Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead (18 page)

The Barrett M82A1 had a range of two thousand yards and pushed its fifty-caliber rounds out with a muzzle velocity of 2,799 feet per second. It was capable of punching through engine blocks and light armored vehicles and even reaching targets hiding behind brick and concrete cinder block.

What it did to the head of a walking corpse could never be called clean but was certainly efficient. There was simply nothing left. The missed head shots—the body hits—were nearly as effective. Any creature within five feet of the edge of the flight deck was blown over the side, sometimes even beyond the safety netting and into the sea.

The Barrett fired with a deep thunder that rolled across the deck, the stock kicking hard into Angie’s right shoulder. It was the last bullet in the ten-round magazine, and she dropped the empty and loaded another with practiced ease. Her eye once more at the PVS-10 day/night optic, she sighted downrange on a target at the extreme far end of the flight deck, a figure in yellow firefighter’s gear with most of the skin torn from its face, watery yellow eyes rolling in their sockets.

The Barrett spoke with the voice of cannons.

The bullet took the sailor in the upper lip, shearing off everything north of that, leaving a lower jaw that sagged open even as the body fell. Angie raised her head from the sight and searched for more targets. She saw only motionless forms lying on the deck, except to the right, where Skye was working.

Skye ticked her sight to the right, squeezed, hit, ticked right again, squeezed, hit. She tracked left to a rotten boy in a jersey, the bullet catching him in the eye. She changed magazines smoothly, snapped the arming handle, fired, hit. A kill. A kill. Shoulder hit. A kill. A kill.

Her targets were primarily emerging from a wide hatch in the face of the superstructure, stumbling out one after another. She could have dropped them right at the hatch opening, where they paused to negotiate the knee knocker, but that would have quickly created a clog and jammed the others inside. So she let them stagger out onto the deck, allowing them to move away ten feet or more before putting them down. She soon clicked on another dry magazine and switched out.

Beside her Angie said, “I’m almost out of fifty-cal. I’m going to use it up and leave this baby right here on the deck.”

Skye paused long enough to give her a thumbs-up.

The Barrett banged out six more rounds, these directed at creatures up on the superstructure’s catwalks. Five were destroyed, a sixth blown in half. Angie scuttled away from the empty weapon and took up her Israeli assault rifle, adding her fire to her partner’s. She didn’t let the dead clear the hatch in the superstructure before dropping them, however, and before Skye could shout a warning, the opening was effectively clogged. A few pale arms reached through the tangle of bodies, clutching at air.

Skye made a disgusted noise and rose to her knees, shaking her head. Before she could deliver an edged comment, the hovering headache spike drove deeply, not through the top of her head, but through her milky, blind eye. The pain was searing and Skye screamed, dropping her rifle and clapping both hands to her face as she fell over, curling into a shaking, fetal ball.

Angie was suddenly afraid she was having a seizure. “Skye! Skye, what is it?”

The girl rolled away from her, one pressing hand shaking with palsy.

Angie wanted to put a hand on the girl, to calm and reassure her, but she thought it might make her scream louder. The girl shuddered and wailed, wrapping her arms around her head and rocking back and forth. Angie watched helplessly, and for the first time, perhaps now that they were out in the light, she noticed Skye’s skin. It was gray, as if the pigment were steadily leaching out of it.

She did the only thing she could think of that would help, and that was to crouch beside the young woman, rifle held ready and standing watch, hoping the episode would quickly pass. It took nearly forty-five minutes, during which time Skye’s screams turned to whimpers, but the rocking and shaking continued. Angie fired her rifle four different times when dead sailors managed to find their way up to the deck from the catwalks below the edge, perhaps drawn by the sound of whimpering prey. She also took a shot at an officer up on the highest catwalk of the superstructure, missing, the bullet dinging off a handrail. The corpse stumbled out of sight through a hatchway before she could fire again, not to evade gunfire, but by chance. It did not reappear.

When Skye was finally well enough to sit cross-legged on the deck, head down and not speaking, Angie handed her a bottled water and let her be, still keeping watch. It was another ten minutes before the younger woman spoke.

“Sorry about that,” she croaked.

“No worries,” said Angie, “I needed the break. She smiled at her young partner, but didn’t get one in return. Instead, Skye dug into a breast pocket and came out with a handful of Excedrin, which she chewed up dry.

“That’s not good for your stomach,” Angie said, realizing she sounded much like her own mother.

Skye held up a trembling left hand for a moment, and then quickly clamped onto it with the other. “Got bigger problems.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“Sure,” said Skye, “let’s just lie on the beach and read a book.”

Angie shook her head, but grinned. “The virus is turning you into a smartass. I think I liked you better as the serious, silent type.”

The corner of Skye’s mouth twitched up in what might have been a smile. “Let’s go.” She rose unsteadily and inserted a fresh magazine, her shoulders hunched against a headache that had not fully abated. Angie led, heading toward the superstructure.

It really was like an eight-story steel building, a haze-gray mass rising from the flight deck with slanted windows high above and smooth metal walls between. Enormous white stenciled letters and numbers painted on the flight deck side proclaimed
CVN-68
. Up closer, squadron logos and what must have been representations of campaign ribbons were painted beneath the ship’s designation, reminders of the many actions in which
Nimitz
had participated.

