Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (12 page)

Little Emer and his Skinners motorcycle club had been the distribution arm of Briggs’s marijuana business for some time, with a small but lucrative sideline in illegal weapons. Of course they also dabbled in meth and white slavery, but it was the weed that kept them flush and, as it turned out, the weed that saved their lives when the world went tits up.

Briggs senior and Andrew Wahrman had been running a sizable indoor grow at a warehouse near the train tracks on the west side of Chico. In mid-August, Little Emer and his Skinners rolled into town after a successful distribution run to Seattle and Spokane. Not only did they return for more grass, they brought with them a cache of military-grade automatic weapons, which they intended to sell in Sacramento. Fate put them all together when the plague struck: violent, well-armed men used to working together. It was a combination that allowed them to keep the dead at bay while they gathered the supplies they needed, keeping their distance from military and civilian authorities who were losing more and more control over Chico every day.

But then his son had gotten this conquering warlord shit in his head, going out and taking from others, forcing people to join his “army” with the threat of death, slaughtering any who opposed him. Big Emer wondered how much of it was real, and how much was just for kicks. Not that it mattered, the results were the same: a lot of dead and frightened people, a lot of shattered lives. Big Emer was no humanitarian, but he had always believed violence should not only serve self, but have a bigger point. Beating his son throughout the boy’s childhood had made Little Emer strong, for example. He didn’t see much of a point in any of this, however.

Not that it was his place to stop the boy. The cancer would take him soon, and then none of this bullshit would matter anymore. Yet he had spoken the truth; for all the flaws he
did
love his son, and he worried what would happen to his boy once Daddy wasn’t around for counsel and advice.

Little Emer looked at his father. “Some of the boys saw another helicopter yesterday. A second one, military just like the first.”

The older man set down his shears and crushed his smoke.

“They said it hesitated over the wreckage,” Little Emer continued, “then flew up the canyon toward Paradise.”

Big Emer traced a nicotine-yellow finger over the curved blades of the shears. “Two helicopters in one day,” he said. “We haven’t seen
one
helicopter in months. That,” he said, reaching for another cigarette, “is a fucking problem.”

Little Emer nodded. “What do you think I should do?”

His father smoked and thought for a bit, then leaned in and told him.

January 12—East Chico

“Please,” said the man on the ground, “please, don’t.”

“No one’s taking your kid,” Angie said. “Stand up.”

Behind her, Skye knelt beside Carney, who was on his hands and knees. The body armor and his own muscle mass had absorbed most of the blow. “Hey,” Skye said, “you think you’re some kind of Secret Service agent, jumping in the way like that?”

Carney stood. “Yeah, that was stupid. I should have let the shovel take your head off.”

Skye squeezed him. “You okay?”

The ex-con nodded, then eyed the corpses coming at them from all points. “We need to move,” he said.

The boy the man was holding was bawling, and then there had been the echoing reports of Carney’s M14. “We made a lot of noise,” Skye said to Angie, “and this is about to get worse.”

Angie prodded the man, who stood and wiped the blood from his broken nose. He didn’t let go of the boy. “You’re coming with us, so keep up,” Angie said. She trotted ahead with Skye’s rifle to her shoulder, pausing to fire, sweeping a slow arc left to right, dropping the dead. The man hesitated but got moving when Skye gestured with her silenced pistol. Once Angie had cleared a path, the little group moved out of the trailer park and back into the neighborhood. Behind them, a crowd of drifters numbering thirty or more followed slowly.

Angie led them right at an intersection, left at the next, then another left, putting distance between them and the trailing crowd. The M4 and Skye’s pistol coughed as they engaged anything that moved in their path, both having to change magazines twice. Carney’s M14 was silent, and Skye kept the newcomer moving. His little boy had quieted down and now bobbed in his father’s arms, staring back the way they had come.

The neighborhood they traveled through was middle class, streets lined with small, neat brick houses that looked much like their neighbors. After several blocks they came upon an intersection where a UPS truck had crushed a red Mini Cooper against a telephone pole. Just beyond, at the far corner, a gas station had burned flat and taken half a block of homes and small businesses in each direction with it. A black and flaking corpse, little more than charcoal, shuffled blindly through the ash.

Angie took them right again and midway up the block detoured up a driveway, rifle at the ready. The drive curved behind a small brick house to a detached garage and a tiny yard with a swing set. To Angie’s delight the garage door was open, and there were no cars inside. She led them in, and Carney took watch at the opening.

“Who are you?” Angie asked. The man was taking a lawn chair off a hook on the wall, settling his boy into it. The newcomer had no pack, no supplies, and both he and the boy were filthy. A raw sore bloomed on the man’s cheek, another on his neck. Skye handed him a canteen, then went to work on the toddler’s grubby face with a baby wipe. The little boy didn’t flinch or complain, simply sat with his hands in his lap, staring through Skye as if she weren’t there.

