Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) (9 page)

“Thank you!” the woman exclaimed, hugging the Caddy driver as he grinned and lowered the door. She looked at the others, holding the kids close, a pair of girls five or six. “They were just wandering out there, crying. They’re not mine. I thought we were going to . . .” She trailed off.

The girls stayed close together, wiping at their eyes. “Where’s Mommy?” one said.

“I saw them in the parking lot,” the Caddy driver said, “hiding between cars. Couldn’t let them stay out there.”

Bud Franks moved to the narrow windows and looked out. A pair of corpses were walking slowly between the cars. The Cadillac man had saved three lives, but Bud realized they were going to have to come to some kind of understanding about opening doors. Angie knelt in front of the little girls and spoke quietly with them, and her uncle eyed the older man in the Kangol hat. He stuck out a hand. “Bud Franks.”

“People call me Maxie,” the Caddy driver said. His handshake was firm and dry.

The others introduced themselves. The Asian woman was Margaret Chu, and the boy with her was Denny. She had pulled him away from where two ghouls were eating someone with long hair, while the boy stood by screaming,
“Stephanie!”
The young black girl was Tanya, and the woman with the two girls was Sophia Tanner, a real estate agent. The girls she had rescued were apparently sisters, who didn’t give their names and hadn’t spoken since one of them asked about their mommy.

“I’m going to get everyone settled,” Angie said, gathering the new arrivals and herding them into the main firehouse, leaving Bud and Maxie in the bay.

“For now,” said Bud, “let’s at least agree not to open any more outside doors unless we have some weapons ready, okay?”

Maxie gave him a gold-capped grin and lifted his bowling shirt, revealing the butt of a silver revolver shoved in his waistband. “Got that covered already.”

Bud wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse. His cop’s eye inspected the man, wondering,
Felon?
Maxie lit a cigarette, sent a cloud at the ceiling, and looked right back at Bud. “Y’all mind if I smoke?” Maxie asked.

Outside, something was now thumping against the rear garage doors.

Marin County

Zimmerman, the heavy correctional officer and their only guardian, had turned on a TV in the corner of the big classroom. He sat in a chair staring at it, the shotgun on the table beside him, massaging his chest as news images of the impossible rolled across the screen.

There were fires, ambulances lined up outside emergency room entrances, acres of traffic jams and devastating car wrecks, scenes of uncontrolled looting, roadblocks where tanks stood alongside police cars, images of people in yellow biohazard suits putting quarantine notices on doors and loading body bags onto flatbed trucks. There were boulevards packed with refugees on foot, pulling luggage and pushing strollers and shopping carts loaded with possessions. Other streets were vacant, littered with discarded bags and coolers, abandoned bicycles, prowled by stray dogs. Bodies fell from skyscrapers. There were scenes of boats, all shapes and sizes, swarming across the San Francisco Bay and heading out to sea, and high-altitude footage shot from a helicopter of Oakland International Airport awash in a sea of flames centered on the wreckage of a Lufthansa jumbo jet. People wore painter’s masks and latex gloves. Soldiers were seen in full chemical gear, looking like aliens with goggled faces. Talking heads droned about infection and transmission, arguing that the plague was passed on by the bite, others disagreeing, claiming the true threat was death by any cause. Politicians spoke of calm and promised an effective response.

The dead were everywhere, filling the streets and hunting down the living. Troops and cops fired at them, military helicopters gunned them down from above, and the cannons of armored vehicles smashed buildings and abandoned cars. They kept coming.

The CO repeatedly tried his cell phone, got no answer each time, and grew increasingly flushed and agitated. He would slap the device down on the table, only to pick it up a moment later and try again. Eight men in orange jumpsuits, handcuffed to a wall, sat quietly and watched. The radio in the other room was now emitting only static. Carney watched the officer, not liking the way he rubbed at his chest.

“CO, you okay?” Carney called.

The officer ignored him. Once Carney had broken the silence, the others joined in.

“Hey, CO, I gotta take a piss.”

“CO, is this shit for real?”

“When we gonna eat, man?”

“Hey, CO, what’s going on at the Q?”

“I wanna call my lawyer.”

“Can you turn on TMZ?”

Zimmerman didn’t even look back. He tried his cell phone again, slammed it to the table, muttering something they couldn’t hear. Then he stood, took a few steps and froze, grabbing at his chest, his face a grimace. He crashed to the floor.

The inmates exploded, shouting, jerking at their handcuffs, hurling questions and obscenities at the fallen man. TC looked at his cellmate, and Carney shook his head slowly. “Stay cool.”

The officer did not respond to any of the shouting, didn’t even move, and across the room Carney could see a small pool of blood where the man’s face had hit the floor.
Dead,
he thought,
and we’re chained to this bar.
At the other end of the row, two inmates, one black and one white, began arguing, shoving one another and making threats, their voices rising.

