Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (24 page)

•   •   •

T
he rumbling of motorcycles could barely be heard over the armored vehicle’s engine as three Harleys preceded the Bradley down East 8th Street. Angie and Skye peered around the corner of the big Victorian home and caught a quick glimpse of the little convoy as it rolled by. When it was gone, Angie turned to her two friends. “Let’s see where they’re going. Maybe they’ll split up and we can take them apart a piece at a time.”

The others nodded, and the three of them took off at a run, following the sound of engines.

January 13—Southeast Chico

Leah was lying on her tummy on the living room carpet, Wawas close by her side as she gripped a yellow crayon, tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth. She was coloring a chicken, trying hard to stay in the lines. Light from the late-morning sun threw bars of muted yellow on the floor. Dean sat on the sofa across from her with a Northern California road map spread out on the coffee table, using a highlighter—also yellow—to trace alternate routes from Chico to the small coastal town of Eureka. His secondary destination took them northeast into lower Oregon, above Klamath Falls to some tiny, remote towns near the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Remote was good. He was eager for sundown to arrive so they could be on their way.

Father and daughter looked up from their projects as a rumbling came from outside. This was not the sound of an earthquake. It was man-made, and Dean knew at once it was far more dangerous. He recognized the thrum of that engine. It was the Bradley, and it was close.

“Come here, baby,” he said, opening one arm and reaching for the assault rifle propped against the end of the sofa. Leah snatched Wawas off the floor and ran to her daddy. Dean snapped on the radio the dead scavengers had carried in time to hear a single command.

“Tear it up,” said the voice.

Then the world exploded.

•   •   •

T
he twenty-five-millimeter auto-cannon roared as explosive rounds ripped from its barrel, tracking left to right. The Bradley sat in the street and panned its turret across the convenience store, blowing apart brick and timber before sending its rounds crashing into the small board house out back, followed by the adjacent garage. A small explosion erupted everywhere a shell landed, splintering walls and roofs, shredding the garage door, fragmenting window frames.

On the street beside the armored vehicle, Little Emer and his two biker brothers, Stark and Red Hen, stood covering their ears with their hands. To the rear of the Bradley, Lassiter and Russo stood behind the pickup, the former armored-car driver grinning and nodding vigorously at the sound and destruction.

Russo’s video recorder was in his hand but hanging limp at one side, not even switched on. He winced at the ripping sound of the main gun, looking at the bikers, then at his partner. His eyes fell on the large, empty crucifix strapped to the back deck of the armored vehicle.

The turret started back again, tearing down walls, fire and black smoke erupting deep within the structures.

All this for a man and his little girl,
Russo thought, knowing their fate should they survive the Bradley’s onslaught. He looked at the camcorder in his hand, thought about the horrors it contained, the hours of nightmares he had eagerly filmed. The world he had loved was dead, and
this
was to be his eulogy? Russo shook his head slowly, suddenly repelled by the sight of the small metal and plastic box, sickened at what he had allowed himself to become for the sake of survival.

Closer to the Bradley, Little Emer laughed, the sound swallowed by the auto-cannon.

A moment later, standing in his commander’s hatch, Corrigan opened up with the machine gun mounted beside him, brass tinkling to the pavement as he raked the three buildings with 7.62-millimeter automatic fire. The deserter shook with his weapon, a savage grin on his scarred face as he hunted with the bullets, searching for any place a person could hide.

After a minute, the convenience store was a pile of rubble, the garage was burning from a gasoline fire, and the house was near collapse, the roof sagging and soaking up most of the machine gun rounds. Little Emer gave the signal to cease fire, and as soon as Corrigan stopped, the warlord waved to the men on the ground around him.

“Let’s go,” he shouted, gripping his Uzi and charging in, the other men close behind. This was one attack Little Emer would lead personally.

Russo remained in the street. After a final look at the camcorder, he turned and hurled it as far as he could down the street behind him, watching it explode in shards of plastic and glass.

Up in the turret, Corrigan tracked the charging men with the barrel of his machine gun, finger caressing the trigger.
Accidents happen,
he thought, but he did not fire.
Maybe later.
He failed to notice that Russo did not follow the men into the ruins.

Ahead, the bikers and Lassiter spread out through the destruction, searching for fresh blood.

