Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (27 page)

“Lieutenant, three o’clock,” RJ called.

Vladimir looked to the right across the field. He saw Rocker’s lone Super Hornet still on the ground, and he wondered what had happened to the young fighter jock. That wasn’t what RJ was drawing his attention to, however. Another Black Hawk sat on the deck close to a cluster of buildings, rotors turning, masses of the undead coming in at it from all sides. A small circle of men was falling back to the chopper, firing in all directions. Vlad recognized the tail number as Conroy’s bird, his former co-pilot.

“Hold tight.” The Russian banked hard and roared across the base toward the surrounded helicopter, while RJ loaded his last box of ammo. Ahead of them, the defenders began to fall, and two men with rifles turned and leaped through the open side door as Conroy began to lift off.

Handfuls of the dead galloped after them and scrambled aboard as well.

Groundhog-7 was almost there when Conroy’s bird became fully airborne, close enough to see the side window of the cockpit suddenly splashed red. The chopper staggered and tipped sideways, racing horizontally through the air and dropping. The Black Hawk’s engine made a high-pitched death whine as it streaked toward the ground, and then there was a tremendous blast as it crashed.

It hit inside NAS Lemoore’s tank farm of jet fuel.

“Shit!”
Vlad cried, banking away sharply and accelerating, pushing the turbine for all its power. Behind him there was a deep boom that he felt in his chest cavity as the first aboveground tank erupted, an enormous bomb that sent a flaming pressure wave of shrapnel in a three-hundred-sixty-degree circle. The blast set off others, the giant tanks going off like a string of firecrackers.

The pressure slammed into Groundhog-7, lifting it from behind and hurling the aircraft forward, nose down, trying to knock it out of the sky. Pieces of metal banged and rattled off the fuselage, and a frantic warning buzzer sounded in the cockpit. The helicopter dropped toward the flat roof of a barracks building, turbine intakes sucking at the superheated air, and the cords in Vlad’s neck and arms jumped out as he hauled back on the cyclic.

The Black Hawk pulled out ten feet above the rooftop, low enough for the wind from its blades to scatter gravel like a dust storm. Then it was roaring across the base.

Vlad whispered something in Russian, a little prayer his mother had taught him, and slowly gained elevation. He shut off the warning buzzer—a caution that his air intakes were suffocating, though no longer—and aimed the chopper toward the tower. He circled it, calling repeatedly on the radio, and still getting no response. No one moved behind the glass. He pulled away, looking down as the streets of the naval air station filled with the dead. Many were charred black from burning fuel, civilians who had come here seeking sanctuary and found something worse than death.

The pilot made a slow, low-level inspection of the base, seeing no more firefights. “RJ, do you see anything on your side?”

The gunner said nothing.

“RJ?” Vlad twisted in his seat to look back into the troop compartment. The metal decking was slick with blood, and RJ was flat on his back, jumpsuit scorched, a blackened twist of metal jutting out of his throat. His eyes were open, staring up at nothing.

The Russian cursed softly. The man had probably been killed instantly when the jet fuel tank went off. Vlad told himself that even if he had known his gunner was hit and was able to find a safe place to land, there wouldn’t have been anything he could do. Nonetheless, he felt the weight of the man’s death. He could rationalize it all he wanted to, but he knew his dreams would have something quite different to say about it.

If he lived long enough to sleep again.

He continued his slow patrol across the length of the base, searching for survivors, finding only the walking dead as they continued to file through the breaches. If anyone was down there, they were out of sight, hiding in a building and beyond Vlad’s help.

A howl at his right ear made him flinch left as fingernails clawed the corner of his seat. Vlad twisted to see RJ on his feet, the metal still in his neck, reaching with both arms. His eyes were filmy, and he hissed through bared teeth. The door gunner’s safety line, still clipped from his harness to a ring on the floor of the troop compartment, held him back like a vicious dog straining at the end of its leash. The dead man lunged against it, coming up short, able only to touch the corner of the pilot’s seat. He moaned and kept at it, jerking and snapping his teeth.

Vlad put the Black Hawk into a hover and slipped a small automatic from a zipper pocket of his flight suit, just beneath his armpit. “Forgive me,
tovarich
.” He shot RJ in the face, and the gunner’s body collapsed to the decking.

The pilot looked down for a moment, and then looked at the map strapped to his right knee. It showed secondary and tertiary landing zones—both military and civilian—as well as places he might find the JP-5 fuel his bird consumed at a rate of 0.74 miles per gallon. He knew that most, if not all, were out of date and already overrun.

He flew the Black Hawk north.

Oakland

The highway was no longer an option. It was too packed with vehicles, and the dead wandering among them numbered in the thousands now. At the head of the hippie convoy, Evan’s Harley led them down into the neighborhoods of West Oakland. These would have been rough areas before the plague, dangerous and crime-infested. Now the city was infested by a new breed of predator.

