Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters (5 page)

He looked for what might have brought it down, seeing nothing but the empty southern end of the city, its streets populated only with the walking dead. Maybe it had been mechanical failure.

A hollow, thumping noise caused him to put his binoculars on the south. A dark shape appeared from behind a hill and moved slowly over the Black Hawk’s wreckage.

“I’ll be damned,” Halsey said.

It left the downed bird behind and came straight toward him, moving slowly as it followed the highway that would lead to Paradise. In moments it was gone, its sound echoing among the hills.

Halsey ran for the path that would take him to the side-by-side. He would have to cut across to the Skyway. Driving the main road wasn’t his first choice, but if he had any hope of catching up, or at least seeing where it went, he would have to risk it.

The ranch hand’s boots pounded the earth as he ran faster than he had in twenty years.

January 11—South Chico

Vladimir Yurish banked right and angled the Black Hawk over what Angie West declared was the south end of Chico, California. He had cautioned her that landmarks looked different from the air, and sitting to his right in her cockpit seat, Angie had quickly agreed. Now she was navigating from a road map, opened across her knees.

“We’re looking for the Skyway,” she said into her radio headset, peering out and down through the windows. “It’s a good-sized highway running east into the hills.” Vladimir acknowledged and slowed the bird so she could get her bearings. He held at a constant three hundred feet.

Another voice spoke over the intercom. “We’ve got wreckage down there,” Skye Dennison called. “Looks like another Black Hawk.” Skye was dressed in black fatigues and combat gear, a knit cap pulled down over her freshly shaved head. She was clipped into the safety harness near the starboard M240 door gun, leaning out through the opening, and the rush of wind and the beating of blades threatened to drown her out.

Vladimir strained to look down through the port windows, but the angle was off, preventing him from seeing the fuselage. He could clearly see the debris field, however, twisted metal scattered across blackened earth. Something had gone down.

“Survivors?” the pilot asked.

A pause. “No,” said Skye, “looks like only drifters.”

Angie could see better out her side. “It looks burned. Hard to say how old it is.”

Vlad nodded. It could have crashed months ago or mere hours. They burned fast, and the smoke would have cleared quickly. He followed the course Angie called, lining the bird up with a four-lane strip of road leading into the eastern hills. The Russian left the wreckage behind.

Back in the troop compartment, Bill “Carney” Carnes was clipped into his own harness at the left door. He watched the burned and broken bird fade behind them, then looked out at Chico. From up here it was large and spread out, though it was really just a small Northern California city nudged up against the base of the mountains on one side, an expanse of rich farmland stretching out on the other. The center of town appeared to be a grid of tree-lined streets, whereas the south end looked more commercial. There were big parking lots for retailers and small industry, sprawling apartment complexes, and residential areas with curving streets.

No cars moved along the avenues, but he could make out the small shapes of people. What had been people. Now they were just lifeless, dangerous, rotten shells.

It was a little more than two hours since their helicopter lifted off from the USS
Nimitz
, their home now, purchased with the blood of their friends. Father Xavier had stood on the flight deck and waved as they departed. Time had become a strange and intangible thing for Carney now. Could that have only been this morning?

It was not so very long ago, he admitted, that he and TC Cochoran had been cellmates at San Quentin, both locked away for what would probably be the rest of their lives. The plague had granted them their freedom, releasing them into a violent and nightmarish world of the walking dead. He thought about their odyssey in the stolen riot vehicle, the horrors they had seen, and the things they had done to survive. Perhaps strangest of all to Carney was that with all the killing since their escape, he—a convicted murderer—had not taken a single human life. He had killed only the dead.

The same could not be said for TC, who up until his final moments had played the role life intended for him: mad-dog killer. Even though in the end he had tried to rape Skye and kill Carney, doing enough damage to them both to leave behind a wake of pain and scars, Carney caught himself missing his cellmate sometimes. He would never say it aloud, of course, and he was glad that Skye had put a bullet through the man’s brain, but in many ways TC had been like a brother. The closest thing to a brother Carney had ever had.

An odyssey indeed, one in which he had chosen to join with and protect others instead of looking out for himself, had stormed an aircraft carrier when any sane person would have run the other way. He had friends now, people who cared about him. And the most unbelievable part of it all was that he felt the same way.

And of course there was the girl.

Carney looked across the troop compartment at Skye, now sitting with her legs hanging out the door and one arm wrapped around the machine gun mount. He couldn’t see her face but knew it would be all business, her normal look. There was another side to her, though, a softer side that could still smile, and one that she had permitted Carney to see.