•   •   •

D
ean was facedown, wounded, cheek pressed against the hot grit of Iraqi sand. His body throbbed and his head was heavy. Where were his men? He heard the running boots and cries of insurgents and prayed he wouldn’t live long enough for them to decapitate him on television. He missed Angie. He wished they’d had a baby.

But Angie came after the war, and they did have a baby.

He blinked his eyes and saw carpet littered with pieces of brick and timber debris. Not sand. The desert wasn’t real, but the wounds were. A chunk of two-by-four not far from his face was bright with blood.

There was something beneath him, something that moved.

“Daddy?” Leah said, her voice groggy, like when she awoke in the night with a bad dream.

Dean tried to answer, couldn’t. It was hard to breathe, and when he tried to move it felt like he was being stabbed by a dozen knives at the same time. Leah crawled from under the shield he had made of his body. He wanted to tell her to be careful, not to cut her hands and knees on the glass and sharp pieces of wood.

She rested a small hand on his cheek. “Daddy, wake up.”

He blinked at her, tried to smile.

“Daddy, get up.” She tugged at his arm.

“Leah,” he croaked.

“Get up, get up.” When he didn’t move, she hugged him, and he felt her little body shake as a tear landed on his cheek. Dean fought to rise, biting back a scream of pain as he got his palms under him and pushed up, hissing.

Boots crunched through the ruins of the house, and Dean heard his daughter gasp as hands gripped his ankles and dragged him through the wreckage and outside. Then Leah’s voice began screaming inside the house.

•   •   •

L
ooks like he had a nice little stockpile in there,” Stark said, standing in front of the burning garage and looking at the scattered supplies from Dean’s preload. “Shame it’s wasted.”

Red Hen picked up the melted remains of a fiberglass compound bow. “This looks like it would have been fun,” the biker said, slinging the bow back into the ashes of the garage.

Lassiter backed out of the house dragging a man facedown by his ankles. Blood soaked the man’s sweater in a dozen places, and the hair at the back of his head was matted and wet. The scavenger stripped a custom leather shoulder holster from the groaning figure and slipped it on, admiring the MAC-10 machine pistol with its tubelike flash suppressor. He also took the holstered Glock from the man’s hip and clipped it to his own belt.

Little Emer emerged last, carrying a struggling little girl in his arms. Her fists beat at his neck and shoulder, but he didn’t appear to notice either her blows or her cries. The warlord looked down at the man on the ground and signaled for the others to flip him onto his back. Dean’s face was bruised and covered in blood. His chest had a few shrapnel wounds, not as bad as his back.

Dean tried to speak, but it came out as a wheeze, and he reached for the image of his daughter in the biker’s arms in slow motion. Little Emer looked down at him without expression.

“Crucify this,” he told Lassiter, kicking Dean in the ribs. “We’ll see you at the church.” Then he grinned at Lassiter. “I think you’d look good in Skinners colors.”

“Damn right,” said Stark, and Red Hen clapped Lassiter on the back. Lassiter smiled so broadly he felt his face might split. He followed the bikers back to the street, dragging Dean.

Little Emer made a twirling motion in the air to Corrigan, who was still standing in his turret. The deserter gave commands to his men. As Lassiter unstrapped the heavy wooden cross from the rear deck of the armored vehicle, the biker warlord straddled his Harley and pinned Leah against his lap. The little girl struggled and wailed, crying, “Daddy!”

“Shh,” said Little Emer. “I’m your daddy and we’re gonna let you play with your new brothers and sisters.”

Little Emer Briggs throttled up the street, his biker brothers following and the rumbling Bradley trailing last. Lassiter watched them go, then leaned the heavy wooden cross against the broken wall of the convenience store.

Russo stood nearby, his eyes moving between Lassiter and the departing shapes of the Bradley and the bikers. There was nothing he could do to save that little girl.
It’s not your problem,
he told himself. And now he would witness yet another crucifixion.
He’s not your problem either. Be smart. Now is not the time. The smartest thing to do is keep going along and slip away at a time of your choosing.
Russo knew he was no hero. After all that he had seen and done, he wondered if he even qualified as human anymore.

