Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (7 page)

January 11—East Chico

Russo and Lassiter looked up at what sounded like a long crackle of distant thunder. A light mist still fell from the pewter sky, but there was no storm. Not one of nature’s, anyway. After a fifteen-second pause it came again, sharp cracks in short succession, the echo rolling over the dead city. They went back to work, continuing south on Forest Avenue, walking side by side down the center of the road. They were glad they weren’t involved in the not-thunder.

Well, at least Russo was. He suspected Lassiter would rather be there than here. Five years older than Russo, Lassiter was a cop wannabe with a severe crew cut—people called them buffs, right?—who for whatever reason had been repeatedly denied entrance into any number of law enforcement agencies and ended up as an armored-car driver. The man wore body armor and a harness of magazines for the AK-47 he carried, and tucked his fatigue pants into the top of his combat boots like he was in the Army.

The younger man would have laughed at him, but he was afraid Lassiter might gun him down in the street.

“We’re getting a little far from the truck,” Russo said.

“Don’t worry about it,” came the reply.

Russo was scruffy and in need of a shave, but good-looking under the stubble. Twenty years old, he wore an L.L.Bean jacket and, underneath that, a black T-shirt with the image of a reaching corpse over the words
Zombie Apocalypse? It’s About Time!
He had a knit cap and a striped scarf, a large backpack and hiking boots. If not for the shotgun and the pistol on his hip, he would have looked like any other Chico State student, which was what he had been before the world went sideways. He lit a cigarette as he walked.

It earned him a sharp look from Lassiter. “They can smell that.”

The younger man grinned. He had straight teeth, turning an ivory shade despite his youth. Russo had smoked since he was thirteen. “C’mon, with all that racket over there?” He waved in the direction of the not-thunder. “You’re worried smoke is going to attract them? How about the two Happy Meals walking down the middle of the fucking road?”

Lassiter made a sour face. Russo thought that was the right word for most everything about his partner.

The former armored-car driver looked away. “Just remember to keep checking our six.”

Russo raised an eyebrow. “Our six? Do you mean behind us?”

“You know I do, asshole.”

Of course Russo knew what he meant. In the months they had been paired, he had grown accustomed to the wannabe tough-guy’s mixture of police and military slang. The guy just begged to be made fun of, and even though Russo suspected screwing with the man could be unhealthy, sometimes it was just too hard to resist. The trick was to mock him without actually laughing. Besides, Russo was bored.

“Copy that,” he said, deepening his voice.

Lassiter grunted.

“Roger and ten-four. Wilco. Good copy.”

“Fuck you,” said Lassiter, walking faster to get in front of the other man. Russo snapped a flat-handed, British salute at the man’s back and whispered, “Okey-dokey, kilo-victor.”

They were moving through a commercial district made up of retail stores, chain restaurants, small hotels, and strip malls. In many places windows had been covered with plywood, most of them pasted with yellow and black biohazard warnings. Russo knew the message by heart.

AVOID CONTACT—REPORT ALL EXPOSURE

The street had its share of abandoned cars and overturned bicycles, but not as many as there would be in the major cities, Russo thought. He tried to imagine what it would have been like in the bigger cities like New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, millions of people packed into what would quickly amount to killing jars. He thought about Chicago right about now, a frigid January wind coming in off Lake Michigan, snow on the ground, and frost-covered corpses moving slowly through those urban canyons. Russo shook off a chill.

The two men walked around a Chico Municipal dump truck that had been painted black, now sitting cockeyed in the road. They peered up and in at the stacks of body bags arranged in rows in the bed. One was moving.

Just beyond the truck, in the parking lot of a multiscreen movie theater, they saw a trio of wild dogs harrying a corpse in a hospital gown, lunging in and nipping, darting out when the zombie turned as another leaped in to bite at its gray legs. The dogs would eventually win, Russo knew, but they were just as likely to be a meal themselves tomorrow if they ran into a pack of skinnies.

That was Lassiter’s word for them. He said it was what the Army had called them. To Russo, it sounded a little racist.

“We’re too far from the truck,” Russo repeated. “We should go back for it.”

