Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (11 page)

The woman made a meaty noise in her throat and waddled into the road, chubby fingers clutching at the air in front of her. Carney fired two more rounds, hitting her in neck fat and punching into the same cheek, both without effect. Angie fired as well, clipping off an ear.

“For Christ’s sake, kill her already!” Skye yelled, laughing.

Carney did. He finally put a 7.62-millimeter round between her eyes, blowing a cloud of black and maroon out the back of her head. The woman’s mouth dropped open with a wheeze, and then she fell face-first onto the road with a heavy thud.

“Holy shit,” Carney repeated, letting out a shaky laugh. “She scared the crap out of me.”

Skye was still laughing, even as the trailer park’s dead closed in. “How the hell could you miss a target like that?”

Carney was about to give her a smart comeback when a man in his forties, carrying a long-handled shovel, bolted out of a trailer just ahead of them. He was also carrying a toddler and ran for the far entrance to the trailer park.

“Don’t let him get away!” Angie cried. “We need to talk to him!” She began using the M4 to clear out the drifters that were closing on their little group.

“I got him,” Skye called, sprinting after the man, with Carney chasing close behind. Skye was only a few yards away when the man dropped the toddler, screamed, and swung the shovel at Skye’s face. Startled by the attack, she didn’t react in time. The blade connected with flesh in a flat, dull thud, but it was Carney who took the blow across his shoulder as he leaped between the two of them and went immediately to his knees. Skye saw the look of surprise on the man’s face just before she broke his nose with a furious punch, laying him out flat. The toddler was screeching as she kicked the shovel away and crouched beside Carney. Angie ran up and leveled her rifle muzzle at the shovel man’s bloody face.

The man paid no attention to the rifle and crawled to the child, a boy of two, calling, “Drew, Drew, it’s okay.” He pulled the child to his chest and looked at Angie, crying and hugging the boy tightly, tears mixing with blood.

“Please,” he begged, “don’t take my little boy.”

January 12—Saint Miguel

The grow was located in a long, narrow greenhouse behind the Saint Miguel School. A flatbed work truck loaded with coils of irrigation hose and bags of potting soil sat outside. From within the greenhouse, muted by glass walls, flowed a harmonious blend of guitars, an early Eagles tune.

The January sky was overcast and drizzling again, raindrops chasing one another down the sloped greenhouse roof. Little Emer Briggs followed a sidewalk between the church and the school, rain streaming down his closely shaved head and muscled neck, pattering against his leather biker’s jacket. A large-frame automatic rode on one hip, an eighteen-inch hunting knife on the other, and an Uzi dangled from a strap on his shoulder. The chains on his motorcycle boots jangled with every step.

Little Emer saw the man sitting in a lawn chair out in the rain beside the greenhouse door, oblivious to the weather, smoking a joint in a cupped hand to keep it dry. He was thin and muscled, in his late forties, wearing a loose button-up shirt, baggy pants, and dark sunglasses. He wore a .45 in a shoulder holster. Little Emer had known Andrew Wahrman since he was a boy, and the man never seemed to change, never aged, and never—in Emer’s memory—took off those damned sunglasses. Wahrman was his daddy’s grower and had been for decades.

“What’s up, pothead?” Little Emer said, stopping and towering over the slender, older man.

Wahrman smiled without showing teeth and looked up, raindrops dancing on his sunglasses. “Quality control testing,” Wahrman said, offering the joint.

Little Emer took a hit and handed it back, blowing the smoke out through his nose. “New crop?” the biker leader asked.

“Nah, just simple herb.”

The biker looked at the man sitting so relaxed in the rain. Andrew Wahrman rarely left his grow. Not so long ago he had worked acres at a time in the California back country, living out of tents and trailers, tending his plants and stringing trip wires for Claymore mines to keep out thieves and federal drug agents. Despite a lengthy list of arrests, Wahrman had managed to do only county or light state time, and he had never rolled on anyone, not distributors or benefactors, not even mules. His cultivation skill was legendary.

There was another legend about the man, one that belied his easygoing, pothead appearance. It was said that once upon a time he caught a DEA agent in his grow up near the Oregon border, shot him in the head, then chopped him up and buried him in the soil beneath his plants. That particular crop had been packaged and marketed under the name
Fed Food
.

“Your daddy’s in the back,” Wahrman said, staring at his own toes as he wiggled them in his sandals, taking another hit. Little Emer went inside.

The interior of the greenhouse felt almost as damp as the morning outside, the humidity from the warm plants steaming up the glass. It was pleasant and fragrant in here, and Emer palmed rainwater off his face as he made his way down the space between long tables of soil. The crop at this end of the building was young, the plants only a few inches high. They grew progressively taller the farther back one went, transitioning from tables to pots and then to large buckets on the floor, some towering more than seven feet high and reinforced with long wooden stakes.