Evan leaned and turned, working the throttle to scoot past clusters of the moaning dead, not stopping to use his weapons. There were simply too many of them, and they had to keep moving. Slow as they were, the creatures still had numbers, and if they managed to make a ring around the motorcycle . . . Evan didn’t delude himself about their chances if that happened.

Behind him, Maya wrapped her arms tightly about his waist, leaning naturally into the turns. In one hand she gripped the nine-millimeter Evan had taken off the dead cop in Napa, and she kept her head tucked against the rain. Over the years Evan had grown accustomed to riding in all sorts of weather, but he still wore a pair of goggles he had found on the highway. His clothes were completely soaked and his hair slicked back.

The cars, trucks, and vans followed closely in a line.

Evan and Calvin had planned their route while still on the interstate, spreading a road map across the hood of an abandoned car and highlighting it in yellow. The writer committed the street names and turns to memory, and Maya watched the process closely, wordlessly memorizing as well. The map was tucked inside his jacket now, in the event their planned route was blocked and required an alternate way through.

Thunder grumbled overhead, and the flat gray above was occasionally broken by white flashes.

Evan ignored the turn onto West Grand Avenue. Although it was a wide road, with more room for the line of vehicles to maneuver, it also led to the Bay Bridge, and there seemed to be an extraordinary number of corpses coming from that direction. Were they leaving San Francisco, heading into Oakland? That wasn’t a pleasant thought. There were too many of them here already. Instead he kept the convoy headed south on Peralta, watching for 7th Street, which would lead them west to the harbor.

Where their hearts would be broken when they found it empty.

Despite the growing threat around them, they had pressed on, pinning their hopes to a phantom hospital ship that would carry them all to safety and a happily-ever-after.
I’m as crazy as the rest of them,
Evan thought,
not only a part of them now but a leader.
How had
that
happened? Evan Tucker was a loner and, according to his father, a vagabond who ran from responsibility, chasing dreams. Well, Dad had been right about that last part. Except Evan suspected he was chasing a nightmare now, and he feared what would happen when he caught up to it.

The intersection where 7th crossed Peralta appeared, and Evan stopped the bike, lifting his goggles and wiping at his face. Maya patted his shoulder and pointed to where he was already looking.

“I’ll be damned.”

On all four corners of the intersection, large white signs had been attached to light posts, each with a big arrow pointing west up 7th. Above the arrows in tall letters was
USNS COMFORT
, and above this a large, red cross.

USNS . . . United States Naval Ship? Faith had said it was there, and here were the signs, pointing to the harbor. It couldn’t still be here, could it? Evan was exhilarated and chilled at the same time but couldn’t say exactly why he was suddenly nervous. Maya nudged him and kissed his ear, and instantly things were better. He waved to the tow truck behind him and accelerated down 7th.

Very quickly they passed back under the Nimitz Freeway and entered Oakland’s main industrial center, a place of wide streets and sprawling, flat-roof buildings. Other than a lone corpse walking stiffly out of a loading dock, the dead were absent. That made a little sense, since this wouldn’t have been a much populated area under normal circumstances. Still, 7th was unusually clear of vehicles, and that bothered him.

Even in the downpour the place smelled of oil and rust, and rainwater pooled in potholes and ruts in the asphalt made by the passage of thousands of heavily laden trucks. A rail line on the left followed the street as they traveled through a silent city of warehouses and truck yards, motionless freight cars parked on sidings, paved lots with rows of trailers, cranes, and greasy forklifts. Stacked ocean containers—blue, orange, rusty red, and green—rose like castle walls in vast storage yards.

Every block, the signs for
USNS COMFORT
directed them forward.

He wondered at the absence of vehicles. If this was an evacuation center, wouldn’t it have been jammed with carloads of refugees trying to get out? He had his answer on the next block.

It had been extremely organized.

The road ahead was blocked by a pair of desert camouflage tanks parked nose to nose, a ten-foot gap between them. Several weapon-mounted Humvees stood to the sides, and a pair of sandbag gun pits had been built near the tanks. A corridor of razor-sharp barbed wire formed a funnel that would have permitted only a few people at a time to pass between the tanks. A control point.

To the left, a truck yard behind a high chain-link fence had been turned into a parking lot, refugee vehicles lined up inside in endless rows. Evan was reminded of how people were directed to park in the fields at state fairs.

Bold-lettered signs around the control point announced
NO WEAPONS BEYOND THIS POINT
and
DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED
. More signs pointed up Maritime Street to the right, past a truck weigh station. These read
QUARANTINE AREA
and
INFECTED ONLY
and had red arrows.