They had been together for a couple of months now, a casual thing with no expectations, nothing that would get in the way of serious business such as this. So he had assumed. But without warning or discussion, Carney had invited himself aboard the Black Hawk just before it left the flight deck. He told himself it was to add some firepower to the mission, but that didn’t ring true to him. The ex-con didn’t want to admit what he really suspected, that he had come along in order to protect Skye.

He frowned, imagining her reaction if he even suggested she couldn’t take care of herself.

Carney watched the winter landscape passing below and shook his head. He was mooning over a girl, acting like a lovesick kid. He hadn’t realized he was so soft.

The Black Hawk thumped up the valley, pine-covered hills extending to both sides, the snowcapped Sierra Nevada invisible behind the mist. Beads of moisture raced off the windscreen.

“It’s about five more miles,” Angie said from the co-pilot’s seat.

“Then we are nearly there,” said Vladimir.

Angie stared out at the gray ribbon of asphalt winding up the valley, leaning forward in her harness and touching the blue teething ring hanging around her neck by a chain. Almost there. After all this time they were almost there. She didn’t notice the ache in her right shoulder, where TC Cochoran’s bullet had punched through, didn’t notice the throb in her right arm, the bones still knitting together after TC had fractured both the radius and ulna. There was only what lay ahead.

Leah, two years old and away from Mommy for five months.

Dean, her husband, her rock, keeping Leah from harm.

This was the story she had told herself since the outbreak, that Dean and Leah had fled to the family ranch and were now riding out the crisis in safety with her mom and dad. In minutes they would all be reunited. Angie hadn’t yet told her companions that she would be staying, that they would return to
Nimitz
without her. She silently urged the helicopter to go faster.

“I think we’re coming up on the turn,” she said, pointing. “Up on the left. Slow down and get a little lower.”

Vladimir eased back on his airspeed and let the bird sink to one hundred feet, the wind from his blades thrashing the tops of pine trees. The four-lane Skyway wasn’t completely choked with vehicles like the silent graveyards of cars and trucks they had seen during their flight from San Francisco, but it wasn’t empty, either. An abandoned logging truck a quarter mile ahead blocked two lanes, pickups and SUVs sat on the shoulders with their doors open, and almost directly beneath the chopper was what had to have been a fatal accident involving an office supply truck and a lime-green VW. Several figures wandered past automobiles, a few even reaching up toward the sky as they stumbled in the direction of the Black Hawk, but these were not survivors.

Angie was now able to make out the ranch’s mailbox, mounted alongside a dirt road that peeled off the Skyway and headed north into the trees. The box was bright red, and attached to a wagon wheel.

“That’s the road,” Angie said, her heart pounding faster. “The ranch is two miles in. We’re almost there.”

Vlad climbed to avoid clipping treetops with the blades and moved slowly up a new, much narrower valley. The dirt road moved in and out of view beneath the pines. In the troop compartment, Skye and Carney looked at each other and nodded, tightening their gear and readying their personal weapons. Their friend was expecting a tearful reunion while they were preparing for the worst.

Skye crouched behind the M240 door gun. During the flight, Vladimir had given instructions over the intercom on the weapon’s use and reloading. He had even cruised low over some roads and fields where corpses moved, giving his two gunners some practice.
Trigger time
, he called it. Skye was impressed with the firepower, the door gun chattering, vibrating in her hands as brass streamed out of the ejection port like water from a faucet, falling out and away in the downdraft. The M240 tore hell out of anything it touched: abandoned cars, asphalt, earth, the undead. Bullet impact threw the corpses to the ground, blew them open, and chopped off limbs, but head shots were rare, accidental, and she growled in frustration. Carney fared no better.

Vladimir had told them it was to be expected, reminding them that the weapon was designed for living targets, where a single touch of one of its deadly rounds could exterminate life. It was not a surgeon’s tool, it was more like a bulldozer. Now, as the Black Hawk slowly followed the road below, Skye and Carney leaned their mounted weapons out and down.

Groundhog-7 covered the two miles in short order, and then the trees came to an end, the road moving into open ground as the valley widened to either side until it reached pine-spotted hills. The brown valley floor rolled gently as the road followed a small stream.

Angie wore a tense smile as she strained against her harness, the house coming into view. Then the smile faltered. And fell.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no . . .” Her voice was climbing. “No!” Her hands balled into fists and tears blurred her vision. “No!” she screamed.

The Franks ranch was fenced, a sturdy line of high chain link marching into the trees, but the gate that closed off the property at the tree line was open. Not open, but knocked down and driven across. The house where Angie had grown up, a large, two-story log home with a wraparound porch, was a rectangle of ashes and charred timbers, a blackened, river-stone fireplace rising at each end. The stables, the barns, and all of the outbuildings had been similarly burned down. Her father’s pickup was black, resting on melted tires, and in what had been the front yard, something was planted in the earth, a post of some kind. A dozen drifters roamed through the destruction, turning toward the sound of the approaching helicopter.

