Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (14 page)

The angry hum of auto-cannons tore the desert air in half, followed by the deep-throated impact of rockets and the thump of rotor blades. Bodies spun through the air or came apart in storms of blood and bone as an Apache gunship, looking like a giant prehistoric insect, roared overhead, blotting out the sun for just an instant. More choppers followed, the beat of their blades overwhelmed by the thunder of weapons.

Staff Sergeant Dean West blinked at the blood in his eyes, then slipped away into cold, dark pain.

•   •   •

D
ean crouched at the front window of the small house, staring out through a slit in the blanket he had hung. The memory, so intense he could smell the blood of his friends and feel the hot grit of the sand, had come unbidden and quickly overwhelmed him. Now his hands trembled and he bit the insides of his cheeks so hard they bled.

Not now. Not now.

It had been months since he’d had an episode, and none so far could compare with this. He was paralyzed, trapped in a shaking body over which he had no control, sweating, breathing hard, fighting to hold down the moan trying to claw its way out of his throat.

Beyond the window, the cul-de-sac was filling with the walking dead.

For weeks the street had been empty, undisturbed except for the odd corpse. Now, only a day before Dean was preparing to relocate, to find a new location that would replace their now-exhausted supply of food and water, they had come. Hundreds strong, a steady tide of walking decay was making its way into the circle at the end of the street, spreading out and stumbling across lawns and up driveways, pressing against houses and hammering at doors and windows. A dozen or more shuffled up the driveway to Dean and Leah’s house, heads tipped back and turning left and right, scenting the air.

Dean gnawed at his cheeks.
It’s our trash, the bagged waste in the garage, oh, God, they can smell it, oh, God.

“Daddy, I want Dora,” Leah said, standing in the living room behind him wearing a kid-sized football jersey that hung on her like a dress. She was dirty, they both were, and it was so hard to keep her clean when the water had to be saved for drinking. Dean trembled, stared at the corpses sniffing in the driveway. He couldn’t reply.

“Daddy.” Leah’s voice was low and petulant. It had been one of those days when nothing made her happy or kept her occupied for long. “Daddy,” she demanded, “want Dora. Want
Dora
!”

The driveway corpses stopped scenting and as a group turned their dead eyes on the front of the house.

Dean squeezed his eyes shut and tried to steady his breathing, wishing for some of the meds the VA gave to guys who’d had trouble after they came back from overseas, then instantly changing his mind. Some of those meds turned you into a living version of what was massing outside.

“We have to go,” he choked out, and forced himself to look away from the window and at his daughter.

She stomped a foot.
“Want Dora!”

Dean flinched at the noise and shushed her, praying his heartbeat would slow.
It wasn’t right. He had made it out of there, done three tours and made it home alive. He had seen the horrors and returned intact. He did
not
bring that war home with him.

The panic attack, brewing right on the edges of his self-control, disagreed. Dean knew he couldn’t let it all the way in, couldn’t allow it to have its way.

“We’re going bye-bye,” he told his daughter, and she cocked her head at the strange tone in Daddy’s voice. “I need to put you in our fun backpack, okay, sweetie?”

She stomped her foot again. “Don’t wanna.”

Dean crawled across the floor on his hands and knees, arms still shaking. “We need to play the quiet game, and I need you to be my big girl.”

“No.” Leah ran back to the bedroom they shared. A moment later her voice shrieked down the hall. “Wawas!”

Dean bolted for the bedroom just as something heavy slammed against the front door. Leah was standing in the room, fists clenched, looking around frantically. “Wawas!” she cried, and then the tears started. The stuffed walrus was on the floor, mostly hidden by a Dr. Seuss book, and Dean snatched it up, pressing it into his daughter’s hands. She snatched it and turned away, pressing it to her face, still crying.

There was a steady thumping from out front, the sounds of fists. Moans rose behind them.