On-screen, the image shifted to show troops setting up medical tents in a Kmart parking lot. Then it cut to a split screen of a man in a lab coat talking, while on the other side computer graphics displayed microscopic particles bumping together and consuming one another. The president came on, calling for order and assuring everyone that the government had the crisis under control.

The arguing inmates were about to come to blows when the CO climbed slowly to his feet across the room. There was silence then, broken only by the scuff of the man’s boots on the tile floor. He walked a few steps in one direction and stopped, then turned and shuffled back, lifting his head and moving it in short jerks. He faced a wall and stood there with his arms at his sides.

“Damn, CO,” called an inmate, “you went down hard, man.”

The officer turned, revealing a nose crooked from where it had broken against the floor, his skin pale and his eyes filmed over with a creamy glaze. His head twitched. He looked like the things they were seeing on TV.

When the CO started around the table and began moving toward the bench, the inmates panicked. They yelled and tugged at their handcuffs, pulling at the rail. Then the CO was on them, and with a snarl he took a bite out of an inmate’s arm, the black guy at the far end who had been arguing. The man screamed and tried to punch at him, but the CO clawed for a better grip, biting again, ripping away an ear.

The man beside him pulled away, pressing against the next man in line, straining to get as far away from his handcuff as he could. Leaving the black inmate shrieking and holding the bloody tear where his ear had been, the CO went for the next man in line, seizing the extended arm and biting deep. Everyone was screaming, except for Carney.

“Hey, fuckface!” He stood, hopping up and down with a rattle of chain. “Fuckface, over here!”

The CO tore at his victim’s arm, crunching on bone, flesh parting as his fingers ripped at tendons and muscles. He growled deep in his throat, and his prey’s eyes rolled up as he passed out.

“Carney, what are you doing, man?” TC asked.

Carney ignored his cellmate, pulled off one of his canvas slip-on shoes, and threw it at the corpse. It hit the CO in the side of the head, and he pulled away from the arm to look. “That’s right, fuckface, over here! C’mon, over here, come get me!”

“What the fuck?” shouted TC. “Don’t bring him over here!”

“Shut up and be ready.” Carney kept yelling and jumping, and the CO started toward him, moving past the other inmates as they cringed away and tucked into balls. “Keep coming, keep coming . . .” He glanced down at TC. “Trip him when he goes by.”

The dead CO lunged for Carney, and TC’s leg shot out. The thing stumbled, and as it fell forward Carney leaped back. It hit the floor face first again, snarling, but before it could start back up, Carney had slipped off his other shoe and was jumping with both feet, coming down on the back of its head with his heels. TC was on his feet at once and began stomping too, an animal growl of his own coming through clenched teeth. They kept at it, slipping in blood and pulling themselves up, landing blows with their feet until they heard the crunch of bone, and then kept at it still. After two minutes the uniformed body was motionless, its head a flattened mess.

The inmates cheered. Carney used his feet to pull the body close, then stretched an arm and unclipped the keys from its belt. A few minutes later he and TC were free of their cuffs, their waist and leg restraints in a pile next to the body.

“Hard-core, man!” The inmate next to TC lifted his handcuffed wrist. “Me next.”

Carney shoved the keys in his jumpsuit pocket and dragged the corpse away from the bench, searching it. TC retrieved the shotgun. The other inmates shouted demands, and the maimed man at the far end wailed to be taken to a hospital. TC cradled the shotgun and grinned at them. Carney examined the diagram of the prison and surrounding area, finding the facility where they were being held in a box in the lower right corner.

“Let’s go,” he said.

TC motioned with the shotgun. “What about these guys?”

“Not our problem.” Carney left the room. TC grinned at the cuffed and screaming inmates again, then followed.

The building had a locker room next to a weightlifting gym, and here they swapped their orange jumpsuits for the black ones worn by San Quentin’s tactical officers. Bloody feet were wiped down and soon wore black combat boots. They found some bottled water and a few granola bars, and Carney discovered a heavy folding knife, which he slipped into a pocket. TC kept the shotgun close and stopped often to listen in case the other COs returned. He had no intention of returning to his cell.

A sound that was part roaring and part screaming floated through the building, and when they went to the classroom door to look, TC poked the barrel of the shotgun through first. On the bench, the two inmates who had been mauled by the CO had turned. The one without an ear moaned and strained against his handcuff, as the one beside him with the mangled arm fed upon the inmate next over. The man’s belly had been torn open and pulled out, and he was slumped with his head back, dead eyes staring at the ceiling.

As they watched, this corpse suddenly twitched, and the head came up slowly. The other creature stopped feeding at once and tried to reach for the next inmate, beyond his newly risen brother.

