Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (8 page)

Skye stared down the gloomy hall as something banged hard against wood. She was almost certain she saw a door rattle in its frame not far away, and didn’t notice Taylor ghosting past her. Sgt. Postman gave her a gentle nudge and gestured at the younger soldier, who was climbing the next flight of steps. Skye followed.

The top of these stairs ended in a metal door with a simple crash bar and opened onto a flat tar roof with a two-foot-high wall running all around the edge. The buildings to their left and right were one story lower, and at the back of the roof the top of a fire escape ladder curled over the little wall and dropped into an alley below.

“Secure that door,” Postman said, and Taylor looked it over for a moment before producing a folding tool from one pocket. Skye recognized it as a Leatherman, a multipurpose tool just like the one she had gotten her dad for Christmas a couple of years ago. Taylor turned it into pliers, wedged it into the seam low on the door where it met the metal frame, and then used his helmet as a hammer to drive it in tight. He next produced a small, curved metal box with folding legs and set it about six feet from the door, wrapping a wire around the doorknob and running it back to the box, where he carefully twisted it down onto a connector.

“Skye, come here,” Taylor said.

She joined him, and Taylor pointed at the little box. “That’s a claymore mine. It will go off if the door is opened and kill anything in its path. Please keep away from it.”

Skye said she would.

They shed their packs and extra weapons in the shade of an air-conditioning unit, then walked to the wall overlooking the street out front and took a seat on the edge looking down. A handful of corpses were shuffling among the cars, some dragging crooked feet, others with necks craned forward as if walking were an effort. A few were in uniform. Columns of smoke rose in all directions beyond the surrounding rooftops, and distant sirens wailed. Ghostly, sporadic gunfire echoed in the distance. From here they could see part of the bay, and San Francisco beyond, hazy at this distance. Heavy smoke rose there too, and the tiny shapes of aircraft floated above it.

“The radio is in the Hummer,” said Postman.

Taylor nodded. “And it’s gonna stay there. Too far.”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

Skye pulled out her cell phone to check for a signal. Still nothing, and her battery level was down to half. The screen saver was a close-up of her and Crystal, faces mushed against each other and laughing hysterically. Her eyes began to burn.

“Someone’s going to come looking for the platoon,” said Taylor. He squinted back toward the intersection with the deuce-and-a-half truck in it. A pair of corpses in uniform wandered past the truck.

“Maybe,” said Postman. He looked at Skye. “How are you doing?”

She shrugged. “I’m scared.” Her lip trembled. “I miss . . .” And then the tears came. Taylor reached for her but she pulled away, running across the roof to the air-conditioning unit, dropping to the other side of it with her back against the metal, not wanting them to see her. She gripped her cell phone in both hands and cried, head down, shoulders shaking with the sobs. It all poured in at once, her family, her life, the world. She let it come, burying her cries in an arm, not wanting to wail, powerless to stop it, and the anguish carried her away like a riptide.

An hour later the tears were gone, leaving her hollow and drained. She couldn’t remember being this tired, wanted simply to drop onto her side and let the black nothingness of sleep take it all away. She didn’t. She feared the dreams that might come.

A boot scraped at the tar roof beside her, and she lifted her head to see Taylor crouching there, arms resting on his knees. She must be something to see, she thought. It had been an ugly, snotty cry. The young man didn’t look at her with disgust or contempt, and he wasn’t giving her the fake pity face people used at funerals when they didn’t really care about the deceased. It was a matter-of-fact face.

“You okay?”

She wiped an arm across her nose and rubbed her palms into her eyes before she shrugged. “I guess.”

“Good. There’s not enough of us.” He touched her elbow and guided her until she stood. “The sergeant says it’s time to turn you into a shooter.”

Oakland International Airport

There were eight of them now: Dunleavy, five staffers, and the two pilots in their starched white shirts and striped shoulder boards. The G6 was well behind them and they were moving as a group, out in the open, crossing a grassy area and heading toward a squat, concrete structure painted in red and white checks. A bristle of antennae was fastened to its roof.

A door stood open in one side of the little building, and this small promise of shelter was what drew them. Staying in the open was a death sentence, as they had quickly learned, and the terminal was no longer an option.

Dunleavy and the others had still been sitting in the private jet, everyone staring at the fire and talking at once, when the second plane went down. It was a fat Lufthansa jumbo and had probably been in a holding pattern circling high above Oakland. The plane appeared without warning, a white mass streaking out of the sky like a missile, engines screaming as it dove straight into the main terminal of Oakland International. The blast rocked the G6, and the bloom of fire was so intense it made everyone flinch back from the windows. Burning jet fuel turned the terminal into an inferno.

