Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (13 page)

For most, questions about how and where the Omega Virus started, how it managed to spread so fast, and why no one was prepared to deal with it ceased to matter. It was here, it was a pandemic, and for most it was an extinction-level event. For those who cared, the generally agreed-upon outbreak date for OV was mid-August. The first weeks of the plague, and the devastation that came with it, forced the remaining survivors to wonder if life had moved into its final act.

For many of them, that question was swiftly answered.

Bakersfield

Dr. Charles Emmett walked slowly up a fire stairwell, pushed open a door, and stepped out onto a gravel roof. Beneath him, Francis Miller Presbyterian Hospital was coming apart.

The news had begun calling it the Omega Virus, OV, before all broadcasting ceased. Their declaration was echoed by many of his colleagues: If you were bitten by the dead, you perished and turned. The media liked it simple. Dr. Emmett knew there was something more complex and far more sinister at work. It took him nearly two weeks before he was certain, and by then, communication beyond the hospital walls had ceased to exist. He had attempted to use the military radios of the troops standing guard at sandbag and barbed-wire perimeters around the building, but he had first been told they were restricted to military traffic only, and then been assured that even if he could use the equipment, he would only achieve company-level communication.

They had all learned a great deal that first day of outbreak, however. It was an experience he was sure had been repeated up and down California and across the country. Francis Miller and Bakersfield General, only a few miles away, had quickly swelled to capacity with the sick and wounded, and both hospitals were soon forced to turn patients away. Most of these people, with no place else to go, just waited in the parking lots. Those who had been bitten but not killed outright by the walking dead ended up sharing the crowded hallways and lobbies with patients suffering gunshot wounds, burns, and injuries from traffic accidents. People with broken bones, severe cuts, heart attacks, and pregnancies come due waited among the bitten. Every available bed, gurney, and wheelchair was filled.

Fatigued staff tended to the worst cases first as best they could, but still people died of their injuries in the crowded corridors without ever being seen. The deceased rose within minutes, and those same corridors turned into slaughterhouses with no way out. If the Army had not arrived in several trucks when they did, little more than a platoon’s worth of soldiers, the hospital would have been overrun. As it was, more than half of the Francis Miller staff and three-quarters of the patients died in the resulting melee. Bakersfield General received no troops and folded.

Two weeks of examining both deceased and heavily restrained zombies, combined with exhaustive lab work, revealed that it was actually two viruses at work, not one. Emmett nicknamed the infection carried by the walking dead the Corpse Virus or CV, determining that not only was it carried in the fluids of the dead, it appeared to be most concentrated or virulent in the corpse’s mouth. An unbitten person could still be infected by fluid contact, like a blood-borne pathogen, but not always. Even direct exposure through an open wound or orifice wasn’t guaranteed to transmit every time, but a bite was a death sentence. A bite guaranteed transmission of CV one hundred percent of the time. CV brought on the horrible fever that killed within twenty-four hours and had so far proven completely immune to any medical attempts to stop or slow its progression. CV was an efficient, determined executioner.

It wasn’t turning victims into the walking dead, however.

Dr. Emmett knew the few troops guarding the hospital couldn’t hold forever. He took off his white coat and stethoscope and let them fall to the gravel as he made his way to the edge of the roof atop the six-story building, stopping at the narrow concrete lip. Muffled cries came from below, along with the sound of breaking glass. He looked over the side to see what appeared to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of the dead moving across the parking lot and lawns, slamming into the sandbag defenses. More of the dead shambled out of the hospital, attacking the soldiers from behind. Gunfire and screams filled the air.

Only this morning, as he had stared bleary-eyed at his files and lab reports, did he realize the mistake he and everyone else had made. There was a second virus, the
true
Omega Virus. Each of his test subjects, including himself, was hosting the dormant Omega Virus, which appeared to be localized in the brain. His realization also explained the need for massive brain trauma to stop one of the dead, or prevent turning in the first place. If the brain was destroyed, it couldn’t support OV.

