Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (27 page)

The rumble of the Bradley’s engine, the squeal of its tracks echoing off granite, snapped her back. It was following her between the buildings, cracking sidewalks and chewing up grass and corpses, preparing to chew her up as well. Skye ran, ripping her machete from its sheath and chopping down a dead man that came at her, burying it in the head of another and tugging the blade free, swinging again, making a hole she could dart through. She headed for the scant shelter of another stone-walled stairway, throwing the Barrett across a flat surface, raising the weapon on its tripod. The sound of the Bradley increasing speed roared off granite walls as Skye fed a fresh magazine into the sniper rifle.

As soon as the armored vehicle cleared the corner of the building and was out on the lawn, Skye braced the stock against her shoulder and fired four quick rounds, trying to keep a tight grouping. Even over the bellowing of a military diesel, the Barrett’s reports echoed across the open, grassy space, bouncing off campus buildings where professors would never again speak.

Four black holes appeared in a cluster, penetrating the Bradley’s side skin near the vehicle’s front. Twenty-seven tons of armor bucked to a halt. At once, Skye had the rifle strap across her chest and was running again, heading for the far corner of the building while the turret whined and rotated behind her. She turned right—

—and a legless corpse rose up on its arms and hissed under her boots. Skye couldn’t get her feet up high enough in time, and the tip of her right boot caught on its rib cage. She went down hard, twisting an ankle, and in a second the corpse was on her, teeth snapping at her right calf.

Skye screamed, rolling over and kicking it in the face. Its head rocked back, jaws working, cloudy eyes staring at her. Skye pulled her silenced pistol and shot it through one of those eyes, then scrambled to her feet and ran, favoring her right ankle.

•   •   •

L
enowski, why did we stop?” Corrigan shouted from the turret. He had rotated the main gun to the right, but the sniper was no longer in view. More than a dozen corpses were moving between the far buildings, indicating the direction she had fled, and dozens more were headed toward the Bradley, a few already arrived and beating at the armor with their fists.

The gunner-turned-driver did not respond.

Corrigan realized that something was sparking and smoking below him. The sniper had succeeded in damaging something, but he couldn’t tell what. “Driver, right turn,” Corrigan commanded.

The vehicle did not move.

“Lenowski!” Corrigan dropped from his seat to the lower deck, ducking his head and moving forward. To his right, several circles of daylight poked through the side armor, and an electrical box hung open where a bullet had ripped into it, fused wires giving off a curling, acrid smoke.

“Lenowski?” he repeated, grabbing the shoulder of the man in the driver’s seat. The body slumped left and the head fell over at a sickening angle. There was blood everywhere, and Corrigan could see that the sniper’s bullet had not only hit the man in the neck but severed his spine at the base of his skull. Lenowski’s eyes stared in a perpetual state of surprise.

“Goddammit,” Corrigan muttered, just as a pair of pale hands hauled the driver’s hatch fully open, daylight spilling into the vehicle. A corpse began crawling down through the hole.

Corrigan fumbled for his sidearm as he backed up, smacking his head on the edge of the gunner’s elevated seat. The creature scrambled over Lenowski and dropped onto the steel deck. Corrigan fired, missing, the bullet bouncing around the interior, making him cringe. A second, steadier shot from the .45 took off the top of the zombie’s head.

Two more corpses fought to crawl down through the open hatch.

Corrigan cursed again and climbed back up to the commander’s seat, looking through his viewports. He would have to abandon the Bradley and hunt the bitch down on foot. Fortunately, it looked like none of the dead had managed to climb as high as the turret. A short, cut-down assault rifle with a folding metal stock hung in clips beside the commander’s seat, and he slung it over his shoulder as he popped the hatch above him and stood, taking a quick look around the outside of the vehicle to find his best exit route.

He saw her, a woman in black with a shaved head and an eye patch, standing on the street to the rear of his Bradley. The heavy length of a fifty-caliber Barrett was raised to her shoulder and pointed at him. Corrigan blinked at the sight.
No one tries to fire a Barrett like that!
Then he went for his assault rifle, swinging it up just as hands gripped his legs. Lenowski, head lying sideways on his shoulder, sank his teeth into the back of Corrigan’s knee.

