Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (16 page)

A woman in pajamas.

A teenager in cutoffs.

A man in a shirt and tie.

A girl in a bathing suit.

Ghastly faces appeared and disappeared, eyes glazed, flesh sagging or missing from rot or old bites, complexions of gray and green. And then the sight fell on a drifter with a bald head, bare-chested with taut skin defining every muscle, clearly dead from a savaged and open throat. It was impossible to identify its former race, because now it looked like nothing Skye had ever seen. Its skin was glossy, unnaturally smooth. Most startling of all was its dark, cherry-colored skin. It reminded Skye of something she had once seen online, the body of a person who had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. That person’s skin had been nearly this shade, although blotchy. This thing appeared unblemished.

It wasn’t following the other dead things, either, simply standing near the back of the electrician’s van with one hand resting on the metal side. The creature’s teeth were bared, and it stared directly up at Skye from across the street, then licked its lips with a coal-black tongue.

Her breath caught and she moved her eye from the sight for a second, blinking. She had never seen one of them do that before. Then she centered the sight’s luminescent green chevrons on the thing’s forehead, tensed her finger—

—and the creature stepped out of sight behind the van.

“Did you see that?” she shouted to the others.

Angie dropped to one knee beside her, rifle raised. “See what?”

Skye pointed. “There was a drifter out there, and it was looking at me. It moved behind that van just before I fired. Like it
knew
.”

Angie used her binoculars but saw nothing but the same type of drifters they had seen for months, moaning and walking stiffly to fill the lane Skye had cleared. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s behind that van. It’s red, smooth, and kind of shiny. It was looking at me and it moved out of the way. They don’t do that!” Skye made a growling sound and fired at the new drifters in her lane until her magazine was dry. The glossy red drifter did not reappear.

The dead frightened her, always had, though she had learned to control her fear. This new . . . creature . . . was even more terrifying. It was self-aware, that much was clear, and it could think. One of her literature teachers in high school had used a word once that resonated with her:
hobgoblin
. He said it was a creature that originated from Celtic mythology, but he told them the term had been used to describe other things as well. “Hobgoblin,” he had said, standing in front of the chalkboard, “something frightening, dangerous, and hard to get rid of.”

Hobgoblin,
she thought.
That’s what it was.
And then another word occurred to her.
Mutation.

“This might not work,” Angie said, watching as drifters immediately replaced those that fell. “It’s not much of an opening, and the activity is drawing in even more.”

But someone thought the gap was worth the risk. Below them, a fire exit banged open as Sorkin and Hannah bolted out of it. They ran across the lawn and into the street, into the lane choked with fallen bodies, Hannah in the lead. They dodged around reaching arms, the old man carrying the assault rifle and keeping up with the younger woman.

Hannah had almost made it all the way across when she cut too close to a reaching creature in khakis and a red shirt. It caught hold of her waistband, and though her forward movement jerked it off its feet, it also brought Hannah to the ground. Two more drifters galloped in as the first clawed a better hold on the struggling woman.

Hannah screamed. Sorkin ran past without stopping.

“Son of a bitch,” Skye hissed, putting her rifle sights on the old man’s back. But then she shifted right, trying to line up on the head of one of the thrashing figures atop Hannah. It was too late. Beside her, Angie saw Sorkin dodge more reaching arms and then run into the small parking lot and around the back of the electrician’s van.

There was a horrible scream, quickly cut short.

Below, Skye’s exit lane was full of the dead once more as drifters moved in to participate in the feeding frenzy where Hannah had gone down. Skye cursed and looked for another way out.

Then everything stopped.

Every
thing
stopped.

Every drifter in view came to a complete halt and slowly shuffled in place until they were all facing the same direction: southwest. Those feeding on Hannah climbed to their feet and did the same, and all the corpses tipped their heads back in the same instant. They were silent, standing motionless in the drizzling rain.

The survivors on the roof stared at one another with unspoken questions, but it was Angie, in a sharp voice, who said, “Don’t ask, just take advantage. Everyone off the roof.”

One by one they sat on the edge, turned, and hung from the lip, legs dangling before they dropped. Abbie made a small whimpering noise but did as she was told, and within a minute all five of them were on the ground without injury.

Skye took the lead again, and the others followed in a running line as they crossed the street, weapons raised, winding through the stationary dead. Nothing moved or reached, nothing moaned.

The young woman stayed well to the side as she took them past the electrician’s van, her M4 switched to full auto and ready to shred the glossy red drifter as soon as she saw it. The pavement, the rear doors of the van, and the medical office wall were covered in what looked like paint cans’ worth of red. Sorkin’s assault rifle lay in a pool of it, and what remained of the man was difficult to identify. He had been torn to pieces. Separated limbs rested yards away from the savaged torso, as if ripped off and thrown, and the head was missing.

Abbie screamed and pointed. At the rear entrance to the medical offices stood a row of white metal boxes for lab pickup and drop-off. Sorkin’s head sat upon one of them, eyes gouged out and mouth open in a frozen scream.

