking behind them. They kept to the sidewalk when possible, as there was no way of knowing who or what might be watching, and it made little sense to offer themselves up as better targets walking down the center of the street.

Before leaving the Polaris behind, Carney had checked in with Vlad by way of the two-way Hydra radio, the signal strong and clear. The Russian reported that all was well with Halsey and the ranch, and that he would be standing by.

Up here close to the hills and forest, the houses were larger, the neighborhood affluent. Down many driveways, boats and motor homes were tucked away and covered against the winter weather. But affluence had been no protection against the plague. Garages stood empty, front doors hung open, and lawns were littered with personal items as people fled in a hurry. In a few upper-floor windows of these beautiful homes, pale, rotting faces stared out, hands pawing at the glass.

A small dog skittered across the street in front of them, pursued by the corpse of a woman in cutoff jeans and a tank top, galloping stiff-legged after her prey. When the dead woman saw the three people in the street, she altered course and limped toward Skye.

Skye took the creature out with an overhand swing of the machete, burying the blade in its head up to the bridge of its nose.

Angie looked at the spot between two houses where the little dog—a terrier maybe—had disappeared. That it was still alive was a marvel to her. The small domestic breeds wouldn’t survive long in this dangerous new world, and most had likely died trapped in their homes or devoured by their owners. Those that made it out would have to forage and hunt, and face not only the hungry dead, but other predators thriving in the apocalypse, like coyotes and, eventually, wolves. She silently wished the terrier luck and returned her attention to the street.

Some of the houses they passed were tightly shuttered or boarded up, with black-and-yellow biohazard warnings stapled to their doors. Others had spray-painted messages scrawled across their stucco walls.

GONE TO OROVILLE
JOHN, MEET US AT REFUGEE CENTER
AMY, THE KIDS ARE WITH ME

As they walked, Angie felt a deep sadness settling over her. Had any of these messages been seen by their intended readers? She somehow doubted it. Both the writers and those they were trying to contact were probably now rank and file in the legions of the dead.

But not her daughter, and not Dean.

He and Leah were out here somewhere, and she would find them.

As blocks passed, affluence gave way to middle-class and blue-collar neighborhoods. The cars in driveways and along the curb were older, in worse shape than in the better neighborhood, and the houses and lawns were smaller. The spray-painted messages continued, however.

MEET US AT THE HIGH SCHOOL, JACK
MOM, DAD IS DEAD. STAY AWAY FROM HIM
CHRISSIE, I’M BIT. I LOVE YOU

Angie swallowed hard at that last one, then told herself that wasn’t the case with Dean. He wouldn’t let that happen. She wished she could believe it.

Skye used her machete to dispatch a pair of drifters that came at them across a brown lawn on the left. One of them was rustling along in an olive-green biohazard suit, rotting behind the Plexiglas face shield. She had no sooner dropped the pair than Carney called, “On the right.” Skye turned and moved toward a young man in a light-green grocery apron, who was followed by a decaying thing in a tattered state trooper uniform. They were too close together to risk engaging one and not the other up close, so she pulled her silenced automatic and put them down, one bullet each.

Angie continued to search for a message from Dean, something he could leave that only she would understand. Though she didn’t want to, every time they saw movement—drifters on their street or blocks away down a side avenue—she stopped to examine them with binoculars. She was looking for the dead versions of Dean and Leah, and praying she wouldn’t see them.

They came to an intersection with a wine shop on one corner and a run-down ice cream parlor on the other, a seedy place with
TONY B.
spray-painted across its front window. Snarling came from within the ice cream parlor, and then a pair of shapes tumbled out the door. Weapons snapped up, but it was only a pair of mongrel dogs, fighting over a rotting, severed leg still wearing a Nike on its foot.

PUFFT, PUFFT.
Angie put down both dogs with Skye’s M4.

The street continued for another block and ended at the entrance to a trailer park.
Twin Pines
was stenciled on a rusting metal archway stretching over the drive, with lines of angled trailers marching down both sides of the road beyond. The few cars in sight were beat-up and smeared with rust-colored bloodstains, windshields spiderwebbed with fractures. The trailers rusted on cinder-block foundations, their cheap tin skirts missing panels or dangling on old bolts. Laundry still hung on lines between them, and patchy dirt yards held plastic toys and more than a couple of engine blocks. The scent of death drifted from open trailer doors.

“Let’s move through here quickly,” said Carney from the rear. “This is pretty close quarters, and it doesn’t look like the kind of place your husband would choose as defensible.”

Angie agreed, and they picked up the pace. Skye sheathed her machete in favor of her pistol, and the other two kept rifle stocks to shoulders. They were far enough into the park now to see that the roads were set up like a pair of plus signs, one atop the other, two streets crossing the main avenue. Slow-moving figures on the side streets began to turn toward the trio, and other shapes began to appear from between the trailers. In moments, every dead thing in the trailer park was headed their way.

Fifty yards ahead, Skye saw that their street would lead them through another metal arch, out of the park and back into a neighborhood. She began moving faster, her pistol raised in a two-handed grip. Then Carney’s M14 went off to their rear, shattering the still morning.

“Holy
shit
!” Carney exclaimed, firing twice more.

Angie and Skye spun to see a woman lumbering past an old Suzuki Samurai vehicle that was so rusted a good wind would blow it to pieces. The woman wore a yellow floral-print housecoat seemingly the size of a ship sail, her bare feet torn to the bone, swollen gray calves as thick as saplings. Her mouse-brown hair hung limp across a wide face, and glassy yellow eyes stared out from behind the strands. She looked to be four hundred pounds plus, and not from the green bloating they had all seen. There was a fresh bullet hole in one cheek, and another two had torn away much of her thick neck.