Corrigan never had a chance to scream. A fifty-caliber slug blew through his chest, taking his heart, a lung, and a length of vertebrae and exploding them out his back. The deserter’s body sagged and was pulled down through the hatch by eager hands.

•   •   •

S
kye watched the body fall, then ejected her empty magazine. As she reached for another, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to look.

A shirtless drifter with taut, shiny red skin was running at her from half a block away. Its eyes were locked on its target, teeth clicking.

Skye dropped the heavy sniper rifle and ran.

January 13—Saint Miguel

His name was Doug Titcombe, and before the plague he had been a greeter at a local superstore, the best job he had ever had. Until this one. At five foot five, prematurely bald, and with protruding front teeth, he looked ponylike, and the kids at the store often made neighing and snorting noises when he passed. Doug was thirty-five, looked fifty-five, and had a maturity level just shy of fifteen. Last year he’d been wearing a blue vest and a yellow name tag. Now he wore a camouflage jacket and carried a loaded .357 revolver.

“Should we tell?” Doug asked the young woman standing beside him. They were posted on the container wall that encircled Saint Miguel’s property, at the farthest corner away from the church, the baseball field between them. Melanie, a twenty-year-old Chico State student, edged away from the nasty little troll with whom she had been paired for guard duty. A shotgun was slung over her shoulder.

“Mind your own business,” said Melanie, her lip curling at the sight of him. The little troll never bathed, and his khakis were stained and stiff from never being washed. The two sentries watched as, half a block away, a trio of people with packs and weapons dropped to the far side of the wall and quickly vanished into the neighborhood. They had waited until the Bradley raced away and didn’t look like it was coming back before they made their move.

“We should tell,” Doug said, but didn’t move. He looked at the girl for confirmation.

“Just shut up and keep watch.” Melanie turned away to look at the intersection near their corner, two dog runs of corpses strung across the connecting streets. It was gross, and she could smell them even up here. She wished she were going with those wall jumpers. But no one had approached her to join. She was damaged goods.

In the beginning, hooking up with Little Emer’s crew had seemed smart, with the promise of shelter, food, and safety. She had been given the duty of emptying shit buckets, however, and nothing could have been worse. One evening she had refused to do it, getting into an argument with another woman who told her she didn’t have a choice. The angry words turned into a fight, rolling on the ground, throwing wild punches, the two women bloodying each other’s nose. The bikers had appeared and watched, laughing. When Melanie came out as the winner, Little Emer had directed the beaten woman to take the shit detail, and promoted Melanie to standing watch on the wall.

Unfortunately, the beaten woman had been well liked, and now Melanie had become a pariah within the community. No one would speak to her.

Now here she was, partnered with this ugly little man, wishing she had been invited to run away with those others. That, however, would never happen.

I could go on my own,
she thought.
Right now, no pack, just drop and run. I’ll find food on the way, hook up with new people. They have to be out there.
Melanie found herself at the edge of the wall, staring out at the row of vacant houses across the street. Something crystal glittered briefly, maybe a sun catcher in a kitchen window. She would find a safe place and have a kitchen of her own.

Not far away, Doug stood worrying, fretting about not reporting the deserters. They had been told that bad people were coming to hurt them, to knock down their wall and let the dead into their home. The sentries had been ordered to shoot at anyone coming over the wall and raise the alarm, but what about people going
away
from the wall? No one had told him what to do if that happened.

Now here was Melanie, standing awfully close to the edge. He was afraid she would fall off and get hurt.

There was a thumping on the metal wall below where Melanie was standing, and both sentries looked down to see a corpse in a filthy Army uniform bumping repeatedly against the steel, reaching up and clutching toward Melanie’s feet, sticking out over the edge. The girl looked down and let out a cry, then skittered away. She had been about to jump right down into the creature’s arms. She put her face in her hands.

“Why are you crying?” Doug asked, moving toward her, wanting to put a reassuring hand on her back. He didn’t, knowing she would jerk away and call him names. She didn’t respond, just stood there hiding her tears, and he went back to biting his lip. What should he do about
this
? No one had told him what to do when his sentry partner started crying.

The bullet took Melanie’s lower jaw off in a burst of teeth and bone, flinging her body off the wall and into the compound.

