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

But there was no one.

Dean left the shotgun in the car and pulled his shirt down over the pistol as he moved across the lawn. A handgun at a daycare, no matter who you were or what was going on, would result in an immediate call to the police. After what he had seen at the intersection, he had no wish to encounter Sacramento’s finest.

Then he saw why the lot was empty. The glass front doors to Sunrise Daycare were closed, and packed with adults on the other side, staring wide-eyed at the sidewalk beyond, some covering their mouths. The cement walk just in front of the doors was splashed with blood, the body of a woman in a charcoal business suit lying facedown to one side, unmoving. Closer to the doors, another woman was crouched on all fours, just like the one he had seen earlier, biting and ripping at something small, something with a pink top and matching pink sneakers. . . .

“Oh, God,” Dean gasped, stopping.

The woman lifted her head, eyes glassy, face a red smear, and she snarled. He recognized her, Miss Daniels, one of the preschool teachers. The woman snapped her teeth several times and went back at the little body.

Dean’s Glock .40 cleared leather as he stepped to her and pulled the trigger. A sharp crack, red and gray exploding out the other side of her head, the tinkle of a brass shell hitting the sidewalk.

There was rapid pounding at the glass doors and Dean looked up to see the cluster of parents frantically pointing behind him. He turned to see the woman in the business suit, Veronica something, mother to the little one in pink, standing and lurching unsteadily toward him. Her throat was a torn, red void, and her eyes had that same glassy quality.

“Veronica . . .” Dean started, but the woman made a sound that was half growl, half gurgle, and lunged.

Dean shot her in the chest. She stumbled and kept coming.

He raised his Glock ten inches and fired a round, stopping her.

It was like opening the flood valves of a dam. The front doors burst open and parents flowed out carrying crying children. They moved past Dean and ran into the parking lot.

“Watch out for that one,” one mother said as she passed, pointing at the little girl in pink. Then she was gone, the lot quickly turning into a mass of gunned engines and horns. Dean looked past the hopelessly blocked lot and saw half a dozen people stumbling in from the street, probably parents who had seen that they couldn’t get their cars in. They moved like people who had just been through a prolonged artillery barrage.

Dean went into the lobby, no longer worried about the pistol in his hand, where he met Miss Pottermeyer, the center’s director. She held up her hands. “She’s fine. Leah’s with Miss Pam, playing with a few other kids. We haven’t been able to reach all the parents yet. I’ll go get her.”

While the woman was gone, Dean looked out at the still-snarled parking lot. There were fewer honking horns now. Then he looked at the two women he had killed.

Infection? Biological attack? Zombies?

He ejected the partially used magazine from the Glock and pulled his spare clip from its slot next to the holster, looking at his hands. They were steady. Thank God for that. He loaded the full magazine and looked at the bodies again. No hyperventilation, no racing heart. Again, good. He’d worry about how he felt about them later; he needed his game face right now. And they weren’t his first, were they? Or the first women.

Miss Pottermeyer returned with Leah, blond, blue-eyed, and two (two and a half, he corrected himself), wearing little white shorts and a powder-blue top with a kitten on it. Her sneakers had kittens on them as well.

“Daddy!” She ran to Dean, and he swept her up in his left arm, holstering the Glock with the other hand.

“Outside . . . I . . .” He looked at the center’s director and shook his head.

The woman held up a hand. “Dean, you did what needed doing. No one could leave while she was out there. And I can’t even think of her as Miss Daniels after what she—she was a monster, and that’s all.”

Dean shook his head. “But the other ones.” He remembered the dead girl’s name was Kayla but realized he had never met her mom, except to say “hi” in passing. “How did they . . . ?” He trailed off again.

“They come back,” Miss Pottermeyer simply said. “They’re not people anymore.” Her voice was flat, her face without expression, as if a hard shell had closed over her emotions. It was a survival technique, and used especially by those with responsibility for others. He had seen it many times and had done it himself, in a place of sand and high temperatures.

Miss Pottermeyer took a step toward him and lowered her voice. “Monsters, Dean. Don’t you forget that, and don’t you hesitate. You’ve seen what they do, and they don’t differentiate between adults and children.”