“That truck was a piece of shit. I’m looking for a new truck,” Lassiter said.

The younger man shook his head. “Uh-uh, that’s not what we were told to do.”

Lassiter stopped and looked back at his partner. “Then walk back to the truck. But I have the keys, and I’m going this way.” He continued in the direction he had been heading.

This was stupid. Lassiter’s confidence was nothing but ignorant bravado. If they ran into a sizable pack or got cornered, they would be dead meat on foot. “No one said anything about a new truck. You’re going to get us both in trouble.”

“You’re going to get us in trouble, boo-fucking-hoo,”
Lassiter called back in a falsetto. “Why don’t you man up?” He kept walking.

Russo watched him go, looked around at the deserted stores and parking lots, then hurried after his partner. “You’re a dick,” he muttered.

Lassiter ignored him.

As they continued down Forest, they came upon a man hanging from some overhead power lines, his body dangling ten feet in the air. The man snarled and snapped at them from above, twisting in the air, and the two men in the street stopped to stare. The corpse wore the green flight suit and patches of an Air Force pilot, and he was hanging from his own parachute lines, the shroud tangled in the wires above.

“This fits with what we saw at the edge of Bidwell Park,” said Lassiter. Months ago, during one of their many scouting runs, they had encountered the wreckage of a fighter jet that had plowed into the trees near the west end of the giant park.

Russo took out his pocket camcorder and filmed the snarling pilot.

“That’s sick,” said Lassiter. “No one is ever going to see your stupid movie.”

The younger man ignored him. Before the plague he had been a film student at Chico State, about to begin his junior year. What the other man said might be true, no one would ever see his work, but that wasn’t stopping Russo from putting together a kick-ass documentary. He already had several sketch pads of notes and storyboard drawings, but the film footage was the real prize. His only difficulty had been keeping his camcorder powered. There were several generators back where he, Lassiter, and the others lived, and scavenging crews went out regularly to collect fuel from Chico’s many gas stations and abandoned cars. The toughest part—the most
frightening
part—was sneaking his camcorder battery in for charging. It certainly wouldn’t be seen as a priority, and he was more than a little worried about what would happen if he was caught. Not enough to keep him from doing it, however.

The documentary was a priority for
him
. For after the plague. There
had
to be an after, right? This was history, happening all around him, and future generations would want it chronicled.

A rattle of chain link on their right got their attention. A dead teenage boy had his fingers hooked in the fence of a car rental lot, staring and moaning at them. This was why they should have the truck, Russo thought. It started with one, and then more came to the sound, and soon they were running for their lives instead of just driving away. Sometimes the truck’s engine attracted more attention than two men walking, but in addition to scouting—their destination wasn’t far now—they were supposed to scavenge as they went, and they needed the cargo space. Russo had his own opinion about the intelligence of sending out only two-man teams, but he wasn’t about to argue with the one who sent them. The not-thunder was a perfect example of why.

A dead woman in only bra and panties, her many bite wounds turned black and green, joined the teenager at the chain link. Russo caught up with his partner and tucked his camcorder away. He had plenty of footage of corpses shaking fences.

They passed a Burger King with abandoned cars still lined up at the drive-through, windows smeared red. At a spa in a strip mall, someone had bagged a zombie—Russo refused to think of them as skinnies—with a shot to the head. A woman in a white terry cloth robe was slumped beneath a rusty splatter on the wall of the spa above her head, another motionless corpse lying half in and half out of the front doors, also in a robe, wearing one slipper. At the neighboring dentist’s office, an old man still wearing a blue paper bib thudded against the inside of the glass door, cloudy eyes staring out at them.

Russo shook the empty satchel hanging over one shoulder. “We don’t have shit to show for this run, man. We’re not going to come back with anything if we keep walking past places.”

Lassiter jerked his head. “You want to see if the dentist has some shit? Maybe some Oxy samples?”

The film student looked at the old man behind the streaked glass. Somewhere in there would be the dentist, an assistant or two, other patients . . . “No,” he said.

Lassiter laughed. “Didn’t think so. Besides, we’re about to score, big time.”