The Eagles were singing about Winslow, Arizona, but it wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out the metallic clipping noises coming from behind a high wall of dark green cannabis. Emer found his father perched on a stool at a worktable, clipping heavy buds off a stalk and placing them in a plastic bin.

At fifty-six, “Big” Emer Briggs—the nickname a mere result of being the older of two men sharing the same name—was twice his son’s age and half his size. Balding in front, he wore a scraggly gray ponytail in back and a goatee that was almost completely silver—or would have been silver if it weren’t an ivory shade from the nicotine. The man’s eyes were sunken in dark hollows, the skin of his face drawn close to the bone as advanced lung cancer steadily consumed him. He looked worn down, old beyond his years, and extremely ill. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips.

When those dark eyes flicked up at his son’s approach, though, there was not even a hint of frailty. Within those eyes was a cunning, an intelligence blended with a talent for violence and an even greater talent for evading a long-overdue accounting for his crimes. The tip of the cigarette flared, and the voice that followed was like a hard wind over a gravel road. “You had another one in the playpen last night, didn’t you?”

Little Emer grinned and nodded.

The older man clipped off a bud. “Old farts like me go to bed early. Fucking screaming kept me awake.” He shook his head. “You’re a sick one, Junior.”

His father was the only one who dared call him Junior. “We broke the post office yesterday,” Little Emer said.

Snip
went the shears. “Do you want a medal?”

A smirk. “I gave them a chance to swear allegiance,” Little Emer said, “but they chose to defy me.”

“Allegiance? Defy you?” Big Emer looked up. “You still playing at that Roman emperor shit?” The older man had only a slightly higher level of education than his son, but it was enough to know that the younger Briggs had it all muddled. Romans in a Catholic church? Medieval warlords and skull-tipped thrones? What was next, cowboys and pirates?

The son pulled a stool up to the opposite side of the worktable and shook a cigarette out of his old man’s pack.

“Get your own fucking smokes,” Big Emer growled, snatching the pack away and lighting a fresh one from the lit butt in his other hand. He was no longer picky about his brands, and there was no shortage of them in the many convenience, grocery, and retail stores. It was just the principle.

The younger man chuckled and lit his own smoke, waving it back and forth. “I just put six minutes back on your life, old man.”

“Like I fucking care.”
Snip
went the shears.

“And why not a Roman emperor?” Little Emer asked, leaning his elbows on the worktable. “I’ve got the army, the fortress city, hell, I’ve even got a gladiator pit.” He laughed. “And didn’t the Romans crucify their enemies?”

“Get your history straight,” said the old man. “The Romans crucified criminals.”

“Wrong. The Roman emperors crucified whoever the fuck they wanted. Friends, rivals, enemies, even family members.”

Big Emer stared at his son through a haze of smoke. “Gladiator pit,” he muttered. “That abomination you call a
playpen
.” He pointed the shears. “You’re living a fantasy. God knows how you got the size and not the brains. Fucking imbecile, you and your idiot friends.” He went back to harvesting his buds.

The warlord regarded his father with eyes as flat and lifeless as a shark’s. These were minor insults and no longer even left a mark. Little Emer wasn’t playing. Yes, he knew he wasn’t a real Roman, and what he had done in Chico was microscopic compared to what his heroes had accomplished. He had discovered them in prison, demanding his cellmates read to him about ancient Rome and specifically its rulers. They were men who took what they wanted, did as they pleased, and made no apologies. Men without remorse. The subject more than fascinated him, and he bore the names of his favorites as tattoos across his broad back.

There was
Maximinus Thrax
, who had ruled through fear and conquest, murdering dozens of friends and advisors.
Diocletian
murdered more than three thousand Christians by crucifixion and beheading and was known as the Caesar who popularized throwing Christians to lions.
Nero
executed his own mother and blamed the Great Fire of Rome on the Christians, using them as living human torches to light his gardens.

Little Emer thought he would like to see how that would work.

Caracalla
was the master of repaying an insult. When he heard he had been mocked in a play in Egypt, he sailed his legions to Alexandria, burned the city to the ground, and slaughtered its inhabitants. Twenty thousand died for that little barb. The emperor
Commodus
ordered that all cripples, hunchbacks, and undesirables in the city be rounded up and placed in the Coliseum, where they were forced to hack one another to death with cleavers.

These were the men he admired, for their audacity, for their strength and willingness to live as they pleased without regard for the outraged cries of others. But great as they were, none inspired Little Emer as much as the Roman emperor
Caligula
. Here was a man who proclaimed himself a god, and who murdered anyone who had ever wronged him in life, or even disagreed with him. He made his favorite horse a high priest, had sex with his sisters on banquet tables crowded with guests, murdered entire families for a perceived slight, and publicly cannibalized the testicles of live enemies who had personally wronged him. His crowning move, in Little Emer’s opinion, came at the Circus Maximus. When the dungeons had been emptied of criminals and none were left for Caligula’s favorite event, the lions, he ordered his soldiers to force the first five rows of spectators down onto the sand, where they were promptly devoured for the emperor’s amusement.