Doug stared. “Melanie?” He rushed to the edge where she had gone off, looking down at her body and all the blood around it. She was making a high squealing noise, hands fluttering weakly about her destroyed face. A bullet whipped off the steel next to Doug’s feet. Neither shot made a sound, but Doug knew what a ricochet sounded like, and what it meant. He raised the .357 and looked around quickly. Should he shoot? At what? Should he run and tell?

“Melanie?” he called again. She had stopped moving down there on the grass.

He saw the truck racing toward the intersection from one of the cross streets, a flatbed type the towing companies used to pick up and carry the entire car, not just hook the front end. The deck was up, turned into a ramp. The vehicle plowed into one of the dog runs, scattering wire and corpses, and Doug saw a woman bail out the driver’s door and roll just before the flatbed truck slammed into the wall where two containers met, knocking one askew.

The next bullet took Doug Titcombe just below the sternum and knocked him flat.

He couldn’t breathe, felt heavy liquid in his throat and mouth, then the hot sensation as it bubbled past his lips and slid down both cheeks. His fingers clutched at the hole in his chest, getting slippery. Then he heard boots thudding up the tilted deck of the tow truck and saw two figures flash by him across the top of the container wall, a man and a woman dressed in a military style, loaded down with gear and weapons. They didn’t even look at him as they passed and dropped down onto the baseball field.

Doug tried to speak, tried to breathe, could do neither as he gurgled and died. When the shooting began inside the compound, Doug Titcombe heard it with undead ears and crawled off the container in that direction, bumping briefly into Melanie, who was standing and swaying, staring at the dead pushing their way in through the gap in the containers created by the truck’s impact. Both former sentries turned and joined the growing crowd of walking dead moving across the baseball field.

•   •   •

T
hey moved together, husband and wife in body armor and combat harnesses, heavily laden with pouches of magazines and sidearms. Angie carried the silenced M4, handed back to her by Dean after he left his shooting position and joined her at the truck ramp. The Galil was across her back, and twin automatics hung beneath her armpits. Dean carried the AK-47, his MAC-10, and the ever-present Glock. They ran side by side, crossing the field toward the church and adjacent school.

“Hey!” yelled a voice from the right, a man with a rifle standing atop the wall fifty yards away. Angie stopped, knelt, and dropped him with a three-round silenced burst. Then they were running again.

Ahead, rising in a black line over the church’s high peak, a column of smoke identified the place where Skye had sent in the gasoline-loaded truck. It was still burning and a string of blasts were going off ahead and to the left, beyond the buildings and walls, where Dean had rigged a line of cars to blow. The explosions boomed through the neighborhood, and Dean and Angie saw figures up ahead rushing along the wall and across the grounds toward the blasts, ready to defend against this new threat, unaware that death was already inside the perimeter.

“Greenhouse,” Angie said, and they cut left, angling toward a long glass structure with a work truck parked outside. Someone had leashed a drifter to the front bumper, an old man in a bloody wifebeater, tugging against its chain. They ignored it.

Dean was puffing hard, pain flashing through his body like electric shocks as the shrapnel wounds pulled against their dressings, several opening up and bleeding once more. Still, he bit it back and kept up with his wife.

Two men in baseball caps and carrying shotguns charged up the right side of the truck, yelling in surprise at the unexpected intruders and bringing up their weapons. Dean sprayed them both across the chest with a three-round burst, cutting them down. The AK-47’s raucous bark carried across the compound.

Angie passed the greenhouse and led them to the back of the school, then down its length, passing between the glass structure and the church. At the corner was a shelter canopy for an RV, the church parking lot, and the front gates to the wall. On their left, half a dozen people were crouched on top of the containers, looking out at the car fires Dean had arranged. Dean decided the insurgents he had fought overseas were better soldiers than these people.

Angie looked at her husband, who nodded. Dean’s moral compass was that of a soldier inside the enemy’s perimeter, but even more, the father of an abducted child. There would be no mercy. He stepped around the corner and switched to full auto, pouring fire into the people on the wall. All went down, some falling off. Husband and wife charged across open ground, not toward the church, but aiming for the structure they knew was the pool building, based on what Skye had described.

She’s not in that pool,
Angie thought, imagining the playpen.