Russo had an opinion about that too, but he kept it to himself.

They came upon a minivan sticking out of the front window of a dry cleaner, its sides covered in long, dark streaks. A small Asian woman was pinned beneath one of the rear tires, arms reaching and fingers clawing endlessly at the asphalt, the flesh worn away to chipped bone. Russo stopped to film it, and this time Lassiter didn’t give him a hard time, only stood and stared. After a minute, Russo put the recorder away again and they moved on. Neither even considered putting the thing out of its misery.

The two men took a right onto Notre Dame Boulevard, passing first a bridal shop with a smashed and empty display window, a fluttering white veil caught on a shard of glass. Russo stopped and pointed.

“They’ve been here!” Color came into his face. “I’ve seen that bride mannequin, and so have you.”

Lassiter shrugged.

“Look,” Russo insisted, “they’ve already
been
here!” He pointed toward the parking lot of a Raley’s supermarket. The grocery store had been looted, debris scattered across the lot. Parked on the lot closest to them was a Greyhound bus with the word
EVACUATION
stenciled on both sides in white, the interior windows streaked with gore and the slap marks of bloody hands. Off to the right a flatbed Army tractor-trailer was parked with the rear ramp down, the flatbed empty. It was big enough to have carried a bulldozer.

“Why would they send us down here if they’d already checked it out?” Russo demanded, his voice rising in volume. “Are they trying to get us killed?” He was close to shouting now.

Lassiter suddenly grabbed the younger man by his scarf and yanked him close, lifting him onto his toes. The armored-car driver was stronger than he appeared. “No,
you
are, dickhead. You’re fucking yelling.”

Russo blinked and looked around. Corpses that had been drifting aimlessly through the lot or in and out of the grocery store were all facing their direction now, and moving as one.

“Good job, dick,” Lassiter snarled. “I should fucking feed you to them.” He gave Russo a shake and pushed him away, the other man stumbling backward. Lassiter turned and started to jog away from him.

Russo stared at the dead, at his partner’s back, and choked down a sob. Why did the world have to go and shit on him like this? He missed his friends, missed the Internet and Facebook, missed regular showers and being able to just switch on a light when you walked into a room. Food that didn’t come from a can, being able to speak your mind and not risk getting shot for it, coming and going as he pleased
without getting fucking eaten!
Now he did sob, a brief, semisuppressed gurgle of a noise. Lassiter was a first-rate bag of shit, but now he was getting farther away, and being alone out here was worse than all the rest. Russo had to run to catch up with him. The armored-car driver didn’t say anything when the younger man reached him, only smirked.

•   •   •

L
assiter stood in the road and stared, ignoring the muttering of his partner beside him. Maybe Russo had been right. Maybe they shouldn’t have left the other truck behind. He would never give the little punk the satisfaction of agreeing with him, though. As to being sent out here to die? They were valuable, at least he was, and wouldn’t just be thrown away. Someone had a good reason for sending them out here, and that was enough for him.

Their orders had been to scout Pro-King Range, a large gun store and indoor shooting range at the south end of town. And there it was on the other side of the Skyway, burned to the ground. A lone, charred skinny shuffled through the ashes. Lassiter wasn’t even going to bother crossing the road. There wouldn’t be anything left of value in those ruins.

“So we scouted it, and now we know,” he said aloud.

“You don’t think they saw this when they were down here?” Russo said, his voice a whine that grated at Lassiter.

“They wouldn’t have sent us if they did.” The older man looked at the light running out of the cloudy sky. “Time to head back.” He headed down the westbound lanes of the Skyway.

Russo pointed back the way they had come. “The truck’s that way.”

“And you got the skinnies all stirred up back there, didn’t you?” Lassiter called over his shoulder. “We’ll get up onto ninety-nine and head north.”

The film student jogged up beside him. “There’s going to be lots of cars up there, lots of zombies.”

Lassiter shrugged. “You can try getting back through the neighborhoods if you want to. Good luck. I’m taking the freeway.”

Russo didn’t reply, just followed, wishing all manner of hateful things on a man he knew he didn’t have the guts to stand up to.