Little Emer pictured feeding his father to lions. Then he shrugged and said, “Everyone needs a little fun.”

“You need to think about being smart instead of having fun,” the old man said, jabbing the shears through the cigarette smoke. “Like the way you burn through fuel, especially with that goddamned tank running all over the place. Do you even know how much diesel you have stored up? Or how much is left in Chico? Smarten up.”

“I
am
smart,” the biker leader said, but the confidence was running out of his voice.

A snort. “Right. Spell
cat
, dumbass. I’ll give you a hint, it doesn’t start with
T
.”

Little Emer flinched at that. His dyslexia was a very sensitive spot, and an easy target his father knew well. Big Emer alone could bring it up without fear of maiming or death. Others hadn’t been so fortunate.

“No one asked you, cancer cluster.”

Big Emer began to laugh, and it immediately turned into a savage, back-breaking coughing spasm. Bloody spittle hit the cement floor around the older man’s stool, and a full minute passed before the coughing tapered off to a rattle. Big Emer steadied himself with a hand on the table as he wiped a rag at his mouth and nose. It came away bright red.

“That’s the best you can do?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

Little Emer didn’t respond, only sat and smoked his cigarette, staring at the old man in front of him. There had been a time when his father’s mere presence in a room loosened his bladder, a time when Daddy’s hand brought pain and humiliation that only abated when one felony conviction or another made him the state’s problem for a while. Little Emer had grown up swearing he would kill his daddy one day, but that day had never seemed to come, even when the old man was weak and sitting defenseless right in front of him.

The elder Briggs lit another cigarette and squinted at his son with runny eyes. They held a look that whispered,
Any time you think you’re man enough, little boy
. Little Emer Briggs, a rock-hard biker lord who had put twelve people in the ground
before
the plague, felt his father looking into him and had to stiffen to keep from trembling. When he was a child, his father’s presence had sometimes caused him to urinate without warning, a fact that still made him burn with shame.

The old man gave him a knowing smile of yellow teeth and returned to his clipping.

“I need to talk to you,” Little Emer said in a small voice, angry at becoming that little boy who said the wrong thing and was backhanded across the kitchen for it.

“We’re talking,” said his father.

“Some of the boys,” Little Emer said, and then his voice cracked. He started again. “You heard we shot down a helicopter yesterday.”

The old man nodded. “I heard that nutcase Corrigan and his fucking tank shot one down. I don’t know about
we
.”

“Right. He shot it down on the south end of town. He said he was rolling through the area and saw it coming in.”

“Anyone check to see who or what was inside?”

Little Emer nodded at his daddy. “Yeah, as soon as the fires were out. Corrigan said it looked like a pilot and a door gunner, could have been a woman. Both were in uniform. The dead started coming in not long after, so everyone split.”

“And this helicopter,” Big Emer said, inspecting a particularly heavy bud and placing it gently in the plastic bin, “what was it doing?”

“Landing,” said the biker. “It looked like it was landing.”

The older man snorted. “So naturally your stupid buddies blew the shit out of it.”

“I . . . We didn’t . . .” Little Emer flushed as he fumbled. “They might have found us.”

Big Emer pointed the shears again. “What, they might have discovered your pathetic little empire and ruined all the fun?”

The biker’s face reddened further as he furiously crushed out his cigarette, his hand shaking just enough to earn one of those yellow grins from his old man. “They might have compromised us,” Little Emer finished.

His father’s eyebrows rose. “Ooh, a fifty-cent word. Care to spell that, Junior? I’ll spot you the
C
.”

“Fuck you!” Little Emer shouted, standing up fast and knocking over his stool, his large hands turning into fists. “It was my decision.”

Big Emer shrugged and snipped a bud. “And now it’s over,” he said, his voice soft, no longer taunting.

The younger man stood there, unsure of what to say or do, and then the rage just drained out of him. He knew his father knew it would. He righted the stool and sat at the worktable again, reaching for another of his old man’s smokes. This time Big Emer didn’t protest, and even leaned across the table to light it for his son.

“You’re a big dummy,” his father said, his voice a rasp, “but I love you.”

Little Emer closed his eyes and nodded.

The elder Briggs regarded his only son for a long moment. Brawn, a spark of cleverness, and an absolute willingness to visit death and destruction upon his fellow man had kept the boy alive so far, but Briggs wondered how long that could last. Certainly longer if he listened to his old man, as he had done fairly consistently throughout his adult life.