“No,” Angie gasped, slumping back into the co-pilot’s seat.

A small earth mound rose at the back of what had been the house, a heavy steel door set in the side of the small hill at an angle. It was standing open. As the helicopter thumped in for a landing, everyone aboard could see that the ground all around the ranch was torn by tire tracks.

Dean’s Suburban was parked near the bunker entrance, charred and shredded by gunfire.

“Gunners,” Vladimir called over the intercom, “clear the area.”

Using the M240s, Carney and Skye chopped up every drifter within a hundred yards, burning through ammo until the bodies were not only down, but no longer moving. Any other time, there would be cries to conserve the ammunition, but the gunners at both doors were committed to getting their friend safely on the ground. Rage played a part as well, a reptilian urge to destroy the things they had all come to hate so much. As the Black Hawk’s wheels touched down, Skye and Carney unsnapped their harnesses and jogged out from under the turning blades, using their rifles to finish off anything that had survived the airborne fire.

Angie climbed out the side door and walked slowly toward the postlike object stuck in the earth in front of the house. Her fists trembled at her sides, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

The post was actually a crucifix made from wooden beams, and there was a zombie tied to it. The creature gnashed its teeth, wiggling in its bonds, and let out a long, low moan. Crows had been picking at its face, but it was still recognizable.

It was Angie’s father.

January 11—Franks Ranch

Skye retrieved Angie’s Galil assault rifle from the chopper and pressed it into the crying woman’s hands, then held her by the back of the neck and pressed their foreheads together. “I’m so sorry, Ang.”

Angie’s body shook with sobs.

Skye’s hand tightened. “We’ll find who did this,” she whispered fiercely. “We’ll kill every last one of them.”

Angie shook her head slowly. “Why would someone . . . ?”

Skye closed her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Behind them, Carney walked a slow circle around the Black Hawk, out beyond the turning blades. The M14 was at his shoulder, and his blue eyes were narrowed, looking out. It was a survival habit he had developed in prison, a necessary skill in the cell blocks that served him well in this new world. When there was a commotion, something drawing everyone’s attention, that was the time to look in the other direction. Death’s favorite tactic was ambush from behind.

The former inmate popped several drifters walking through the fields around the burned ranch. The gunfire made Angie jerk away from Skye. “Don’t! He could be out there!” She grabbed Skye’s combat harness in one fist. “Did you kill him?” she demanded, her eyes darting and wild. “Dean could be out there! Did you and Carney kill him with the door guns?”

Skye stepped back. “We only shot dead things, Angie.”

The other woman held on to the harness, sobbing.

“I’ll help you look for them,” Skye said, softly.

The brown grass was pressed flat in every direction as Vladimir kept the Black Hawk’s blades turning, just in case they needed a quick exit, and Carney remained close on security while the two women walked together, examining bodies. Angie couldn’t look at what had become of her father, groaning and struggling up on his cross, and she wasn’t prepared to deal with him. Skye didn’t know what Angie’s husband looked like, so she stayed close to her friend. There wouldn’t be any trouble identifying a murdered little girl, however.

Half an hour and a full circuit of the grounds revealed only dead drifters, most of them fresh kills from the door guns, and none of them Dean or Leah. There was also no sign of Angie’s mom, Lenore, even among the cinders and fallen timbers of the house. They looked inside the small, original fallout shelter her grandfather had built, which Lenore now used as a potato cellar, but it was empty of both the living and the dead. Then they approached the entrance to the main bunker.

“Why is it open?” Angie moaned. “It should be sealed, they should be locked inside.”

Skye didn’t have an answer, and she knew Angie hadn’t really been talking to her.

The door yawned wide and debris was littered on the ground around it: some batteries, a can of string beans, a gray sweater, and a gas mask with a cracked eyepiece. The ground outside was pocked with craters, and there were at least a hundred shell casings, the empty brass of an assault rifle scattered across the torn earth. A set of narrow concrete steps descended like a throat into the darkness, and both women switched on flashlights. Angie went down first.

Daddy is on a cross, he’s on a cross, they killed him and he’s on a cross.
Her boots scraped on the concrete steps.
He’s on a cross and he’s like them, like them, he’s dead, oh, God, my daddy is dead!
She felt like screaming.