The head couldn’t have landed there, in an upright position, by chance. It had been intentionally placed.

Of the glossy red zombie there was no sign, but Skye came to a halt and sighted, turning in a slow circle. Angie gave her a hard bump. “We need to keep moving,” the woman said, taking the lead with her raised Galil. The others followed, but Skye stood there a moment longer, staring at the head as a shudder raced up her back.

When Sorkin’s lips peeled back from his teeth and his tongue began moving inside the decapitated head, Skye caught up to the others.

The earth began to tremble seconds later.

•   •   •

A
cross town from the elementary school, at an intersection outside Saint Miguel and its fortress walls of shipping containers, a line of drifters stood in the late-afternoon drizzle. Each was collared and leashed to a long cable spanning the street, a dog run for the dead. There were twenty-two corpses forming a gruesome curtain, but a twenty-third leash, at the end of the line opposite the church, led to a row of hedges and out of sight.

In the shadows behind the hedge, a drifter lay curled on the ground in a fetal position. In life the drifter had been Anne Marie O’Donnell, twenty-four, with long red hair and a fair, almost pale complexion. She had once been a parishioner of Saint Miguel, before she was bitten by her own mother in mid-August.

Nearly twenty-four hours ago, Anne O’Donnell’s tongue turned as black as soot, and she shuffled away from the others to crawl behind this bush.

Now her skin was a glossy crimson that had pulled taut to accentuate bones and muscle. Her body shook as if having a seizure, and a low, wheezing croak issued from her throat. No one noticed her absence from the dog run, and no one discovered her quivering body behind the hedge. Anne O’Donnell’s corpse did not react to the tremor that shook Chico.

By nightfall, the body’s trembling slowed and then stopped. The corpse stood and stared in amazement at its hands for a moment, slowly flexing its fingers, head cocked. It scented the air and looked across at the lights of Saint Miguel, at the wall and the sentries. A hunger pulled at its insides, along with a curious but pleasant, violent urge. The creature let out a low moan that came out more like a growl.

The newly born creature reached up and unbuckled its collar, letting it fall, staring again at its hands before breathing in the night. There was another out there, another like itself. It eyed the sentries once more, wanting to destroy and feed upon them, but sensed danger. Instead it turned and ran into the night, as fast as any human.

January 12—East Chico

Russo and Lassiter sat in the cab of Lassiter’s new Ford F-250, watching the column roll by on Deer Creek Highway, making the turn south onto Forest. There were three pickups packed with armed people, led by a pair of bikers wearing their Skinners colors. At the tail end was the Bradley, the armored vehicle rumbling down the center of the road and Corrigan riding high in the open hatch, one hand resting on a mounted machine gun. The prey they were hunting would require the heavy firepower.

Scott Corrigan, an Army deserter with a nasty scar down the side of his face and cold eyes, glanced over at the two men in the truck with a look Russo thought said he would enjoy rolling over them with the tracks of his Bradley.

Lassiter kissed Corrigan’s ass whenever possible. Russo thought it smarter to avoid the man altogether.

“It’s not fair,” said Lassiter, watching the column move out of sight. “We’re the ones who saw the damned helicopter. We should have been able to go look for it with the others.”

Russo said nothing, just watched the rain trickle down the windshield. He had no wish to go on a raid. He didn’t want to be here with this loser day after day, collecting supplies to better stock Briggs’s fortress, risking his life for toilet paper and bottles of Advil. Russo had actually hoped that spotting and reporting the helicopter might earn them a reward, a chance to stay behind the walls for a while. He had been wrong.

His partner, Russo knew, loved being out here. He couldn’t stop talking about how he had participated in the raid on that TV star’s ranch, the place with the bunker packed with weapons. Russo had never seen the show himself, it wasn’t to his taste, but a day didn’t go by that Lassiter wasn’t boasting about how he first heard of the place and reported it to Briggs, boasting of his bravery when he captured the female zombie out there and chained her into a truck bed.

Lassiter was drinking a warm Dr Pepper and munching on a Pop-Tart. Russo had a V8 and a bag of trail mix, which his partner called
bark
. The former armored-car driver had chosen a delightful spot for their picnic. On the left side of the road was a wide grassy stretch that had once featured saplings and a bike path. At some point during Chico’s final days, officials had ordered the excavation of a long trench, tearing up the trees and obliterating the path.

Now little yellow hazmat flags poked from the earth around the excavation, and the trench itself was half-filled with decomposing corpses. The bodies were coated with white powder that clumped in the rain, and they gave off a punishing fragrance of lime and decay that burned the nose and eyes.

More gruesome than the pit, Russo thought, was the trail of clumping white lime that led away from it, across what remained of the grass and into the road. He tried to imagine what kind of chemical-burned nightmare that escapee would look like, and couldn’t.

It was disgusting, all of it, but Lassiter disgusted him the most.