“My name’s James Garfield,” the man said. When Angie cocked her head, he nodded. “That’s right, my parents named me after the twentieth U.S. president, assassinated after only two hundred days in office. God knows why.” He took a drink, the canteen shaking in his hand. “I was a mortgage broker. That’s my son, Drew.”

“What are you doing out here?” Angie demanded, taking in his bedraggled condition and suspicious about his lack of weapons or supplies. “How have you survived?”

Garfield wiped at his nose and winced—it was starting to bleed again—and retrieved an oily rag from a workbench, pressing it gingerly to his face. “We’ve been hiding in a trailer for a week,” he said. “There was food in there. We would have stayed but you stirred them up through the entire park.” His eyes were beginning to bruise from the broken nose. “We were with a group for a while before that.”

“What happened?” Angie asked. ‘Why did you leave?”

“Because one of them got bitten, and the others were arguing about whether to kill him. I got scared.”

“So you ran with a little boy and no way to defend yourself,” Angie said, shaking her head.

“I’m not—I’m not confrontational.” His eyes grew wet.

Angie ignored it. “I’m looking for some people,” Angie said. “Maybe you’ve run across them in the past months. The man is Dean West, thirty-three, dark hair, ex-military. He’s got a little girl with him, about your son’s age.”

Garfield shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Angie’s volume went up, and she took a step toward the man. He took three steps back.

“I’m sure. No one like that.”

Angie took a deep breath. “What about the others in your group?”

“You mean do they know him?” Garfield shrugged. “It never came up. People came and went, I don’t know who they met out there. Maybe.”

Angie paced the garage, arms crossed. Skye produced a granola bar from her pack and offered it to Drew, who didn’t respond. When she pressed it into his hands, he began to take bites, chewing slowly and still staring.

“Why did you beg us not to take him?” Angie asked, stopping her pacing and pointing at the little boy. Garfield moved to his son’s side and rested a hand on the back of his neck.

“Because that’s what they do.”

“Drifters, you mean?” she said.

“I don’t know what a drifter is. You mean the dead people?”

She clamped her lips and took another deep breath, nodding.

“No,” the man said. “I mean, yes, but the dead take everyone. I’m talking about the people on motorcycles and their friends. They kill people.”

Angie flashed to her family ranch in ashes, her undead father nailed to a cross.

“They find people hiding and kill them, take everything they have. I’ve seen it.”

“What about the children?” Angie asked tightly.

“They take them,” Garfield said, and now tears rolled down his cheeks and he wrapped his arms around his boy. Drew chewed the granola bar and seemed not to notice.

Angie turned to her two friends, lines of despair etched in her face. Skye shook her head, and Carney’s expression was as unreadable as a stone. Angie looked back at Garfield. “Where is your group?”

“It’s been a week,” he said, “they might not even be—”

“Where
were
they?” Angie demanded, striding at him across the garage.

The man held up his hands and ducked his head. “At the elementary school! Little Chico Creek!”

Angie shouldered Skye’s M4. “Take us there.”

Garfield shook his head violently. “No, one of them is bitten, and Sorkin is crazy. I’m not going back there.”

Angie’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, yes you are.” The look in her eyes ended any further argument from James Garfield.

•   •   •

I
t was seven blocks to the elementary school, Garfield pointing the way and regularly demanding assurances that Angie and her friends wouldn’t let anything happen to his son. He never stopped talking, but he also never apologized for hitting Carney with the shovel.

He and his family—wife, fourteen-year-old daughter Kim, and two-year-old Drew—had reported to the refugee camp out at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds, dutifully obeying the instructions of the authorities. They had been given cots under a white canopy, some Red Cross toiletries and bedding, and promises that they would be safe.

“There were soldiers there,” Garfield said, “and high fences. Even Army doctors. Someone said they were going to inoculate us against whatever was changing people.”

Angie, walking beside him, listened without taking her eyes or her rifle off the street.

Garfield told them how one day, two weeks after the outbreak, his wife and daughter had gone to get their family’s daily water ration while he stayed at the cots with Drew. “The dead were always at the fences,” he said, “shaking them. But they couldn’t get in.” His voice grew soft then. “But they did. The fences collapsed, and people were screaming, they were dying and we . . . we just ran.” He was quiet for a long time and then said, “I thought for a while that they might be alive. Then a couple of months ago I saw Kim in the street. She was changed.”

Angie stayed silent, not wanting to upset her guide more than he was already.

The silenced pistol and the M4 went off with regularity as they traveled the seven blocks, Angie stopping to aim, Skye trotting up to the dead and executing them at close range. The drifters came in every form: men and women, old and young, dressed in summer clothes or uniforms for jobs they had been at when their lives ended. All were rotten and gray.