To say the bunker was made out of concrete was misleading. It was actually a series of eight-foot segments made from connected corrugated steel pipe, sealed in reinforced concrete and covered in earth, resting fifteen feet belowground. It was designed to be bomb resistant. The main entrance was the outer steel door, four inches thick, that was supposed to cover a long flight of steps leading to a second, inner door, this one as solid as a bank vault and ringed with a rubber gasket to make it gasproof when it was closed. The inner door, however, also stood open.

The design was simple: a long central tube with a raised floor, two chambers opening off each of the left and right sides. There were dedicated areas for supply storage; a bunk room; the well pump and water storage; a generator and air-handling room; a chamber to handle waste, complete with sinks and showers; and the armory. The bunker had not burned, but it was immediately apparent that it had been completely looted. The flashlight beams threw a cold, blue-white light on the central chamber, revealing empty shelves and pallets where supplies had once been.

Why are the doors open?
Angie screamed silently. They should have been sealed up tight in here. No one could have reached them.

A scrabbling, chittering noise came from the well chamber, and the two women advanced, rifles ready as they peered inside with their lights. Some of the blue plastic barrels holding the water supply were still in here, and the motorized pump that serviced the well still looked intact. A dark shape moved low against the floor, peering out from behind the pump motor with yellow eyes that caught and reflected their lights. The baby raccoon darted back out of sight.

The women stepped back into the central corridor.

The string of overhead lights running the length of the tube remained, but every fuel container had been taken. Pallets that had once held cases of dried goods, clothing, medical supplies, batteries, and flares now stood empty. No longer were there neat rows of toiletries and gas masks, flashlights and hand tools, spare radios and maps. A few clean air filters leaned against the wall by the air handler, but the portable battery-powered TVs and the sophisticated ham radio set were missing.

The armory was bare. Empty weapon racks were bolted to the walls; vacant pallets sat on the floor. Whoever had been here had taken every rifle, every handgun, every last bullet.

Skye hadn’t even bothered to look. She knew it would be empty, and in fact the armory was probably what had drawn the raid in the first place. Instead she conducted a more thorough examination of the two chambers toward the rear of the bunker, the pump room and the waste/toilet facilities. In here, behind the big unit that ground and pumped waste out of the bunker, presumably into a septic system, Skye found a small, circular steel hatch mounted in the wall. It had a wheel in the center—just like the hatches on the
Nimitz
—and a pair of deadbolts.

“Ang, come in here,” she called. “What’s this?”

Angie entered the room, knowing at once what her friend was looking at. “It goes to a tunnel,” she said, “an escape tube, sort of. You have to crawl on your hands and knees.” She squatted and pulled it open, a puff of cold air rushing into the room. A flashlight beam showed that it was dry and very long. The light was swallowed by the darkness. “It travels for half a mile, and lets out inside the far tree line.”

“It was unlocked,” Skye said. “It only locks from the inside, right?”

Angie frowned and nodded.

“I want to check it out. Is that okay with you?”

Another nod. “I’ll be okay. Don’t get lost, and be careful.”

Skye said she would and disappeared into the tunnel, flashlight and rifle muzzle leading the way.

Angie watched her go for a minute, and then went to the bunk room. She stood in the doorway, hand on the frame, her breathing rapid. Sporadic rifle shots came from outside, muffled by the still-turning rotor blades.
Carney cleaning up the dead,
she thought to herself. At last she entered.

There would only have been her parents, Dean, and Leah. They would have wanted to stay close together, and her mom would have wanted Leah sleeping where Grandma could watch over her.

Why are the bunker doors open? Why?

Angie passed the flashlight over a room that had been lived in. Four bunks had tangled bedding, as if the occupants had gotten up in a hurry. She inspected the sheets for blood, found none. Then the beam fell upon a small blue blanket covered in puffy white clouds, balled up in a corner of a bottom bunk. Angie let out a sob and fell to her knees, clutching the blanket to her chest, burying her face in the fabric and breathing in the faint scent of her daughter. Then she began to cry.

•   •   •

S
kye crawled. The tube was also made from ribbed steel, high enough to pass through on all fours, but she’d had to leave her pack behind. She didn’t want to try to push or drag the pack and handle the flashlight and her weapons all at the same time. Her hard plastic knee pads banged and scraped at the metal—crawling in just jeans would have really hurt the knees, she thought—and her flashlight beam wobbled across the metal walls. A half mile. There was no sense of direction or distance down here, so she couldn’t tell how far she had gone. It felt like forever.

The beam of light swept over an object in the tunnel about thirty feet away and then quickly centered back on it. It was the top of a head, strands of thinning hair clinging to it, gray in the light and lying facedown.

It reeked.

And then it moved.