“It’s okay, baby,” Dean said, pulling her to his chest and shushing softly in her ear. He felt
it
, what some combat survivors referred to as the
Fear Animal
, retreat inside him, frightened off for the moment by the power of a man’s need to protect his daughter. He blinked and gritted his teeth. After all these years, all his denials, it turned out that the Fear Animal had indeed hitched a ride back from the Middle East. He had secretly suspected it was true for a long time, but now, admitting it and thinking of the implications, he felt a new hammer blow of fear. His denial and refusal to seek treatment of any kind now left him exposed, unprepared . . . and weak. How was he supposed to deal with this?
Could
he deal with this without help? How was he going to protect Leah if this was an example of how bad it could be, freezing up when he needed to act? And could it get even worse? He feared it would. In that moment, Dean knew only two things for sure: he hated the Fear Animal, and he wanted to kill it.

“We’re gonna go bye-bye,” he said in a forced, happy voice. “We can look for Dora too.”

“Find Dora?” Leah asked, pulling away, her round, red cheeks wet with tears.

Dean smiled. “Yes. We’re going to get in the pack and go for a walk, but we have to stay really, really quiet. Can you do that?”

She nodded.

He squeezed her again, then got them moving. Dean had prepared long ago for the time when the supplies would run out. The papoose pack was on the kitchen table next to a new, well-stocked go-bag. The deer rifle and the MAC-10 rested beside them, and the Glock never left his hip. Dean pulled on the machine pistol in its shoulder holster; settled Leah, the rifle, and the gear on his back; then moved to the back kitchen door, watching through a slit in the blanket.

Nothing moved in the backyard yet, and Dean didn’t hesitate. In a flash he was out and running for the gate in the fence at the opposite side of the yard.

•   •   •

T
he surge, as Dean came to call it, forced them completely out of the neighborhood. He wondered at it, wondered why the dead would suddenly go from completely absent to present en masse. The best he could come up with was their trash. Perhaps there were uniquely human scents that the dead were particularly dialed into, and it gave him pause as he realized he had most certainly underestimated the acuity of their senses.

The two of them stayed on the move for close to a week, creeping between houses, scavenging what they could, never staying anyplace for more than a day. Dean looked for food, water, and toiletries. He found no weaponry other than a hunting knife, which he immediately threaded onto his belt near the Glock. Mostly they hid. There was no other choice, as the residential neighborhoods seemed to be filled with the walking dead, as were many of the houses.

There were close calls. Once, Dean forced a door open only to have the corpse of a woman fling itself at the wood from the inside and slam it back at him, reaching a gray arm through the opening. Her aggression saved them from walking in on her.

Many times, the dead saw them and pursued, slow but relentless, sniffing after them even when visual contact was lost. Turning to fight wasn’t an option, not with Leah on his back, and so he ran. The ugly panic attacks kept their distance for now, but Dean felt them circling, looking for an opening.

In time they came upon an apartment complex, a sprawling collection of three-level buildings with open breezeways and concrete stairs between them, surrounded by lawns gone shaggy and brown.

“Time to go apartment hunting,” Dean murmured, scratching at his beard and eyeing the closest building from a position across the street.

“Home, Daddy?”

“Soon, baby. Daddy is going to find us a new home.”

She gave him a kiss on his right ear. “I love you, Daddy. Is Mommy home?”

“Not yet, honey. We’ll see Mommy soon.” He reached back and stroked the side of her face. “We’re going to have to make some loud noises. Daddy might kick some doors, but don’t be scared.”

“You mad?” she asked.

“No, sweetie.”

“Not supposed to kick. It’s bad.”

“I’ll only do it a little. There might be Icky Men.”

“And bad boys,” she said, nodding seriously.

“Maybe. But we won’t be scared, right?”

She said she wouldn’t, and even giggled each time her daddy kicked open an apartment door. Dean moved through swiftly, clearing rooms with the MAC-10 extended at arm’s length. There were zombies in some of the apartments, and Dean shot them the moment they appeared.

Leah began giggling at that too, and that was both startling and unsettling for Dean. Part of him was relieved she saw it as a game, the part of him that needed her calm so he could search for the things they needed. The other part, the parent in him, felt a heaviness in his heart at the horrors to which the little girl was growing numb.

As he moved room to room he wondered if, instead of raiding, might they not set up here in a more permanent way? Something on the top floor with a good field of vision? Dean knew there was likely only drywall, insulation, and aluminum studs between the apartments. He could chop several escape routes or even break through walls to explore without having to go outside.