Dominoes, Carney thought, looking at the remaining men in orange. They pleaded, prayed, babbled, tried to pull away. Carney felt nothing for them and wasn’t about to release them. They were killers and animals, not to be trusted. He trusted only TC, and only so far. Carney watched the slaughter a bit longer, though, learning.

TC nudged his friend. “Let’s boogie. You got the CO’s keys, right? That’s got to be his Taurus in the parking lot.”

“Yeah, but I want to check something first,” Carney said.

TC followed him across the room and out into the sunlight. “We got wheels and a piece, man. What else do we need?”

Carney stopped, rested a hand on his cellmate’s big shoulder, and pointed. Two people were standing at the chain-link gate to the facility, an older man in torn overalls and a teenage girl in a bloody tank top. As they watched, a black woman in a floral-print housecoat shuffled up to the gate, tugging on the fence.

“Things are different now, TC. There’s more to worry about than cops. You get that?”

TC looked at the corpses rattling the fence, thinking about what they had seen on TV and on the bench inside. “It’s the end of the world, man,” he said, smiling. “No more rules.”

Carney shook his head. “Wrong. The rules are just different, and if you break them, you die.” He pointed. “Or worse.”

The corpses moaned in agitation.

“I need you to listen to me, and do what I tell you.”

The younger man saw another corpse, this one in bloody pajamas and bare feet, make its way from the road to join the others at the gate. “Those COs aren’t coming back, are they?”

Carney watched the pajama corpse grab the chain link and shake it. “I don’t know, but stay ready. I think they’ve got bigger problems, though.” He looked in the direction of the prison, where the thickening smoke still climbed into the air. “If they’re even still alive.”

They watched the corpses for a while. “What now?” asked TC.

Carney led them to the third cinder-block building, using the dead CO’s keys to get inside. He found what he’d expected, and the keys opened that as well: the armory. Inside was gear the tactical officers used for both training and actual crises, and more weapons than he could count. The fact that it was untouched only confirmed his suspicions about San Quentin, that it had gone down too fast for an organized response. The armory was a gift. What they found next exceeded his wildest hopes.

It sat in a garage near the armory, a huge, bright blue armored truck with
CALIFORNIA D.O.C.
stenciled on the side. Carney ran his fingertips across the metal, over the letters. “What’s up, Doc?” he whispered, his tone reverent. It was a Bearcat, an armored vehicle used by law enforcement during riots, a monster on four big, hardened, off-road tires, with armored glass viewports, a tank-style hatch in the roof, and a ballistic windshield covered in steel mesh. Double doors at the rear gave access to a compartment where a dozen men in full riot gear could sit across from each other on benches.

“It’s a nasty mother,” said TC, “but what about the Ford? This thing’s going to draw attention.”

“I don’t think that matters anymore,” said Carney. To him the Bearcat was more than freedom. In the world he had seen on TV, it meant survival. “Let’s get to work.”

The Bearcat had a full tank of diesel. They spent an hour loading it with gear, weapons, and ammunition, and they each took the time to pull on a full set of cell extraction body armor. Carney reminded his cellmate of how the things killed, and so they both donned black, heavy plastic shin, knee, and forearm guards. They finished with mesh-reinforced biteproof gloves, a standard in America’s prisons, where inmates often chose that method to assault officers.

They broke open a pair of vending machines and emptied them of soda, bottled water, and snacks. TC left for a few minutes, then returned to report that all six men on the bench had turned.

By the time the Bearcat rolled into the afternoon sunlight, Carney at the wheel (it took some adjusting, since he hadn’t driven in seventeen years and never something this big), nearly twenty of the walking dead were gathered at the gate. Three of them wore orange San Quentin jumpsuits, and that answered any questions about the prison’s fate. Carney pictured thousands of the dead wandering the cement halls and tiers, drifting through the exercise yards and across the manicured lawns of the administration buildings. COs would be among them, their adversarial role now moot in this new reality.

Carney hit the gate at forty miles per hour, blowing it open and sending bodies flying or crunching under the big tires. The massive steel push bar on the front of the Bearcat handled it easily, and after a short drag the gate fell away and they were rolling. When they reached the main road and turned left, away from the prison, they saw what Carney already knew: corpses in orange shuffling over the asphalt. The Bearcat drove over them.

Soon they were at the entrance to the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and what was left of the highway patrol roadblock. A couple of cruisers sat with their rooftop lights flashing, a yellow sawhorse standing between them. The outbound, northwest lanes were completely blocked with stalled traffic, car doors standing open, but the lanes heading toward the urban sprawl were clear. Bodies moved sluggishly among the vehicles, and near the roadblock a corpse in a highway patrol uniform walked to the armored truck and beat its fists against TC’s door. Out over the bay, a pair of fighter jets streaked by, wings flashing in the sun as they banked and headed south.