Anderson stood in the aisle. “Everyone needs to stay calm. I think we need to leave the plane and get off the airfield.”

No one moved, except Dunleavy, who shoved the Glock into his front waistband and pulled his shirt down over it. It was clear he would not be expected in court today, or any day for that matter.

Anderson went forward to confer with the pilots, and that was when everyone noticed the big United on the tarmac ahead of them. A door high on its left side popped open, and a second later an inflatable yellow slide ballooned outward. The G6 went silent as they all stared and waited, but no one came out. Almost a full minute passed before a fat man in a dark business suit appeared at the opening, tie undone and shirt pulled open to reveal a hairy chest. He bumped into the door frame and then didn’t exit so much as he fell out backward, onto the slide and quickly ending in a heap at the bottom. His arms and legs kicked for a moment, like a pudgy turtle on its back trying to right itself, and then he slowly got to his feet. The businessman stood there, arms hanging at his sides, swaying as if dazed.

A young woman in a flight attendant’s uniform leaped through the opening, her mouth open in a scream they couldn’t hear, and slid right into the businessman at the bottom. He fell on her and tore her apart.

No one else came out of the plane.

Even steady, calm-under-pressure Anderson couldn’t keep the staffers from panicking then, and screaming filled the cabin until from the back their spiritual leader yelled, “Oh, shut the fuck up!” It startled them to silence. The reverend looked past a shocked Anderson and at one of the pilots standing in the cockpit doorway. “Get me off this bitch.”

The pilot did, opening the hatch and lowering the stairs to the asphalt. The minister shoved his Bible into an expensive leather carry-on, pushed his way up the aisle past his loyal followers, and climbed down. They followed.

And there had been nine of them. Until one of his staffers (a twat from Kentucky who’d repeatedly refused his offers to come to his hotel room) ran whimpering toward the emergency slide of the United flight, as if she could somehow save the fallen flight attendant. He had never considered the girl terribly bright, and this proved it. The businessman took her down the moment she arrived.

Now down to eight, the little band neared the airfield outbuilding. The businessman, the flight attendant, and the Kentucky twat lurched across the grass behind them in pursuit. On the inside of the door was a bloody handprint, the building a single room filled with long gray circuit breaker panels. In the center, a set of concrete stairs with yellow-painted metal handrails descended into a dimly lit tunnel.

The group hesitated. The minister shoved through, checking the door handle to find that it automatically locked once closed. “Get in,” he ordered. When they didn’t immediately respond, he grabbed the arm of a young male staffer and propelled him forward. “Get
in
.” He pulled the door firmly shut once the last one was inside, then moved through the small crowd and started down the stairs. He stopped when he realized no one was behind him.

“What are you waiting for?”

One of the staffers, a pretty blonde, began crying. Another woman backed away from the stairs, shaking her head. “I can’t go down there.
They
might be down there.”

“I’m sure of it,” Dunleavy said.

The man whose arm he’d grabbed started whimpering. “What’s happening?”

Anderson looked at his boss with concern. “Pete, are you okay?”

The televangelist looked at his right-hand man. “Pete? Oh, no, no, no.” He pulled the Glock from his waistband. “It’s Brother Peter from now on. Even to you, Anderson.” He smiled. “Call me Pete again and see what happens.”

The man stared at the gun.

Peter looked at the others. “It’s the End of Days, children, and only the faithful shall survive the onslaught of Satan’s minions. Only they shall be lifted up in the Rapture.” The words flowed easily, the same kind of rhetoric that had served him so well in his ministry.

No one spoke.

“You must believe in me as you believe in almighty God, and obey my word, for He speaks through me.” They simply stared. He cocked his head and gestured at the door with the pistol. “Or, you could take your chances and go out there, get eaten like little Miss Kentucky.” He had already forgotten her name. It didn’t matter. “Of course if you touch that door, I’ll blow your heart out through your ass.”

With the exception of the two pilots, who quietly stepped away from the door (Peter liked that, liked pragmatic men), the rest of his followers didn’t move. This couldn’t possibly be the man to whom they had pledged themselves, who had baptized them and raised their spirits with his powerful sermons, had lifted their hearts in times of sadness with a gentle touch. Before them now stood a man the media proclaimed was not only a fraud, but an unscrupulous asshole. The media had been right.