They were the words of a combat leader, and the fact that they were delivered by a preschool administrator made it all the more surreal. Still he nodded.

“Is Angie okay?” Pottermeyer asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t get in touch with her.”

The woman reached out and ran her fingers up Leah’s back, making the little girl giggle. “You need to get her far away from here,” she said, her voice still low.

Dean nodded. “The family has a crisis plan. We’re going north, to the ranch. Angie will know to meet us there. What about you?”

The woman gave him a sad smile. “There are still four little ones here waiting for their parents and 911 just goes to a recording. I can’t leave while they’re here.”

“Then we’ll put everyone in the Suburban—” Dean started.

Pottermeyer cut him off. “Their parents might be on the way now. I can’t take them anywhere.” She squeezed Dean’s arm and forced a smile. “I called my husband when the phones were still working. He’s coming with the Explorer, and I told him to bring his pistol. If the parents haven’t arrived by the time he gets here, maybe Miss Pam and I will put the kids in the truck and we’ll all leave together.”

“Where’s Mama?” Leah asked, squirming in Dean’s arms.

“She’s working, sweetie.”

“Why is she working?”

Dean smiled at their old routine. “Why do Mommy and Daddy go to work?”

“To make that money,” Leah said.

Miss Pottermeyer reached out and took Leah from Dean’s arms, surprising him. She turned so that the little girl was facing the other direction. “The door,” the woman said.

Dean turned to see Kayla, the little girl who had been torn apart on the sidewalk, standing and bumping against the glass, smearing it red. Her eyes were milky and dead. It was an impossible sight, the little corpse pressing her face against the glass, biting at it. The damage to her body was extreme. She shouldn’t be standing, shouldn’t be moving.

Watch out for that one,
the fleeing parent had said.

Dean didn’t think he could shoot a little girl, no matter what she had become. Miss Pottermeyer saved him from the decision. “Come with me to the fire exit,” she said, crossing the room. Dean followed her down a hallway with brightly colored doors and bulletin boards covered in construction-paper creations and panda faces made from paper plates. They passed a classroom with a viewing window, where he saw a young black woman on her knees singing a song with four preschoolers. Miss Pam looked up and smiled.

Dean stopped in the hallway. “I’m staying with you until your husband gets here.”

“No,” Pottermeyer said.

“I have a shotgun in the truck. Let me—”

“No,” she repeated, this time in her teacher’s no-nonsense, now-hear-this voice. “Richard is on his way. We’ll stay locked inside until he gets here. We both have kids to watch out for; go get yours to a safe place.” She gave Leah a kiss on the ear, getting a giggle in return, then stood on her toes and kissed Dean on the cheek. “God bless.”

A moment later the fire door was clicking shut behind him, and Dean was trotting across the grass toward the Suburban, the Glock once more in his hand. A few of the cars seemed to have managed their way out of the lot, but most remained where they had been. There was no more honking, in fact no more movement. A few of the open car doors were now streaked red, and there was broken glass strewn across the asphalt. Low growling came from within the jam of cars.

Dean quickly buckled Leah into her seat, handing her a stuffed Cookie Monster with a rattle inside to keep her busy. She let it drop to the floor at once, declaring it a baby toy. Then the big SUV’s tires were carving furrows in the lawn as Dean backed up, turned toward the main road, and headed for home.

•   •   •

F
irst there had been no traffic, and then suddenly he was sitting still, cars and trucks backed up from the intersection ahead, horns unable to drown out the unmistakable rattle of automatic weapons. Dean saw a squad of infantrymen in full combat gear running along the sidewalk to his right, toward the gunfire.

He felt a tremble at the corner of his eye, his mouth going dry.

Not now.

People had begun to get out of their cars to see what the holdup was, despite the shooting.
Idiots,
Dean thought, and threw the Suburban into reverse, crunching into the grille of a BMW and hurling it backward. With this new space he was able to wheel out in a hard U-turn, ignoring the shouted curses and horns, scraping the front fender across the brick face of a pizza joint and then shooting back the way he had come, away from the intersection.

“Daddy, you crashed,” said the voice from the backseat.

“Just a little, honey.”

“Did you hurt the car?”