OV lay dormant, waiting patiently for a trigger. Death was that trigger, whether brought on by the fatal Corpse Virus, a broken neck from a fall, a gunshot wound, or old age. And the virus waiting to turn its host was within everyone he had tested. Dr. Emmett was so shaken by the hopelessness of it all that he couldn’t even speculate at its origins, its abrupt appearance. Did it matter? Death was the one condition from which no one could escape, and
this
was what the next life held. In the end, it wouldn’t make a difference if
anyone
learned of his discovery.

He looked at the sky and took a deep breath as the rooftop door banged open behind him with a chorus of snarls. Stepping off, leaning forward, he hoped he would land on his head.

The loss of hospitals was a scenario repeated across the state. By the end of August, streets throughout California were crowded with walking corpses dressed in scrubs, lab coats, and hospital gowns.

Long Beach

Hank Lyons lived in a two-story apartment complex not far from the industrial parks and shipyards. A single man in his fifties, he watched the news until he could stand it no longer, and then shoved as much canned food as possible into a piece of rolling luggage and headed out in his Ford Escape. Baxter, his Jack Russell terrier, rode in the front seat beside him, eyes bright and stubby tail wagging at the adventure.

The airport was shut down, the roads were rapidly jamming with panicked motorists, buildings were burning. At one point a bullet punched through his back window.

“Screw this,” he told Baxter. The dog barked in agreement. Hank headed for the docks, thinking he and his dog might get aboard a ship—any ship, it didn’t matter—that could carry them to safety.

He wasn’t the only one with that idea. Three blocks from the port, the Escape became trapped in a sea of unmoving traffic, people streaming between the cars on foot. He snapped on Baxter’s leash and joined them. Within minutes, the dead poured out of Long Beach and into the traffic jam, and people started running, dropping their bags and possessions and fighting to move faster, pushing and trampling the slow to move. Hank ditched the rolling luggage, lifted Baxter into his arms, and ran with them.

What few ships there were, tankers and freighters and car carriers, had already raised their gangplanks and were casting off. People shouted and waved, pleading for them to come back, and many even leaped into the oily water to swim after them. The dead slammed into the crowds packed along the edges of the piers. Hank sped away into a maze of long steel containers, still carrying Baxter.

The dead were in there too.

Cut off on all sides, he climbed to the roof of a forklift and hurled his dog onto the top of a rusty blue cargo container, then jumped after him. Both man and dog made it. Baxter barked in approval, and Hank discovered with relief that although several of the dead managed to climb onto the forklift, they weren’t coordinated enough to make the jump and tumbled off into the gap.

Once the hordes were done with their victims on the piers, they wandered, and soon discovered two meals trapped on top of the container. By the end of the day there were more than a thousand of them surrounding the long metal box, groaning and reaching. They didn’t go away, and no one came to the rescue.

Hank Lyons lasted four days in the open before lack of water claimed him. Baxter, dying of thirst himself and barely hanging on, nervously licked Hank’s dead face for five minutes, until his master groaned and climbed slowly to his hands and knees. The Jack Russell danced around him happily, and then leaped into outstretched arms.

After Hank ate Baxter, he wandered to the edge of the container and fell off into a crowd that no longer cared about him.

U.S.-Mexico Border

The defense of the crossing from Tijuana, Mexico, lasted four days. The Mexican side fell first and thirty thousand corpses pushed north, both using the main road and stumbling across the shallows of the Rio Grande. Even supplemented by Army units, U.S. Border Patrol officers simply didn’t have the firepower to hold them back, and the fences couldn’t withstand the relentless shaking and pressing weight.

A new kind of undocumented visitor crossed the border.

Chula Vista, California, was rolled up the next day, the ranks of the dead increasing as the wave surged north. By the time it reached San Diego, the city was already on its knees. The Mexican swarm finished it off.

Riverside

Buck and Stuart stood on a mound of earth, latex-gloved hands shoved in the pockets of their FEMA Windbreakers. They wore goggles and surgical masks to shield them from the stench and the lime. The medical experts said with confidence that it was not airborne, but both men knew there wasn’t yet enough research to prove that. The goggles and masks were of little use, regardless. The corpses reeked, and the lime made their eyes burn. The grumble of a nearby bulldozer forced them to shout.