The drifter’s head snapped up, yellow eyes and teeth gleaming in the flashlight beam, and it let out a snarl. Then it scrambled to its hands and knees and began quickly crawling toward her.

Skye’s M4 was equipped with a suppressor, something she had taken from the pile of gear left on the
Nimitz
by the dead Navy SEALs, but so was the pistol under her arm. She chose the rifle, dropping prone and sighting on the snarling thing, squeezing off a round. It clipped the top of the thing’s head, digging out a chunk of rotten gray meat and making a
spang
sound in the tunnel beyond, but the drifter kept coming. She took a breath, held it a half second, and then blew it out slowly, squeezing.

The 5.56-millimeter round punched a hole next to one of its eyes and blew out the back. The creature flopped limply onto its face.

Even with the suppressor, in this tight metal space the shots had been loud, and she shook her head to clear it before crawling forward. By the time she reached the corpse she had her knife in hand, and she plunged the blade through what turned out to be a soft, giving skull, just to be safe. Up close, the corpse was pungent, flesh starting to slough off its hands. It had been a man, maybe in his seventies and dressed in overalls. Not Dean, she was sure of that.

Skye bit her bottom lip and crawled over it, her knees and one gloved hand sinking into the fermented rot with a squishing sound. She hurried and was quickly past, crawling faster to get away from the smell, knowing it was now clinging to her. Then she realized it might not have been down here alone, and she slowed her crawl to let the flashlight probe ahead.

After what seemed like an hour, a crescent of light appeared in the distance, the far hatch, partially open. She still needed the flashlight, but in short order she could see that nothing else had crawled into the escape tunnel. When she reached the end, she found another wheeled hatch, again capable of being locked down from within, the exterior a smooth steel face painted brown and green to blend with the forest. She pushed it open and saw pine trees all around, a carpet of brown needles underneath.

In the light spilling through the opening she saw something on the curving, ribbed steel wall to her right. It was a single word, spray-painted in black. She reached for her Hydra radio to tell Angie what she had found, ask her what it meant, and realized the radio was back with her pack.

“Damn,” she muttered, crawling out into the forest and straightening, stretching her back for a moment and breathing untainted air. The forest was quiet around her.

Then she started crawling back.

•   •   •

W
hen Angie finally emerged from the bunker her eyes were red and puffy, and she was holding her daughter’s blanket close. Vladimir had since shut down the Black Hawk’s engines to conserve fuel. Angie saw that the Russian and Carney were using entrenching tools to dig a hole in the front yard, a figure wrapped in a green poncho on the ground nearby.

The crucifix had been pulled down and was now empty.

Angie began to cry again, torn between running at them, demanding to know which one of them had shot her dad, and just curling up on the ground to weep for the people she had lost. Instead she simply stood near the helicopter and watched them finish digging, then carefully lower the wrapped figure into the earth before covering it quickly. When the dirt was tamped, the men looked at each other, then at Angie.

Skye came out of the bunker then, walking to them and taking it all in. Telling her friend about the word on the tunnel wall could wait.

The pilot, towering over Angie, put an arm around the woman and lowered his head. “I do not have the words. I am sorry.” Carney just looked at the sky.

Angie nodded, hugged the Russian, then did the same to the former inmate. She looked down at the fresh dirt for a long moment. “I wish Xavier were here. He’d make it better. At least he’d know what to say.” She wiped at a tear and blew the dirt a kiss. “Bye, Daddy.”

They gathered at the helicopter, looking around at the devastation, the burned buildings and Dean’s shattered Suburban. No one knew what to say, where to start, but they all shared Angie’s hurt. And then a voice called to them from the road leading into the ranch, making them spin and raise their weapons.

A man was on the road less than a hundred yards away, standing next to a side-by-side green quad. He was simply dressed and wore a John Deere ball cap, a rifle slung over one shoulder. He raised a hand.

“Angie West! Don’t shoot, I’m coming in.”

•   •   •

H
alsey squatted with his arms resting on his knees, as if he were about to draw a picture in the dirt. He spat tobacco and looked up with a weathered face at those gathered around him.

“It was over by the time I got here,” he said. “I was hunting, and it sounded like a damn war up here. I came through the pines on foot.” The ranch hand gestured back at the trees and spat again. “I’d been up here a week earlier, just to check on everyone. Dean was here with your folks, Angie, and Leah was just as right as rain.” He smiled. “Pretty little thing. Your folks asked if I’d had any trouble over at the Broken Arrow, wanted me to pack my gear and bunk with them. Course I told them I was just fine at my place.” He looked at the dirt. “If I’d taken them up on the offer, if I’d been here, then maybe . . .”