The tow truck idled up beside the Harley, and the VW van stopped behind them, Calvin walking up holding his assault rifle. “I’m going to be doing some apologizing to Faith,” he said. “She was right all along.”

Evan looked around. He wasn’t so sure. The control point was abandoned, and the ground was covered in shell casings. The body of a soldier was draped facedown over the sandbags of a gun pit. Nothing made a sound here except for the engines and the rain. “Let’s see what’s on the other side,” he said.

After a brief conversation, the tow truck driver, a long-haired, bearded man named Kyle, backed his rig up to one of the Humvees and ran out his cable. Several minutes later he was dragging the Army vehicle out of the way, creating a ten-foot-wide gap between the rear of the tank and the brick wall of a warehouse. It would be enough for the convoy to squeeze through. Minutes later they were moving once again up 7th, deeper into the industrial park.

More rail lines appeared, more rows of silent boxcars and flatbeds sitting on rails. Ocean containers were everywhere: on trains, on trucks, stacked on the ground behind walls of chain link. In one open, paved area, a huge orange-and-white Coast Guard helicopter stood as a quiet sentinel.

They came to the water. Here the road curved until it reached an attractive stone building with a sign reading
INTERNATIONAL MARITIME CENTER
, a museum of some kind. Past it, the road split in three directions. One cut back into the complex, following another rail line; one continued south along the edge of a park; the third traveled out onto a stretch of land with more train tracks and container yards, eventually coming to a long wharf with a row of high, white cranes used for offloading ships.

Oakland Middle Harbor was gray and choppy in the rain, a horseshoe of land that opened to the greater bay at the far end. Closest to them, right on the water, sat an environmental oasis among the industry, a large green space of trees and trails, playgrounds, picnic areas, and a baseball diamond. An Army field hospital occupied most of the ball field: square, green canvas tents planted in orderly rows and marked with red crosses.

But it had been overrun.

Torn and blood-splashed canvas fluttered in the breeze, empty ambulances stood with rear doors open, and people in both camouflage and civilian clothing moved stiffly among the tents. Out here near the road they saw torn fences, burned military trucks, and a California Highway Patrol cruiser so riddled with bullet holes it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s death car. The road out toward the cranes and wharf was peppered with abandoned luggage and coolers, empty wheelchairs and walkers, and dropped toys.

Evan pulled his binoculars from a saddlebag and looked out at the long white ship tied up at the distant wharf. It was the length of an aircraft carrier, boxy with giant red crosses standing out brightly against its snowy hull.

Launched as an oil tanker in 1976,
Comfort
was converted to seventy thousand tons of hospital ship eleven years later, operated by a mix of civilian and naval medical personnel. Its deck boasted a landing pad capable of handling the world’s largest helicopters. Below,
Comfort
was equipped with twelve operating rooms, intensive care, obstetrics, radiology, a burn unit, dental and optometry facilities, labs, a pharmacy, and beds for more than a thousand patients. It could produce its own medicinal oxygen and distill up to three hundred thousand gallons of seawater into drinking water every day. Its proud history of service included Desert Storm in the nineties, New York Harbor after 9/11, Iraq, post-Katrina New Orleans, Caribbean and Latin American humanitarian relief, and three trips to Haiti in response to both civil unrest and the earthquake of 2010.

And now it was dead.

Evan focused the binoculars. The hospital ship was teeming with drifters, bodies lurching along catwalks and across decks. Worse still, the peninsula leading to the ship was packed with a swarm of ten to twenty thousand milling corpses stretching back from the wharf in a long tail. They had come here seeking evacuation. They had come here because they were sick, and sick people went to hospitals. Sick people.

“Oh, God,” he whispered. How many were already infected when they arrived, and turned into something else? How many were still here, not just in view but herded into fenced yards and warehouses? They would have torn down the fences by now, forced open the doors. They would be loose.

Through the binoculars he saw the horde on the peninsula begin to turn and move back in their direction. At that moment a horn sounded to the rear of the convoy, long and urgent. Both Evan and Maya stood up from the Harley and looked back. The dead were emerging from everywhere: buildings, trucks yards, boxcars, coming from behind containers, streaming into the road behind them as the refugees from
Comfort
closed on the left.

Evan saw a heavy blue truck racing ahead of the warehouse swarm, passing the convoy on one side. It looked official, possibly military, and as it roared past he saw the words
California D.O.C.
on the side. The engine was knocking like a blacksmith’s hammer as it went by, leaving a cloud of oily blue smoke in its wake. It did not stop, or even slow.

Evan looked into Maya’s face. “Hold on!” Then he hit the throttle and chased after the armored truck, the line of hippie vehicles keeping close behind.

And the dead followed with them.