The drizzling rain continued with no promise of stopping, bringing a steady, wet chill. Garfield steered them up Amanda Way, where an apartment complex stood opposite the school. An overturned grounds maintenance cart rested in some bushes against one of the apartment buildings, and it seemed that nearly every door bore the now-familiar black-and-yellow biohazard warning. Nothing moved along the complex sidewalks or behind apartment windows, and except for the patter of cold rain, there was only silence. They took shelter under a tree near the street.

“That’s it,” said Garfield, pointing. “We mostly came and went through a door in the back, by the cafeteria kitchen. The National Guard tried to set up a base in the rear parking lot. We were living off their supplies.”

“How many of you were in there?” Angie asked, looking at the school.

“Other than us, there were five adults, no other kids. One of them is older, a retired cop.”

“Are they armed?”

Garfield nodded. “The old man, Sorkin is his name. He has a rifle. It’s the kind the soldiers carried. His daughter Hannah has a pistol. I think that’s it.”

Angie examined the elementary school, a one-story structure with a roof covered in solar panels. From here it was hard to judge the size of the building. She could see part of a parking lot to one side, and the nose of an Army six-by-six, but couldn’t tell what else might be set up back there. Part of a playground was in view, and a large soccer field stretched out behind the building. There were a lot of windows, and getting close without being seen would be difficult.

“Do they post watches?” Angie asked.

Garfield suddenly looked afraid. “Why, are you going to hurt them?”

“No,” Angie said, “I’m not going to hurt them. But I also don’t want to get shot on my way in.”

The man looked at her for a moment, holding his little boy close and trying to shield him from the rain. “We locked the place up as best we could,” he said. “I always tried to stay away from the windows.”

Skye joined them under the tree. “Who was bitten?” she asked, pulling off her knit cap and snugging it down over the little boy’s head. He didn’t react.

“A man named Deacon. He sold farm machinery.”

Neither woman could tell if Garfield was scared to go back in because he was afraid of his old group, or of the man who had been bitten and, by now, turned. It occurred to Skye to think it odd how everyone she had met since the outbreak, upon introduction, seemed intent on announcing what they had done before it all. Mortgage broker, farm machinery salesman, writer and hippie and real estate salesman. Probably just unable to let go, she thought. Her former life felt as if it were a century ago. Now she just thought of herself as a shooter.

“Deacon was out at the National Guard trucks getting supplies,” Garfield said, “and when he came back he was cursing and bloody. Something bit him on the elbow and broke the skin.”

“Who wanted to kill him?” Skye asked.

“The old man and his daughter.”

Angie looked at her friend and said, “Then those two will be the biggest threat.” Skye nodded in agreement. To Garfield, Angie said, “Will they let you back in?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. They didn’t kick us out or anything, we just left.”

“Then you’ll make the introductions,” said Angie.

Garfield shook his head. “I don’t want any part of this. Please just let us go.”

Skye rested a hand on his shoulder and stared at him. “We need you. You can keep people from being unnecessarily hurt.”

Garfield looked at the gray-skinned young woman dressed in black tactical gear, and his lower lip began to quiver. Carney spat on the ground to show what he thought of Garfield. The man wouldn’t last five minutes in the joint.

“Listen to me,” Angie said, softening her voice. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you or your boy. We have questions, and the people you were with might have answers. After we talk, you can do whatever you want.”

James Garfield sucked in a deep breath and nodded, and then they were off, trotting across the street in a line, Angie in the lead. They moved toward the back parking lot, watching the school’s windows as well as the area all around them.

Angie saw no school buses, no swarms of dead grade-schoolers, and for that she was grateful. Then she reminded herself that it had been five months, and even if school had been in session, the kids who had turned would have wandered away by now. They moved past an exterior wall with
Little Chico Creek Cheetahs
painted on it with the image of a running, spotted cat, the vision of crowds of dead, shuffling children still poking at Angie’s imagination. In the parking lot behind the school, as Garfield had said, was the National Guard base.

It wasn’t really a base, Angie quickly realized, more of a hastily erected command post, and incomplete at that. Someone had set up a square of sandbags to form a helicopter pad, but there was no chopper. At the corners of the command center someone had stacked sandbags for gun emplacements, with no weapons in evidence, and a square green tent was set up behind three six-by-six trucks parked in a row. Next to the tent was a boxy, tracked vehicle bristling with antennae, and a cluster of green fifty-five-gallon drums not far away. At the back of one of the trucks was a pile of debris, mostly plastic packaging and rain-soaked cardboard boxes that Skye immediately recognized as MRE packaging, the military Meals, Ready-to-Eat her fallen Guardsmen friends had introduced her to back in Berkeley.

Rain drummed on the tent and the flat metal roof of the antenna vehicle. There were no drifters here, but a wet crow perched on one of the antennae, watching them with black eyes.