Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (6 page)

More movement, on the street now, about midway up the block: an old man, shoulders hunched, shuffling out between two cars. He was bald and wore a gray sweater, and dragged one foot as he walked. Taylor sighted on him. Through the magnification of the sight he searched for blood on the old man’s clothes. He didn’t see any.
Hell,
he thought,
his spine could be dangling exposed or the back of his head chewed away and I wouldn’t know it from this angle.

More staggered out from doorways and between buildings, men and women, a couple of kids, a wide variety of races and ages.
Zombies, the ultimate diversity group,
Taylor thought. There were more than a dozen, all of them torn up, and they followed the old man into the street. He shuffled on toward the Humvee, head down.

Taylor put his sight directly on that bald head, searching for a torn ear, a fleshy rip, something. And then the old man lifted his head, and Taylor saw his eyes, bright and wide, his face pinched with effort as he tried to shuffle faster. He looked over his shoulder at the horde coming after him and let out a little cry.

“Oh shit, he’s—”

A single rifle shot cracked over Taylor’s head, and he saw the old man take the hit in his stomach. He winced, grabbed his belly, and fell to his knees. “Got him!” Hayman yelled from the Humvee turret.

“Hayman, he’s alive!” Taylor started in that direction, still using his sight. A rising groan came from the street as the horde caught up to and swarmed the kneeling man, tearing him apart.

“Mother
fuckers
!” Taylor opened up, planting his feet and squeezing off rounds into the crowd. Bullets thumped harmlessly into shoulders and chests and thighs and necks, until Sgt. Postman smacked the back of Taylor’s helmet and yelled, “Head shots, goddammit!” Taylor took a deep breath, sighted, fired. A woman’s head popped a little pink cloud behind it, and she collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

Hayman began firing again and shouted, “Action rear!” On the far side of the Hummer, Simpkins went to the back of the vehicle to add his fire. The dead were approaching in the direction from which the soldiers had come, a crowd as wide as the street, bodies at the edges bumping along parked cars. They came on slowly but didn’t even hesitate when one of their number went down to a head shot. The dead walked over the fallen, and a couple out front moved faster than the rest, in a sort of sidestepping gallop, arms flailing.

“Action left!” Corporal Martinez called out, stepping from the driver’s seat, sighting his rifle down the new avenue and opening up. Soon, all five soldiers were firing, shifting direction as more and more creatures moved into the street, bloody parodies of people.

•   •   •

I
nside the Hummer, Dreadlocks whipped his head left and right, looking at the scenes playing out beyond the windows, his hands beating a nervous tattoo on his knees. “Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered, again to no one but himself. Skye edged away from him. In the back, where there were no windows, only the closed, curved rear hatch, both the boy and the girl were crying now.

Without warning, Dreadlocks jumped out of the vehicle. Skye saw him run to the right and disappear near the back of the Hummer where the firing was constant now, and then a moment later he appeared again, running left, his head still whipping in every direction. Through the windshield Skye saw him sprinting up the street with the traffic accident in the distance. A scattering of lurching figures jerked toward him all at the same time and started to move faster, and Skye was reminded of the way schools of fish all changed direction at once. Dreadlocks slid to a stop, looked left and right, and then darted left, out of sight between two buildings.

High-pitched screams came from there a moment later.

Skye discovered that panic is infectious. She bolted from the Hummer, seeing Taylor and the sergeant each kneeling and firing single shots, one after another, into a growing crowd. Bodies fell, but not enough. Their numbers swelled as new arrivals slid in from every direction. As Dreadlocks had done, she ran to the rear, where Simpkins was firing into a wall-to-wall mass of the dead, surging forward. Cries of “Reloading!” came from all around.

Up in the turret, Hayman heard a strangling screech to his right and looked down to see Corporal Martinez on his back near the driver’s door, covered in half a dozen growling freaks. “Sergeant!” He turned and fired down into the new swarm, shell casings spinning through the air and peppering Skye. She didn’t notice. She was frozen in place, arms hanging limp like the creatures that were steadily approaching, now less than thirty yards away. Her stare was fixed on one shuffling figure, its chest open, exposing torn organs and a broken rib cage.