The same thought went through Dean’s mind as they reached the building’s back door.

•   •   •

T
hey’re hitting us from all sides!” a young man shouted, running into the chapel wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a pistol. “I think they’re inside the walls!”

Little Emer, Red Hen, and Stark were standing near a folding table covered in ammunition, loading magazines. They had heard the explosions, followed shortly by automatic weapon fire just outside the church itself.

“Then get out there and
kill them
!” Little Emer shouted. The boy disappeared.

The Bradley’s crew wasn’t responding to radio calls. That son of a bitch Corrigan had either deserted or died. There were reports of sentries fleeing over the walls, and those who remained couldn’t find anything to shoot at. His daddy had been right, after all. At least the bastard hadn’t lived to say,
I told you so.
Nope, that was one dead old man. It made him smile.

Now it was time to bail.

“We ready?” Little Emer asked Red Hen, slipping long magazines of nine-millimeter for the Uzi into the pockets of his leather jacket.

The balding biker nodded, shoving assault rifle magazines into his waistband. “The bikes are inside the greenhouse, with full saddlebags. We’ll be good until we get a chance to resupply on the road.”

“What about the drums?” the warlord asked.

Stark tucked a snub-nosed revolver into the small of his back. “All set. We’ll light it up on the way out.”

Little Emer nodded and hung a pair of Chico Police Department flash-bangs from his belt. All three men were wearing police body armor under their leathers. “Let’s go,” the junior Briggs—now the
only
Briggs—said.

The same kid in the hooded sweatshirt sagged back into the chapel through the same door. The color had gone out of his face, and he was clutching a red, dripping hand. He stared at the three bikers dumbly. “Bit me,” he said.

A corpse stumbled through the doorway behind him, a red thumb jutting from its moving jaws, and fell upon the boy. The bikers ran from the chapel, heading for the pool building and the drums Stark had prepared, screams chasing after them.

•   •   •

F
ires burned in the streets, and the dead pushed through the gap in the wall, spreading out across the grounds. Sporadic firing sounded from isolated points around the perimeter but tapered off. An odd silence settled over Saint Miguel for a moment.

It was broken as Angie and Dean burst into the swimming pool building the same moment the bikers entered opposite them from the door to the church. There was a second of shock and recognition. Tiny moans rose from the pool, the corpse of a woman jerked against her chains, and in the center of the room, standing between the two groups, a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums were linked by a single line of gas-soaked rags.

Angie recognized the woman chained to the wall.

Little Emer recognized the armed man who should have been nailed to a cross.

Husband and wife saw the biker who had stolen their child, and gunfire erupted.

There was no cover, only the fuel-filled drums, so Dean dropped to one knee and sent a tight three-round burst of 7.62-millimeter toward the bikers. Stark’s assault rifle rattled, chipping at tile and punching a pair of holes in a gasoline barrel. Fuel gurgled out onto the floor. Angie dove left to the floor, then triggered three fast rounds as Red Hen blasted back indiscriminately at both of them. Little Emer sprayed the Uzi wildly before ducking back out the door.

Stark went down.

Dean went down.

Red Hen screamed and ran at Angie, still firing on full automatic. Bullets clipped through the air, close enough the make Angie’s hair move by her ear. Angie dropped her empty M4 and pulled a nine-millimeter from a shoulder holster. Red Hen pointed his M16 at her face and pulled the trigger on a dry magazine.

Angie’s pistol barked four times; crotch, belly, throat, forehead. The balding biker slid to the tiles in a pool of blood and gasoline.

“Dean?” Angie crouched beside her fallen husband, keeping an eye—and a pistol—on the door the bikers had used. The first one lay in the same position in which he had fallen after Dean cut him down, and the biggest one did not reappear. “Dean?” she repeated, lifting him into a sitting position.

“Ohh, that hurts,” Dean said through gritted teeth, pressing his hands to his chest, where a pair of slugs had flattened against the Kevlar over his sternum. Angie helped him to his feet, making sure he could stand before letting go. Their nostrils flared, and they glanced at the lake of fuel as it spread across the tiles and began spilling over the edge of the pool, down onto the heads of rotten, squirming figures. More gasoline flowed between the torn, gray feet of Angie’s mother.