Lassiter dragged Dean over and propped him into a sitting position against the base of the cross, then produced a hammer and heavy nails from his backpack. Dean was still trying to get up, but his chin was on his chest, his head pounded, and he had to grit his teeth against the stabbing of a dozen sharp wounds.

Lassiter crouched beside him, setting his AK-47 on the ground and showing him the hammer. “This,” he said, “is going to hurt.”

•   •   •

A
ngie, Skye, and Carney ran through the streets dodging drifters, the creatures emerging from between houses and staggering into the road. The trio shoved them aside and kept moving. They had already lost sight of the small convoy and before long could no longer hear the engines. Still they ran. When the crash of the auto-cannon began, followed soon by the rattle of a machine gun, they altered course and picked up the pace. When the firing stopped after only a minute, they had a pretty good idea of the direction and distance.

They ran past a vacant lot with a four-foot pile of charred bodies, the remains of Chico’s attempt at containment. Not far beyond was a motel with an abandoned ambulance parked outside the office. All of the doors to the rooms stood open, and a fat black crow perched upon an overturned maid’s cart. Drifters wandered through the parking lot, and within the fenced swimming pool out front, a pair of water-bloated corpses stood floundering in the shallows, unable to pull themselves out.

A dead man in the uniform of a cola delivery driver lunged at Carney from between a pair of parked cars. The ex-con pistol-whipped the creature on the run, then put a silenced bullet in its head with Skye’s handgun.

Angie abruptly stopped running. “Do you hear that?”

Skye and Carney listened. It was distant, a child screaming.

Then Angie was running again, her two companions trying to keep up. They traveled two more blocks and made a turn. The grumble of an armored vehicle’s engine echoed over the rooftops to their left.

“We went too far,” Angie shouted, running up a new street. They could smell burned wood and the cordite stink of spent gunpowder.

Angie slid to a stop in the next intersection. On the corner stood the shattered remains of a building, a black Ford pickup parked on the road out front. A young man in a knit cap was holding a shotgun, watching another man who was standing a third up against a big wooden cross.

The one about to be crucified rolled his head to the right, exposing his bloody face.

“Dean!”
Angie screamed, raising her Galil.

•   •   •

T
hat’s enough,” Russo said softly, pulling the shotgun’s trigger. A blast of double-aught buckshot hit Lassiter in the side, pitching him away from the man about to be crucified, throwing the former armored-car driver onto a sidewalk bright with his own blood. Then Russo dropped the weapon and raised his hands, facing the people in the street and closing his eyes to the expected hail of bullets about to cut him down.

•   •   •

A
ngie, Skye, and Carney all screamed at the young man in the knit cap, conflicting commands to lie down, not to move, to get on his knees. The man simply stood with his arms raised, eyes closed.

•   •   •

T
he body armor hadn’t done a thing to protect him, Lassiter thought, not at a range of three feet. He struggled to breathe, to lift his head, hands pawing at the ground.
God, it hurt. Who had done this to him? Why wasn’t Russo shooting back at whoever had done this?
He was cold, and he blinked at the gray starting to close in on his vision.

One blood-slicked hand found the pistol grip of his AK-47 on the ground nearby, and with a groan he lifted it, triggering a short, unaimed burst off to his right.

•   •   •

A
ngie cried out at the sudden gunfire, dropping into a crouch and returning fire on instinct at the man on the ground. A three-round burst hit the body, making it jump, and the Russian assault rifle fell from a twitching hand.

Skye crouched too, ready to cut down the man in the knit cap, but he remained standing, arms raised, his shoulders jumping at the gunfire. She kept her finger on the trigger, the M4’s sights on the man’s chest, but she didn’t fire.

•   •   •

D
ean!” Angie cried again, running to her husband. She dropped to her knees on the ground beside him, taking his face in her hands. “Oh, God, Dean,” she sobbed.

He looked at her, blinking for a moment. “Ang?”

She cried and held him.

Skye put a safety shot into Lassiter’s head, then ordered the man in the knit cap to his knees, telling him to lace his fingers behind his neck as she had seen them do on reality cop shows. The man complied. Rifle still pointed at her prisoner’s chest, Skye called back over her shoulder, “Carney, bring up some zip ties.” He didn’t reply.

Angie looked into her husband’s eyes, still holding him. “Where’s Leah?” she whispered, dreading the answer. “Is she . . . ?”