Skye’s mom locked eyes with her daughter, groaned, and started to gallop.

San Francisco—The Tenderloin

Father Xavier stood in the shadows inside a hair and nail salon, watching the front window through which he had entered. Or, where it had been. It now sparkled in fragments on the tile floor, mixed with bottles of hair care products from overturned displays and larger wedges of shattered mirrors. He wasn’t the vandal; he had found it this way. Photos of beautiful African American and Latina women stared down from every wall, with overdone eyes and red pouting lips, wearing a variety of styles and braid arrangements. The place smelled of burned hair.

It was only a little past noon, and already the power was failing. Xavier had seen entire blocks blacked out, traffic signals hanging dark over intersections. Fires had begun, as had the looting, and the experience of a life lived so close to the street assured him that some of the gunfire and screaming had nothing to do with the walking dead. People could be equally predatory with their own kind.

The cop had proven that.

Xavier found him a couple of blocks from the rectory, an SFPD patrol car engulfed in flames only yards away. The cop had been stripped of his weapons and hung by the neck from the arm of a streetlight. The priest assumed it had been done
before
he changed into what he now was. The undead cop dangled and jerked, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes rolling and mouth gaping in a long, continuous gasp.

Behind him in the shadows of the salon, someone sneezed. Another voice hissed to “Shut up!” which was answered by, “Go fuck yourself, pal.” A girl whimpered, and someone lit a cigarette. Xavier glanced back at the people crouched behind the chrome-and-vinyl swivel chairs. Most looked at him with an emotion with which he was all too familiar: hope.

He shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he murmured, looking back out the front. A pair of old African American ladies shuffled past the window, the kind of ladies who never missed church and tried to sit as close to the front as they could. Except one of them had a big bite of meat missing from her cheek, and the other’s scalp was peeled back all the way from her eyebrows, hanging on her neck like a grisly ponytail.

They had almost moved past when they shuffled to a stop, both tipping their heads back at the same time. They swayed, turning their heads this way and that, and then rotated their bodies until they were facing the broken window of the hair salon.

Xavier froze. The sharp smell of cigarette drifted past him, and he tensed, watching the old women. They swayed, heads still lifted and twitching slightly. Then they started crawling through the window.

A woman’s scream in the street outside made them stop and turn their heads, and then they were crawling back out, heedless of the broken glass cutting their knees and palms. They shambled off in the direction of the screams.

Xavier let out a held breath. He turned to the people hiding behind him, his voice a harsh whisper. “I think they smelled the cigarette. Put it out.”

“What?” asked a large man in a checked shirt. He was squatting near a sink, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He had a beefy face pocked with old acne scars and the blown blood vessels of a heavy drinker.

“You heard me,” said Xavier. The man glared at him for a long moment, then crushed it out. The priest returned to his watch.

It had all gone so fast, and the all-powerful authority everyone assumed would take care of them in a crisis folded quickly, replaced by anarchy. Since leaving the rectory, Xavier had seen only a handful of moving emergency vehicles, and only at a distance. Sirens echoed off buildings, and the occasional, unintelligible babble of a public address system floated through the streets. Most of the police cars and ambulances he saw were vacant, doors standing open with no one in sight. There had been no sign of the military, and the beat of helicopter rotors came from above without the aircraft ever coming into view. Plenty of civilian cars, minivans, and SUVs had been moving at first, but they were quickly abandoned as streets and intersections clogged. Fires burned unchecked, entire buildings ablaze and putting off heat so intense it drove people away.

There were so many people, all of them running: groups and families, singles and pairs, headed in every direction and none appearing to have a sense of where they were going. He saw no checkpoints, no uniformed people with bullhorns directing people to safety, no organized evacuations. Car horns sounded, fires roared, and glass broke as looters took advantage of the chaos. On a few relatively clear streets he saw cars tearing along recklessly, at high speed, scraping parked cars or plowing into others, slamming into hydrants that popped and erupted in great plumes. A big red Coke truck pushed unstopping through crowds of screaming refugees, its horn blaring as bodies disappeared under its front bumper. The driver wore a crazed grin and pounded the wheel as a Kenny Chesney tune bumped at max volume from the cab. There was gunfire and screaming. Lots of screaming.

