Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (18 page)

November—Southeast Chico

The cooler season forced Dean to layer a T-shirt under a black, long-sleeved turtleneck sweater, the rig for his MAC-10 across his shoulders, the Glock on his hip. He wore dark jeans and boots and had found a pair of black leather gloves. Scavenged scissors and a battery-powered trimmer had brought his hair back to a semblance of order and turned the beard into masculine stubble.

He was lying on the flat roof of a gas ’n’ grocery, the hunting rifle on the gravel beside him as he peered through binoculars. Leah was safe back at the apartment with Dylan and Shana, and Dean was able to settle back into the comfortable role of scouting and reconnaissance. He munched on a granola bar looted from the store below.

A little over a block away, a minivan, a station wagon, and a jacked-up black Ford F-250 sat in the parking lot of a Target, close to the entrance. A man with a military look and an AK-47 stood in the truck bed keeping watch while half a dozen men and women repeatedly entered the store and emerged with shopping carts full of goods, loading them into the vehicles. Occasionally the man in the back of the pickup would raise his AK and fire several shots, dropping a dead thing as it walked toward the activity. Twice, muffled shots came from within the store itself.

Skeletons in summer clothes lay on the pavement in places, motionless beside empty, overturned carts or burned cars. A line of crows perched on the edge of the store’s roof, watching intently.

Dean hadn’t been looking for them intentionally; they had simply shown up. The longer he watched them, the more he recognized those on the ground and certainly the man in the truck bed as some of the people who had torn his family and his safe haven apart. These people, looking like innocent survivors trying to make it in a world come apart, were the enemy. Tangos.

They would all be easy kills for the scoped rifle lying beside him, but this was not a hunting trip. Dean needed to know what was out here. The raiders were obviously based somewhere inside Chico, but he had no way to follow them to find where that might be.

He ached to bring the fight to their door, to give them a final, terrifying taste of what a professional urban killer could do to their untrained ranks. But he could not. Leah needed a daddy to look after her, and that was a priority he accepted without regret.

Briefly, Dean considered leaving some booby traps for the raiders to find on one of their scavenging runs, but he immediately discarded the idea. Traps would maim and kill some of them, but not all, and would only serve to warn the others that there was a serious threat in their territory. They would scour the city to root out that threat, and soon no place would be safe for him and his daughter.

No,
he thought,
better to be a ghost. Exist on their fringe and wait for Angie.

A voice in his head whispered,
She’s dead.

Dean slammed the door on that voice at once. It was the thing he had brought back from the Middle East, a black-hearted creature living within him that preached hopelessness and despair, surrender and suicide. It made him tremble when he needed to be strong, and weakness was its religion. The Fear Animal. He refused to hear it, and this time was successful. He didn’t always win that battle.

Angie would come.
That was Dean’s voice.

He watched the raiders until they packed up and drove away to the west, and then he went back down the ladder into the store’s stock room.

The creature was on him in an instant.

Snarling, it lunged from behind a pallet of windshield washer fluid, a fast, dark shape in the gloom. Dean threw up his hands reflexively and it bit deep, jaws crushing down on his right hand, teeth piercing leather and breaking skin. Dean cried out as the thing growled and shook its head, clamped down tight.

The knife was in his other hand in an instant, and Dean hurled himself onto the dirty, mange-afflicted German shepherd. They went to the floor together, the big dog releasing the hand and twisting its powerful neck to snap at Dean’s face. Dean drove the knife deep into its chest behind the foreleg, burying it to the hilt. The shepherd yelped, shuddered, and lay still. Dean gave the knife a good twist before pulling it out.

He pulled off the torn leather glove, wincing, and inspected the damage. The bite was deep, but the glove had prevented the shaking and teeth from ripping the flesh apart. He flexed his fingers and made a fist. No nerve damage. Dean found a wall-mounted soap dispenser in the store’s restroom and used water from the toilet tank to clean out the wound, then searched for something to use as a wrap. The store had been heavily looted, but he found a chamois in the car care section. It would do for now.

Checking the street for movement, living or dead, he headed back to the apartment.

•   •   •

H
ow do we know it was a dog?” Shana whispered to Dylan, the two of them in the apartment’s small kitchen while Dean sat on the living room sofa, cleaning the bite with rubbing alcohol. “How do we
know
?”