Brother Peter gave them all the same angelic smile that romanced the camera and drew in followers worldwide, the smile he used for his book covers, tent revivals, and television interviews. The difference was that now it was a genuine smile, for he was feeling an unexpected inner peace growing within himself. He suddenly realized that this serenity was the understanding that God was more than a scheme used to attain power and wealth. Peter
was
special; God was real and had a plan for him in this new world. A feeling of freedom came with this knowledge, for he now knew that God would forgive anything he said or did. He was also excited, knowing there were more mysteries yet to be revealed.

“I am God’s chosen voice,” Peter said, believing the words for the first time, “His beloved shepherd, and you are my flock. We will gather others unto us. I will watch over you and protect you.” The smile grew. “Now get the fuck down here.”

The reverend trotted down the stairs, not looking back to see if they followed. He knew they would. As for what awaited them underground, he had no fear. It wasn’t just the Glock; that was a mere tool. It was his memories of another time, his vast experience with the tunnels of the Underworld. Creatures of fire and destruction slept there, and Peter Dunleavy knew them well.

Alameda

“We’re going to get stuck,” Bud said as he hit the brakes and ran the van up onto a sidewalk, clipping a plastic real estate flyer box and sending it spinning. Cars were jamming the intersection ahead and he bulled the van around them, taking a right and scraping a fender along the side of a landscaping truck.

Angie gripped the shotgun between her knees and watched out the window. “We need a bunker.”

“We’re a long way from the ranch,” Bud said. He suddenly stomped the brakes, making Angie brace herself against the dashboard as the van shuddered to a stop to avoid a group of people running into the road. They carried luggage and a Playmate cooler, and close behind them a girl of six or seven, arms badly bitten and clothing soaked red, followed in a lunging gallop, mouth hanging open.

Bud punched it once the group was past, and Angie watched in the side mirror as the group tried to jam itself into the doorway of a UPS supply store. The little girl caught a straggler and climbed his back, seizing his head in her hands. Then the scene was gone.

Angie looked forward.

North of Sacramento, the Franks family ranch sprawled across fifty acres deep in the foothills outside Chico, good land with its own water source, private and remote. A sturdy fence ran all the way around the property. Angie’s mother and father lived there full-time, and there were ranch hands to tend the horses and livestock. That was where Dean would be taking Leah, her husband driving the Suburban hard north with their little girl strapped into her car seat in back, a loaded nylon emergency bag on the seat beside her. Dean’s ten-millimeter would be riding on his hip, and a shotgun much like the one she was holding would be in a fast-release dashboard mount on the passenger side. He wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t take chances, and wouldn’t let anyone get between them and safety.

She should have been with them. They had never seemed so far away in her life.

The ranch was more than a house and stables; it was a sanctuary. Her great-grandfather Titus Franks had bought the property in the thirties, and her grandfather Earl had begun the first of many improvements during the fifties when a nuclear war with Russia seemed inevitable. Grandpa had built his first bomb shelter there, and it still stood, though now her mother used it as a vegetable cellar. Her father had carried on the family tradition and built a five-chamber underground concrete dwelling. It had power and ventilation and plumbing, tapped into a well, and was stocked with food and supplies. In addition, because of the nature of the family business, it had enough firepower locked within its rooms to arm a third world country. They weren’t really
preppers
, at least not like some of the silly rednecks featured on that other reality show. But they all understood that the world could be a dangerous place: war, economic collapse, plague, superstorms, civil disorder. . . . If a person had the means—and Angie’s family certainly did—why not take out a little insurance against disaster?
This
type of apocalypse hadn’t been considered, of course, but the ranch could probably weather that as well.

Most people would have thought them a bit mad if they knew, so they kept it a family secret, nobody’s business. To the rest of the world it was merely a Northern California ranch. Dean and Leah would get there, she was confident of that. They might even be there already.

Right. They also might be wandering Sacramento’s streets, a walking dead father and his shuffling corpse toddler, mindless and unknown to one another, drifting apart in search of prey.

Angie bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood, willing the tears not to sting her eyes. No, they had gotten out, and Angie and her uncle Bud would find a way to join them.