And there were the dead. They seemed to be everywhere, monstrous corruptions of the human form relentlessly pursuing the living, who were often too slow or panicked and allowed themselves to be cornered. They were pulled down, savaged, and killed, and within minutes arose as freshly made ghouls. Their numbers multiplied with every passing hour.

Father Xavier went straight to St. Joseph’s, only blocks from the rectory, and found only the janitor, a man named Raul who spoke no English. Xavier’s Spanish was passable, but despite this the man couldn’t be made to understand what was going on. Or perhaps, the priest thought, it was simply too horrible to accept.

“Sí, sí,”
the man repeated, nodding his head and smiling nervously. Xavier grew frustrated. Could Raul at least understand that there was a crisis, and he had to find safety? The janitor nodded faster and started backing away. Xavier took a deep breath and held up his palms. He hadn’t wanted to frighten the man. He had come here thinking the people of the parish might have been drawn to St. Joseph’s as a sanctuary, but that had not been the case.

Xavier’s parish—it wasn’t actually
his
parish, it was Monsignor Wellsley’s, Xavier was just a priest—sat in the middle of the Tenderloin, serving a San Francisco neighborhood not far from downtown, Union Square, and the financial district. Despite its proximity to those upscale addresses, however, it might as well have been another planet. The Tenderloin was hell.

More than forty-four thousand people lived in its one square mile, packed together in a soup of crime, drugs, homelessness, prostitution, and heartbreaking poverty. It was a place of vermin-infested hotels, liquor stores, thrift shops, pawnshops, and XXX video stores. Vagrants (San Francisco had a reputation for having the most aggressive vagrants in the United States) slept lined up on sidewalks, huddled against buildings in nests of plastic bags, cardboard, and piles of filthy clothes. A functioning shopping cart, the vagrant’s home on wheels, was prized above all else and savagely defended against would-be cartjackers. Xavier had once heard two women in designer coats and shoes, standing in line at a boutique coffee bar, talking about the city’s vagrant population. They speculated that they were worse than the New York homeless, because the weather here wasn’t as hard on them.

“At least the bums in New York have the decency to die off in the winter,” one had said, and they both laughed.

It turned out that the homeless died off in San Francisco in August, by the thousands, and now roamed the streets as never before, giving a new definition to the word
aggressive
.

Xavier told the janitor to go with God and headed to the youth center next, moving cautiously along the streets. When he saw the dead he ducked out of sight to let them go by, and when he couldn’t do that, he sprinted past them. He didn’t try to join any of the running knots of people he encountered, and most veered away when they saw him, a muscled black man on his own with a frightening scar. He decided he was lucky no one had shot at him.

The kids at the youth center called him “Father X” and liked the fact that he had grown up in the tough streets of Oakland, never losing touch with what that was like. They were drawn to his imposing size and fearsome appearance, paired with a gentle and understanding nature. He was a sanctuary in a bad neighborhood, fearless and protective of his kids. He was someone who would never lie to them, who would listen but also be real with them, calling them on their bullshit but never making them feel small. They respected him, loved him, and more than a few managed to leave the neighborhood to find a better life, returning years later to thank him and tell him he was the reason they had made it out.

Xavier was only able to get within view of the center, a squat building of dirty red brick with rusting mesh bolted over the windows. Lifeless figures teemed in the streets around it, and within the chain-link-enclosed basketball court and playground he could see dozens more, drifting into each other or hanging on to the fence and making croaking noises. Even from his point of concealment behind a Dumpster across the street, he recognized some of them: Davon and Cleon; the little kid Marcus with the enormous Afro; Little P, who had trouble with shoplifting; Charmaine, the twelve-year-old girl who had nearly been raped last January; Kiki and her little brother, Troy, who had a speech impediment. Boys and girls who came to play ball or box or just to hang out someplace away from the dangers of the street. Xavier saw others he knew, people from the parish, mostly mothers and old people.