They were standing on a concrete landing outside a door with
3C
attached to it in brass characters, when a voice spoke from the stairs to the landing below. “She’s beautiful.”

Dean pivoted and pointed the muzzle of the MAC-10 at the man’s face, index finger sinking pressure down onto the trigger. The man was in his early fifties, with lots of hair and sad blue eyes. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a soft blue work shirt, he carried a bulging canvas laundry bag. There was a hatchet in a sheath on his hip, and a professional-grade camera on a strap around his neck.

The man blinked. “Please don’t.”

Dean didn’t squeeze but didn’t move the machine pistol away.

“Don’t kill him,” a woman’s voice said softly to Dean’s left. He spun, pointing the weapon at a blond woman in her thirties, standing in the open doorway of apartment 3D.

“We live here,” said the man on the stairs. “Me and Shana.”

The woman nodded. “Please . . . come inside.”

Dean looked at them both, tracking the muzzle of the MAC-10 back and forth between them. A foul, black little voice inside him urged Dean to kill them both quickly and take their place and their supplies, to be ruthless in order to survive.

But the man who was a daddy to the wide-eyed, almost three-year-old watching it unfold could not do that. Dean lowered his weapon, and soon got to know Dylan Stern and Shana DiMarco.

•   •   •

I
was backpacking when the plague hit,” Dylan explained, sitting on a small sofa across from Dean and Leah. Shana had already provided bottled water and conjured up a juice box for Leah. She also offered a box of diaper wipes so father and daughter could clean themselves.

Dean thanked her and kept the MAC-10 in his lap, muzzle angled in their direction, finger resting beside the trigger.

Dylan noticed but said nothing. “I lived in the hills as long as I could,” he said, “until I ran out of food. Then I had to come down.” He was a professional photographer, he explained, paying the bills with portraits and weddings and graduations, but his real love was photographing the outdoors.

The man looked at Leah, who was sipping happily at her juice, sitting close to her daddy with Wawas tucked under one arm. Dylan said, “On the stairs when I said she was beautiful, that probably sounded creepy. It just came out; I do a lot of kids’ portraits. I didn’t mean anything by it, so thank you for not killing me.” He gave a nervous, embarrassed laugh.

Shana sat beside him and put a paper plate of chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table, along with an open can of tuna and a fork. “She is beautiful,” the woman said, smiling at Leah. “We haven’t seen a little girl in a long time. Not one who wasn’t . . .”

Dylan put an arm around her.

After a few moments, Shana told Dean that she had been the manager of a wine shop here in Chico. When the city ordered all nonessential businesses closed, she had chosen to stay in her home instead of report to the refugee center out at the fairgrounds.

“It’s good you did,” said Dean. “It was overrun.”

Shana glanced at Dylan and put her head on his shoulder. “We thought something like that must have happened. It’s been so quiet for a long time, no loudspeakers or helicopters, nothing in the street but
them
.”

“We were both out wandering,” Dylan said. “The dead keep you moving. We ran into each other in this complex, looking for supplies like you were. We’ve been here for a month now.”

Dean let Leah have a cookie, and she gobbled down four before he had to ask Shana to take the plate away. Leah wasn’t happy about that, but then the woman returned with a faded Raggedy Ann doll.

“I found it in one of the closets,” she said. “It’s pretty beaten up.”

Leah squealed and reached with little grabbing hands, hugging the doll close. After some prodding by her father she said, “Thank you,” and knelt on the carpet, where Raggedy Ann was soon engaged in a conversation with a stuffed walrus.

Dylan smiled as he looked at the little girl. “They get used to situations. Thank God.”

“That’s what worries me,” said Dean, then looked back at his hosts. They seemed harmless enough. Was he prepared to trust them? “You had your camera with you,” Dean said. “What do you take pictures of these days?”

The older man smiled and offered the digital camera. “It still has juice. I have a solar charger, and it comes in handy when I’m out in the woods for a week at a time. I photograph the same thing I did before: nature. There’s lots of shots of Shana in there too, a few of the vacant city, but they’re terribly sad. I won’t photograph the dead,” he said, frowning. “That’s not nature. They’re abominations. I delete any picture they show up in, no matter how good I think it is.”