The streets were tightening up with more and more traffic, all of it going nowhere, but remaining in its neat lanes as instinctive driver’s habit demanded.
The world is falling apart, and I’ll bet people are still using their turn signals,
Angie thought. Bud, unfettered by driving courtesy, muscled the van around most of it, but they were still slowing. People were everywhere, swarming down sidewalks and across the pavement, carrying children and pets and bags, moving in all directions. Car alarms whooped and sirens came from everywhere, and both uncle and niece tensed each time they heard the sporadic crack of gunfire.

The news on the van’s radio was a confused mess, on-scene reporters trying to describe fires and car wrecks and carnivorous horrors only to be cut off by an urgent bulletin, an official warning for citizens to remain in their homes, just as frequently followed by a different authority instructing people to report to this high school or that stadium for evacuation or medical treatment. Sometimes a report would announce that the aforementioned “safe area” had been compromised, and that people should stay away. There was all manner of speculation about viruses and contagion, most of it vague or outright guesswork. The warning that these animated corpses were both dangerous and infectious, and were to be avoided at all costs, was the only consistent message. “Don’t get bitten,” was the repeated caution.

Shapes were running in the streets, and the dead surged among them. Bitten and torn, hobbling after screaming people, they fell upon the slow and cornered and fed. Angie stared in disbelief as lives were ripped apart before her, scenes of impossible horror flashing by the windows as her uncle Bud struggled to get the van through the increasingly impassable streets. She wanted to help, to do something, but they were gone in seconds, replaced by new nightmares.

She noticed it as Bud drove past. “Stop! Back up, back up!” she exclaimed.

Bud reacted, jamming the brake pedal to the floor and throwing the van in reverse.

“A firehouse,” Angie said, pressing her face against the side window and looking back. “The bays are open and empty. Pull right inside.”

Bud backed up until he was even with a three-story redbrick building, something from the early twentieth century, with two high, open garage doors standing side by side. He drove in on the right side and stopped.

“You get the doors, I’ll cover,” Angie said as she jumped out and locked the shotgun to her shoulder while her uncle moved toward the doors. She swung the muzzle left and right and behind as he found the switch. They rumbled down.

“Power’s still on for now,” he said, his own automatic in his hand. He looked back into the long, empty bays. “We need to make sure we’re alone.”

Angie nodded.

A car horn blared outside the closed bay doors, and they turned toward the narrow horizontal windows to see an eighties-era Cadillac, a well-maintained white classic with lots of chrome. It sat at an angle in the short driveway, and four people were climbing out, the driver an older black man in a blue, vintage bowling shirt wearing a backward Kangol hat. They ran toward the bay roll-ups.

A door between the garage and the firehouse banged open, and a man stumbled out. He wore the blue trousers and shirt of a fireman’s uniform and had a bloody bandage wrapped around his left forearm. The fireman’s skin was an ashy shade, and his pale blue eyes appeared almost frosted. Fresh blood smeared his gasping mouth and stained the front of his shirt, and he groaned as he staggered toward them.

“We saw you!” shouted the Caddy’s driver from outside, banging at the window. “We saw you go in!”

The fireman’s lips peeled back in a snarl, and he reached. Angie unloaded the twelve-gauge at ten feet, the
boom
like a cannon going off in a closet, and hit him center mass. The corpse flew back against a wall, half its chest blown away, shredded organs and ribs exposed. It gnashed its teeth and tried to get to its feet. Bud fired three, four, five rounds, all hitting, all doing nothing but make it jerk a bit. Angie chambered another shell and blew its head off. The fireman’s body slumped and didn’t get back up.

More banging at the door. “Don’t shoot! We ain’t like them!” Faces pressed against the glass. “Open the door, don’t leave us out here! We got a child with us!”

Bud looked at Angie, who hesitated before nodding. He hit the switch and the segmented panels rumbled upward. Angie aimed the shotgun at the newcomers as they ducked in, freezing once they saw her with the big weapon. “Stop. Let me look at you.”

“We ain’t bit, ain’t like them,” the Caddy driver repeated. The other three, a twenty-something black girl and an Asian woman with a little boy who didn’t appear to be hers, shifted nervously in the open garage door as if they had to pee, casting fearful glances over their shoulders.

Angie didn’t see any wounds or blood. “Come in,” she said. Bud had the door rolling down as soon as she said it.

“Thank you, miss,” the Caddy driver said, smiling. He appeared to be in his sixties and had a gold-capped front tooth.

Angie nodded. “We haven’t even checked this place, don’t know what’s in here.” She gestured at the fireman’s body with the barrel of the shotgun. “Wait here while we check, okay?”