When he saw the toddler, he knew God had abandoned them. She was facedown on the asphalt, a little Hispanic girl still buckled into an umbrella stroller and dragging herself across the ground by her hands. The rasp of hundreds of shuffling pairs of feet filled the air, but the metallic scrape of that stroller and the tiny, determined snarls of the dead thing pulling it threatened to drive him mad.

Too late for his kids at the center, for the people of his parish and the city as well. Too late for them all. Xavier stumbled away, unable to look any longer, his eyes burning with tears. He had ducked into the salon a few minutes later to avoid a trio of dead homeless men, and found these people hiding within.

“We can’t stay here,” he whispered, turning back to the group.

“And go where?” demanded Barney Pulaski, a union pipe fitter, the one who had been smoking.

“Yeah,” said the teenager, a girl named Tricia, blond with too much makeup, whose constant crying had made her look like a raccoon. “It’s not safe out there. That’s why I came in here. I’m not leaving.”

Next to her, a man in his forties with a gaunt face in need of a shave, wearing khakis and a button-up shirt, just shrugged. A twelve-year-old in a gray hoodie clutched a skateboard and stared. Xavier stared back at them. He didn’t want this, didn’t want the responsibility. He had failed so many already, not the least of whom was God. Saying “we” a moment ago was a slip, and they would be stupid to follow him. He was a murderer, whether his victims had been vicious gang members or not, and he had broken a sacred oath, hadn’t been there for his parish or his kids when they needed him.

“The city’s too dangerous,” he said. The math of more than forty thousand people packed into this neighborhood, rapidly turning into those creatures outside, was overwhelming. And that was just here. What about all the other neighborhoods?

“And go where?” the pipe fitter repeated, speaking slowly, as if to a child.

Xavier looked at him, then away.

“Who put you in charge, anyway?” Pulaski lit another cigarette.

“I’m not in charge.” And that was that. He was getting out. They could stay if they wanted to. Perhaps God would take mercy on them, but he doubted it. Xavier knew he was beyond salvation.

“That’s right,” said the pipe fitter, blowing smoke at him and glaring.

The gaunt man stepped past Pulaski and stuck out his hand. “Alden Timms. I’m a high school teacher. I was on my way to work . . .” He shrugged.

Xavier shook his hand and gave him his name. He didn’t tell him he was a priest.

Alden nodded, glancing out the front windows. “You said we need to get out of the city, and I agree. It’s just a matter of time before they come in here. We’re pretty exposed.” He was pale and looked tired. “I’m scared to go out there, but I think we have to. How do you think we could get out?”

Xavier ignored the look Pulaski shot him. “I saw traffic jams and hundreds of abandoned cars. We’d never get a vehicle through it.”

“What about bikes?” the skateboard kid asked, looking hopeful. “They can get through tight spaces, and we could carry them over cars if we had to.”

The priest was relieved to see they were thinking, and not just paralyzed, waiting to become a meal for a walking corpse. He still didn’t care for the whole “we” thing, feeling as if he were being pulled into their world against his will. “I think those things would just snatch you off if they got close enough. You’d be better on your feet.”

“If we walked,” said Alden, “we’d have to cross a bridge. If the roads are clogged, wouldn’t they be too?”

Xavier nodded.

“There’s the BART tube.”

“Yeah, and it’s probably full of dead things,” said the skateboard kid. “Forget that.”

“I’m not going into a tunnel with those things!” Tricia’s voice was shaking, getting louder with each word. The group shushed her, except for Pulaski, who muttered, “Bitch is gonna get us killed.”

“What about walking south, toward San Jose?” said Alden. “No bridges, no tunnels.”

Xavier shook his head. “It’s basically just one big urban sprawl between here and there. Lots of population. Lots of those things.”

“Well, you’ve got all the answers,” sneered Pulaski.

“No,” said Xavier, “just more problems. Look, I don’t have the answer. You can all do whatever you want, and you can stop looking at me to solve the problem.” He pointed at the pipe fitter. “Like he said, I’m not in charge.”

Alden Timms pressed on as if he hadn’t heard. “So we’re on foot, and staying together sounds safest.” He looked at the boxer. “Where should we start?”