“I think they just finished the new trench,” Stuart said, pointing across the soccer field toward a yellow bucket loader. It huffed diesel as it rotated on its tracks, swinging its jointed arm. A line of flatbed military trucks was waiting a short distance away from the digger, cargo decks piled with bodies.

“It’s going to fill right up,” Buck said.

A hundred yards behind them, a helicopter sat at one end of the soccer field, its blades turning slowly. Soldiers in full chemical gear, looking like googly-eyed insects in their green chemical suits and protective hoods, relaxed as they walked in pairs around the field, rifles slung. The fighting was farther west, and this was a secure area. They were happy not to be up on the line.

The trench in front of the two men had quickly filled. A hundred feet long, it was stacked end to end with bodies covered in white powder. Several were still moving. The bulldozer was pushing earth back into the trench at the far end. Closer to the mound where Buck and Stuart stood, two men from the World Health Organization were moving along the trench, both in full white hazmat suits with plastic face shields and oxygen tanks. One carried an electronic tablet, the other a long metal probe attached to a handheld black box. He would stop at the edge, probe one of the bodies, say something to his colleague, who would tap in some data (Buck wondered how he managed to work a digital tablet in those bulky gloves), and then they would move farther down the row.

“Bet those suits are uncomfortable,” Stuart said.

“Worse for the grunts.” Buck nodded at a nearby pair of soldiers. “The WHO guys probably have little air conditioners in there.”

They watched the men in white suits work, not even a little curious about what they were testing. Both were exhausted, dark circles under their eyes, unwilling to do more than stand on this hill of dirt and watch. Not that there was much for them to do. FEMA had sent them to organize disposal, which they had done. Their only job now was to wait for instructions and go where the chopper took them next.

They looked out at the field. “Still plenty of room for more,” said Stuart.

The park was a beautiful green expanse of trees, bike trails, and sports fields at the east side of the L.A. suburb. Heavy equipment had turned it into a mass grave, and this trench was the fourteenth dug and filled since daybreak.

Plenty of room. Stuart nodded slowly. It was a physical act just to keep his eyes open. They both knew there probably wouldn’t be a chance to dig and fill more trenches. The Army reported that the line was holding, but the two men had been through this yesterday in Compton. The skinnies would start slipping through the perimeter, compromising the line, and the Army would fall back or even be overwhelmed in places. It would be no different here; the only question was when. The dead were pouring out of L.A. by the tens of thousands.

Buck grimaced. “Skinnies” was a term the Army had used to refer to the local population during its ill-fated adventure in Somalia twenty-plus years earlier. Now everyone used the term, including civilians. It had gone viral, so to speak, and wasn’t that just hilarious? He supposed it was appropriate, though. As many of the walking dead decayed, they shed much of their fluid (not all, he cautioned himself—they were still juicy enough to infect you) and grew emaciated, rotting skin drawing tight against their bodies and features. It was as good a name as any.

The man with the long probe stopped to jab his device toward one of the lime-coated bodies, one that was struggling to pull itself out from under other motionless corpses. The edge of the trench suddenly collapsed, and the man tumbled in on a cascade of crumbling dirt, dropping his tool, arms flailing. His buddy ran in the other direction, waving at two of the patrolling soldiers.

Buck and Stuart didn’t move, didn’t call out. They just watched.

The man started crawling back toward the edge, his movements slow and uncoordinated in the bulky suit. The ghoul in the lime pit caught hold of one of his legs and used it to pull itself free of the other bodies. Then it scrambled onto the man’s back and began tearing at the suit. Within moments the bright red of blood splashed across the white fabric, and the man rolled onto his back in an attempt to fight off the creature. It straddled him, ripping away his mask, and then worked its face in past his raised arms, getting at the exposed flesh.

Two soldiers trotted up to the edge of the trench, raised their rifles, and fired, hitting the powdery ghoul in the head. It slumped over, and the man turned to start climbing again. One of the soldiers shifted his weapon and fired again, blowing out the back of the WHO man’s head. The bulldozer didn’t stop working.