The new arrivals nodded, standing close together. The Cadillac driver looked out the window as a man in mechanic’s coveralls, his bottom lip and chin dangling in a red flap, pawed his way along the Caddy’s side, leaving wet, rusty smears. “Just had that washed,” the driver said.

Bud locked the van and it made an electronic chirp as he and his niece surveyed the bay. It ran the length of the building, front to back, and looked like it could hold four trucks, parked behind each other in pairs. Identical garage doors at the back would allow vehicles to pull straight through, and both were down. Racks for hoses and equipment lockers lined both walls of the bay, and a small door opened into a storage room with a big generator and attached fuel tank. The only other exit was the door through which the dead fireman had come.

Something bumped against the front rolling doors.

Angie and Bud walked back to see that the group had moved closer to the van, except for the Caddy driver, who stood at a window, face to face with a dead man. The mechanic was bumping repeatedly against the door, milky eyes searching.

“Yeah, you an ugly motherfucker, all right. Ugly like my sister’s husband!” the Caddy driver said with a short laugh. “And I ain’t gonna let you in no matter how hungry you are.” He turned and smiled at Angie and Bud, the gold cap a sharp contrast to teeth that were so perfectly straight and dazzling white that they had to be dentures or implants. “We’ll be fine. You do what you got to do. We ain’t gonna let them in.”

Angie nudged Bud, and they went into the firehouse to begin their search. It took a half hour, and they found another fireman, this one dead near a tipped-over chair and a big radio set, who’d had his throat torn away along with one side of his face. He was a fresh kill, obviously the victim of the first fireman they’d met. The rest of the building was empty of occupants, living or otherwise, and within those thirty minutes they decided Angie’s instincts had been good. The firehouse would make a decent bunker, at least for a little while. It wasn’t the family compound, but it would do.

When they returned to the first floor they found the dead fireman standing and swaying near the radio. He turned and growled. Angie put him down without hesitation, a single blast to the face.

Other than the two sets of garage doors, they found several other ways into the station. A rear door—metal with an interior crash bar—opened to a small parking lot out back, filled with cars. It was tightly shut and could be opened from the outside only by using a key. A glass door in a front foyer was concerning, but it locked with a thumb-turn latch. Could those things break through a glass door? They decided that if they stayed, they would have to find a way to barricade it. Stairs led to a flat roof, which was empty except for an ashtray can and a couple of lawn chairs, and a fire escape led down from second- and third-floor windows on one side. The ladder was pulled up out of reach from the ground. All the windows on the ground floor were reinforced with crisscrossed wire.

The firehouse had a dormitory room of bunks, toilet and shower facilities, a large kitchen and pantry, a couple of small offices, and the room with the radio. Sporadic voices floated from it, and they both had to resist the urge to stop and listen.

“We can hold here for a while,” said Bud, putting an arm around his niece’s shoulder. “Good pick.”

“We’re not staying long,” she said.

“I know. We’ll get to the compound.”

“That’s right, we will.” Her face was strained, and Bud knew comforting words wouldn’t get her to stop thinking of Dean and Leah. He was worried about them too, worried about his brother and his sister-in-law as well, but knew they were safe in Chico. Angie’s family was on the road and wouldn’t be safe until they were behind the fences of the Franks ranch. He
hoped
they were on the road.

They walked through a long room with folding banquet tables and stacks of chairs. Balloons were tied in clusters, and a big banner at one end read,
HAPPY 50th SCOTT!

“I’m . . . I wish I knew . . .”

Bud gave her shoulder a squeeze. “They’re safe, honey. Count on it.”

She nodded, not believing it and hating herself for it. She should be with them, keeping her family safe. If only the production schedule hadn’t called for the Alameda segment, or if it had been a week later, then they’d all be together.
Angie’s Armory
had been such a whirlwind, an excited fever of fame and money, a chance for her family—now fourth-generation gunsmiths—to really build for the future. Contracts and photo shoots and parties, financial worries evaporated overnight, celebrities to meet . . . it fed her ego as well as their bank account. Now it was like ashes in her mouth, a meaningless pursuit of vanity and greed that had separated her from her daughter and the man she loved at a time when they needed her most.

They heard the electric whine and metallic rattle of a garage door opening.

Bud swore and bolted ahead, Angie right behind him, and they burst into the truck bay to see both front doors still down. At the back, the Cadillac driver stood at the switch, the left door raised three feet, motioning as a trio of people ducked inside, a young woman and two little kids.