Sitting beside the former armored-car driver in the truck cab, Russo wondered if he could get away with killing Lassiter. He had never killed anyone, not anyone alive, anyway, but taking out Lassiter seemed like it would be easy. The man thought Russo was a spineless punk. He would never see it coming. Russo could shoot him in the heart, let him turn, then shoot him in the head. He could make up any story he wanted, something simple about Lassiter getting careless and getting bitten.

He smiled.

Russo had been fantasizing about murdering Lassiter a lot lately. Maybe it was time to put thoughts into action. Could he pull the trigger? He decided he could.

“What are you grinning about?” said Lassiter, sitting behind the steering wheel and staring at his partner.

Russo jumped, as if caught doing something he shouldn’t. “Nothing,” he said. “Just . . . nothing.”

Lassiter glared at him, the contempt on his face unconcealed. “We gotta check the east side,” he said. The man kept a suspicious eye on his partner as he drove up Deer Creek Highway, and Russo could only stare out the side window, his nerve broken. God, he hated all this. He didn’t even feel like doing any filming for his kick-ass documentary, and the lime pit would have been compelling footage.

The Ford rolled ahead for a time, the roadway noticeably empty of the walking dead. When Russo commented on it, Lassiter just shrugged and said, “They’re busy someplace else.”

They stopped at the intersection where Notre Dame Avenue cut south from Deer Creek, Lassiter letting the engine idle. The two men looked at houses with drawn curtains, little rows of businesses with
CLOSED
signs hanging in windows and doors. Today they were specifically searching for painkillers, at the command of Little Emer Briggs. Where to begin?

Muffled gunfire reached them over the idling engine. Lassiter was out on the pavement a moment later, standing beside the hood, and Russo got out as well. The gunfire was distant, coming from the south, and it was steady, measured shots one after the other, muffled as if inside a building.

“The column?” Russo suggested.

Lassiter shook his head. “They’re farther south by now. This is something else.” The man listened to the shooting for another moment and then pointed. “Down there. That’s where it’s coming from.”

Russo looked down the avenue and saw nothing.

“Come on,” said Lassiter, breaking into a trot and heading for the sound of gunfire.

Kill him now!
Russo shouted inside.
Shoot him in the back! Do something!
But he didn’t, and suddenly knew he couldn’t, no matter how much he told himself otherwise. If he wanted to get away from Lassiter and the madness of Chico, he would have to run. There was no particular destination in mind, and right now it was only away from here. He would have to pick the right moment, but this wasn’t it.

He trotted after his partner.

•   •   •

J
ames Garfield eased Drew to the ground over the low fence. The boy stood and stared forward. Garfield looked back to see a dozen corpses heading for him across the soccer field, and behind them, a stream of the dead poured into the school through the door he had left open. Gunfire came from inside.

It was just too much, he thought, climbing over the fence and collecting his son once more. The fighting, the arguing, crazy, angry Sorkin. That was why he had run in the first place. Garfield was no apocalyptic warrior and he knew it. He was a mortgage broker who had never even been in a schoolyard scuffle, a Democrat who voted for green initiatives and wished for stronger anti-gun laws. Did it make him less of a man that he didn’t like to follow sports or go to the gym? He had lost his family and now had to take care of his frightened little boy until the government could find and rescue them. He had believed in their power, and now it was his turn to be supported.

But it was taking so long!

The thought of keeping the two of them safe and fed and quiet for more weeks and months was exhausting. Still, he picked up Drew as he hurried through a backyard and down a driveway past a small house.

He would just have to do it, he told himself, find a quiet place to hide and wait. Help would arrive soon, from people who didn’t wave guns and act crazy and scare people. He neared the street. The government had a plan for something like this, didn’t they? Of course they did. Someone would come.

The racking sound of a shotgun brought Garfield to a stumbling halt.

•   •   •

R
usso had the twelve-gauge pointed at the man’s chest, and Lassiter moved in fast, patting the man down for weapons. “Where you going in such a hurry?” he demanded.

Garfield, eyes wet and red, could only shake his head.

Russo gestured with his shotgun. “What’s wrong with that kid?”

Garfield turned the boy away from the gun. “Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s just scared, that’s all.”

“Set him down,” Lassiter said.

“No.”

Lassiter rammed the muzzle of his AK-47 hard into one of Garfield’s eyes, making him scream and grab at his face, losing his grip on Drew. Lassiter jerked the boy away from the man and then slammed the butt of the assault rifle into Garfield’s stomach. The man gasped and fell, and as soon as he hit the ground, Lassiter was astride him with the zip ties, securing his hands behind his back and slapping duct tape over his mouth. He glanced back to where the man had come from, no longer hearing gunfire.

“Let’s get him in the truck.” Lassiter gripped his captive by the arm and started hauling him back up the street.

Russo looked at the vacant-eyed child staring through him, hesitated, then took hold of one of the boy’s hands, hanging limp at his sides. Drew didn’t protest, and allowed himself to be led after his father.