“Because he said so,” Dylan replied. “Why would he lie?”

Shana raised an eyebrow. “Because
that’s
something a person would lie about.”

“He’s not lying. He would tell us if it was a zombie,” Dylan said. “He’s that kind of man.”

Shana stood with her arms tightly crossed and glanced into the living room. Leah was playing on the floor not far from her daddy, engaged in a game of blocks and giggles with Raggedy Ann and Wawas.

“Maybe it was a dog,” Shana said softly, biting her bottom lip. “But if it wasn’t, what will we do?”

“We’ll keep an eye on him. Dean won’t be offended and we’ll treat the wound as best we can.” He shrugged. “What else can we do?”

Shana nodded, not taking her eyes off Dean West.

•   •   •

T
he bite wound became infected, and it brought on a fever. Dean was stretched out on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, sweating and alternating between being too hot and not being able to stay warm.

Dylan zippered his jacket and pulled on an empty nylon backpack, the hatchet in its case hanging from his belt. “I won’t be long,” he said, and Dean nodded, closing his eyes.

“I’m going with you,” Shana said, emerging from the bedroom wearing a jacket and carrying both a butcher knife and Leah’s papoose pack.

“What is this?” Dylan asked. “You need to stay to look after them. I’ll be back soon.”

“No.” Her tone was sharp, and she dropped her voice to a whisper, stepping close. “Maybe that fever is from a dog bite, but zombie bites cause fevers too. I’m not staying alone with him like that, and I won’t let Leah stay, either. He could kill her.” Those last words were delivered in a hiss.

Dylan looked at Leah, who was sitting in a recliner with a coloring book and crayons her daddy had brought back from one of his scouting missions. The photographer knelt beside the couch, resting a palm on Dean’s forehead for a moment and then handing the man a water bottle from the coffee table. Dean looked pale, and heat radiated off his skin.

“You need to keep drinking,” Dylan said, “and try to sleep. We’re going out to find antibiotics and whatever other first-aid supplies we can.”

Dean looked at him and blinked.

“Do you understand? Shana is coming with me. We’ll be back soon.”

Dean swallowed the water and nodded.

“We’re going to take Leah with us. Just so you can rest.”

“No.” Dean’s voice was cracked, and his eyes held a fever glaze.

“She’ll be safe with us,” Dylan said. “You can sleep without worrying about her.”

“She stays,” Dean said, and the muzzle of his Glock peeked beneath the edge of the blanket, inches from Dylan’s chest. “She stays with me,” Dean said, his voice a whisper. “Do you understand?”

Dylan glanced back at Shana, who nodded and slipped out of the papoose carrier. The photographer bobbed his head. “I have the key, and we’ll lock the door behind us. We won’t take long. Please rest.” He turned to Leah. “We’ll be back soon, honey. Let Daddy sleep, okay?”

“’Kay,” she said without looking up from her drawing, one fist clamped on a blue crayon, the tip of her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth.

Dean’s eyes were closing even as the lock clicked home.

•   •   •

D
addy. Daddy.” Leah stood beside the couch, shaking Dean’s arm. “Daddy. Icky Man.”

Dean opened his eyes. They ached, and his mouth and throat were dry, his head heavy and hard to lift off the pillow. He reached for the bottle of water and found it empty. “What is it, honey?” he said thickly. What time was it? The apartment was gloomy with shadows, a last bit of gray light coming in through the front window. He could make out his daughter’s shape. She had gone back to the recliner to stand on the seat, leaning over the back and pointing out the window.

“Icky Man,” she said. “I want juice.”

Dean threw off the blanket and sat on the edge of the sofa, putting his head in his hands. Heat radiated into his palms, and a headache throbbed behind his eyes. His entire body hurt.

“Juice, Daddy!”

Dean held up a hand. “Okay, sweetie. Can we use quiet voices?”

“Juice, Daddy,” Leah called in a whisper. “Juice,
please
.”

“Nice manners,” Dean said, forcing himself to stand. “Good girl.”

Leah smiled in the darkness and went back to looking out the window. Dean walked slowly to the kitchen and flicked on the light switch, frowned, flicked it several more times, and then stopped and shook his head. He retrieved a foil juice packet and punched a straw into it. Where were Dylan and Shana? He vaguely remembered them saying something about going out. Had they left Leah here with Dean passed out on the couch? Why would they— Then he remembered pointing his pistol at Dylan. They had wanted to take Leah. With that memory he retrieved the Glock from where it had slipped down between the couch cushions and reseated it in his holster. Bending over made his head thunder, and he had to resist the urge to collapse back onto the couch.