“Nope, we’re fine.”

“Juice!” Leah yelled.

“When we get home, honey.”

“Juice! Juice!”

He was driving up a tree-lined road and had to swerve right and stop on the shoulder to get out of the way of an oncoming line of vehicles, all moving at high speed. Three desert camo Humvees roared past him in the other direction, followed by a sheriff’s deputy with flashing lights. All three military vehicles had men in the turrets, two behind mounted fifty-calibers, the third behind an automatic grenade launcher. Overhead, pacing their movements, a Black Hawk in desert colors flew so low it made the trees shake.

Without warning, the beat of the rotor blades suddenly hurled Dean into his past. He felt the desert heat, and heard the cries of men who now only existed as ghosts.

King-Six, King-Six, we are fully engaged.

Call in the goddamn fire mission!

Get third squad moving on the right flank—

Requesting medevac, coordinates to follow.

Dennis is hit! Oh, Christ . . .

Negative, King-Six, we cannot—

Dean? My legs, man . . . I can’t find them. . . .

The convoy and helicopter were gone, and Dean blinked, shaking off the ghosts. Not real, not anymore. He pulled back into the street and put his foot down, urging the big SUV on. It was bullshit, he didn’t have
it
. Eight years in, three combat tours completed, and all of it was almost five years behind him now. Lots of guys had come home with it, but not him. It wasn’t creeping up on him now, despite the . . . moments . . . he had experienced over the last six months. Post-traumatic stress was something other guys had to deal with. Dean had coped just fine with what he’d seen. It had been horrible, yes, and there were bad memories, of course. But that was all they were.

“Mama!” came a shout from the backseat.

“We’ll see Mama soon, sweetie.”

The Suburban turned into Sierra Oaks Vista, Sacramento’s most upscale residential neighborhood, a sleepy place of large, estatelike homes with lush landscaping and meandering roads. It was tough to buy here because houses rarely came on the market, and before even being able to schedule a showing, potential buyers had to prove they could qualify for the million-dollar-plus loans. He and Angie had been fortunate not only with the timing but to have found a place they fell in love with and could also afford. The schools were first-rate and the neighborhood was safe. He made a series of turns to reach the house.

Over five thousand square feet, the sprawling two-story sat well back from the street across manicured lawns shaded by mature trees. A four-foot stone wall ringed the property, more for aesthetics than security (it was only four feet, after all), and a pair of iron gates closed the paver-stone driveway off from the street. Dean pressed one of six buttons on a remote clipped to his sun visor, and the gates swung in.

The Suburban shot up the curved drive as Dean depressed another button, opening one of the five-car garage’s roll-up doors. He turned to back in and saw a woman walk through the driveway gates before they could close.

She was walking with sort of a stiff-legged lurch.

Bobby and Angel Levine had the house next door. They were a couple close to his and Angie’s age, with a little boy about six months older than Leah. They were nice people and there had been playdates, barbecues, and drinks by the pool. Pulled into the shadows of the garage now, Dean shut off the engine and watched Angel shuffle up his driveway. She had always been an attractive woman, with long black hair, longer legs, who jogged and was religious about yoga, committed to maintaining her figure, much like his own wife.

Angel was dead now. She had to be. No one could live with their torso ripped open like that, internal organs dangling and bouncing against their thighs. It was a sight Dean knew he’d see later in dreams.

“Potty, Daddy!” Leah called. “Gotta go!”

Dean shut the garage door. He was fairly certain the rest of the house was locked; it usually was before he went to work, so Angel Levine would have to wait. He got Leah inside and to her potty chair in time, then carried her to the family room and turned on Nick Jr. He wanted the news, but he had priorities, and keeping his toddler amused so he could carry out his tasks was at the top of the list. Leah clapped when she saw Dora. Dean was just happy there was still a cable signal.

“Daddy will be right back.” Dean touched his daughter’s head and then looked out the windows, searching for Angel. He didn’t see her, but it wasn’t the best angle. She could be near the garage door, or moving around back. He made a quick tour of the doors and windows on this floor, making sure they were locked and looking constantly for his neighbor. There was no sign of Angel. As he took the stairs two at a time he tried Angie again but had no signal.