“Here you go,” he said, handing over the juice. “What are you looking at?”

Leah took a long sip. “Ickies.”

Dean squinted into the winter twilight, the apartment’s living room window giving him a view of a short lawn leading to a sidewalk and then a parking lot. The dead were everywhere, slow-moving shadows passing between cars, walking across the lawn. Dozens. Hundreds. And they were heading toward this row of buildings. It was another surge.

Dean’s heart raced as he took Leah from the chair, setting her on the floor. “Time to be super, super quiet, okay, baby?”

“Not a baby.”

He took a deep breath. “No, you’re a big girl. Can you be quiet?”

She nodded.

“Play quietly with Wawas, okay?”

“And with Raga Ann,” she said, running to her two stuffed toys.

Dean looked outside again. It was nearly dark, had to be after five o’clock. Where were Dylan and Shana? They should have been back before the sun went down. The dead kept coming, staggering into the parking lot from some place beyond, heading this way. Would they try to get into the apartments? Maybe, if they smelled prey inside. Dean knew they would. How would he hold them off, and for how long? No help would be coming. He did a quick mental inventory of his ammunition, the math difficult to process in his heavy head. It told him he could hold for about fifteen minutes at the most.

Could he barricade the door, keep the two of them inside and wait for the surge to pass? But if even one of them caught a scent, or heard a sound—and a two-year-old could stay quiet only so long—the others would follow. He imagined dozens of dead people crammed onto the concrete landing outside, hammering at the apartment door while more choked the stairwell. Their only way out would be blocked, and there was no way he would risk a three-story drop from a window with a toddler. Even if they kept the dead out, they would starve to death in here, or die from lack of water.

Dean got moving, trying to toughen himself against his aching body and head, to ignore the fiery throb in his bitten hand. He grabbed the papoose carrier off the floor where Shana had dropped it and collected their go-bag, now always kept properly loaded and ready. Then he filled canteens with water from plastic jugs and pulled on his MAC-10 harness. He loaded a second nylon bag, this one with a long shoulder strap, packing it with extra clothes for Leah, the rubbing alcohol and gauze, her coloring book and crayons. He bribed her with a chocolate chip granola bar so he could pack up Wawas and Raggedy Ann without a fight.

“We’re going out for a while,” Dean said, setting the papoose carrier down so Leah could climb in.

Still gripping the granola bar, she ran past him, into the hall. “Potty!” she yelled back. Her daddy had brought back an actual potty chair with an image of Dora and Boots on the seat, and Leah cherished it.

Dean’s eyes shot to the door. “Okay, honey,” he whispered. “Quick, quick.”

Leah returned a minute later and let her daddy put her coat on, a padded pink thing with a fur-trimmed hood and a bunny on the chest, smiling when he called her a “good girl.” Then she scrambled into the papoose pack, an experienced pro. Dean hoisted the weight and settled it on his back, slinging the two nylon bags and the hunting rifle over his shoulders.

He had humped more weight than this in Iraq, and in triple-digit temperatures, but never in such a weakened state with a raging fever. This felt like three hundred pounds, and sweat broke out on his forehead. He closed his eyes for a moment as the headache beat at his eyes from behind, holding onto the door frame as a wave of dizziness washed over him. For just a moment he heard the hiss of an RPG round slashing through hot air, heard a boy from Montana screaming as he crawled across the sand, looking for his legs.

A tiny hand caressed his right cheek, and a small head pressed against the back of his own. “Love you, Daddy,” said a soft voice in the darkness. Dean opened his eyes. No desert, only a dark living room and his daughter’s warm breath on his neck.

His eyes narrowed and he bared his teeth. “Hoo-ah,” he whispered, reaching back and gently squeezing the little girl’s fingers. He looked at his bandaged left hand. It was steady. From the front hall closet he retrieved an aluminum baseball bat he had discovered earlier in their stay. He paused, hand on the doorknob, then flicked the lock and stepped onto the landing, bat raised. There was nothing out here, and the stairs down to the next landing were clear. The moans of the dead floated into the breezeway.