Just in front of the superstructure was a low garage, its closed door painted with a cartoon Tasmanian devil in a fire helmet and carrying an axe. Above it was the legend
Fighting 68th
, and beneath the character,
Home of the World’s Smallest Fire Truck
.

The two women moved carefully among the bodies, muzzles pointed down in the event one of them wasn’t quite finished, and then made their way to a chest-high pile of dead zombies effectively choking off what appeared to be the only access to the tower. Snarling, pale faces could be seen in the shadows beyond the pile, and Skye started to raise her rifle. Before the stock reached her shoulder she gasped and let it swing back down as she pressed a hand to the side of her head.

“I’ve got it,” said Angie, the Galil coming up. Half a dozen quick reports later, the faces and reaching arms disappeared, but additional moans could be heard from deeper within. Angie caught movement at her left peripheral, on Skye’s blind side, and turned to see an African American sailor in blackened medical scrubs coming around the corner of the superstructure. His skin pigment had all but vanished, leaving him looking albino, and his hands curled into claws as he focused on the women and broke into a gallop.

Angie dropped him with the Galil and tugged on Skye’s sleeve. “C’mon, keep moving.” Upon seeing the man in scrubs, the former reality show star realized that a flight deck would not be the assigned station for someone dressed like that, and so the creature must have come from someplace else, likely from below, but possibly the superstructure. As they moved around the corner, Angie leading with her gun barrel and Skye following, still massaging her head, they found a massive drop-off to the left leading not to the sea but down the open shaft of an aircraft elevator. About thirty feet directly ahead, the deck ended with the bay beyond, Alameda seeming close enough to touch. The opening for another stairway down to the starboard catwalk was in front of them. That had to be where Scrub Zombie had come from, Angie thought.

And then there was the ladder.

The forward side of the superstructure rose in a flat gray wall for five or six stories until it reached the lowest of the high catwalks. Affixed to the center of the wall, climbing straight up, was a narrow, steel-rung ladder. Angie eyed the height and let out a little laugh. “Oh, what the hell.”

Skye squinted at her partner, and then her good eye tracked upward. “Sure,” she said, “why not?”

Angie looked at the trembling hand, at a girl fighting to be strong. “Are you sure you can handle it, kid? Are you tough enough?” She threw the girl a wink.

Skye snorted and slung her rifle, heading for the ladder. “You go look for a wheelchair ramp.”

“Big talk,” said Angie, following her up the rungs. “Hey, maybe we should get you an eye patch. You’ve already got the ship, you could be a real pirate.”

Skye let out a gravelly laugh. “Shiver me timbers.”

Angie laughed. “Not quite.”

Together they climbed, a pair of giggling killers.

Lavender skies announced that the sun was well below the horizon, and gathering clouds the color of a spreading bruise warned of potential rain. The breeze coming off the bay was cool, making a row of pennants snap along a line running from the top of the bridge up to a radar mast. Other than the fluttering sound, it was quiet.

Maya stood on a high catwalk near the bridge of a World War II destroyer tied up alongside the NAS Alameda pier, directly opposite the
Hornet
. To her right was the seaplane lagoon with the base beyond, and to the north lurked the long silhouette of the
Nimitz
, half a mile out.

The young woman stood alone with a bolt-action hunting rifle slung over a shoulder, peering at the aircraft carrier through a pair of binoculars. She thought she had seen the brief flashes of rifle fire out there, but she wasn’t sure and saw nothing now. Maya wondered if shots could be heard at this distance and, not for the first time, was frustrated at the silent world in which she lived. The snapping pennants above were nothing more than soundless movement.

She wasn’t up here as a lookout as she had no way to cry out an alarm, but she could no longer stay down on the pier with the other refugees, huddled among the supplies as they speculated about what was taking place out on the carrier. Waiting and not knowing was worse than facing the dead. Besides, there was another lookout posted on the stern of the frigate tied up behind this ship, close to the inland end of the pier and the access road leading here. They had a radio and a voice, a useful person.

Maya tried every day not to feel sorry for herself because of her handicap, and most days she succeeded. Her mood was black right now, though, and that made it easy to entertain self-pity. What made it worse was that she had only herself to blame.

Where was Evan at this moment? Was he even alive? He had gone off with the assault group knowing she was angry with him, she had made sure of that, refusing to even give him a hug. And why? Because he insisted she stay to look after her brothers and sisters and the others. To keep her out of harm’s way. It hadn’t mattered that her father felt the same way. Maya had put it all on Evan, blaming him for being a typical man trying to keep the little woman out of the way, for implying that she wasn’t up to the task. She had survived on the road just fine before he came along, so who was he to push her around like that? She refused to think he had done it out of love, and so she acted like a petulant child, hurting him just before he left to face what could turn out to be his own death.

Maya hated herself for what she had done, and she started to cry again. It seemed all she did anymore was cry: for her mother, her uncle, for her father saddled with so much grief and responsibility. Now for herself, and the man she loved.

Come back to me,
she begged, the binoculars crawling over the aircraft carrier. She wanted to see movement, any sign of life that would give her hope. There was nothing, and she lowered the glasses and wiped at her eyes.

Down on the pier, everyone was settling in for the night, clearing the remains of a meal and tucking children into sleeping bags, telling them they were safe and that everything would be okay. Telling the lie every parent knew how to deliver with a confident expression and a gentle smile.

At the edge of the group, Sophia and Vladimir were sitting cross-legged next to the little orphan named Ben, who sat wrapped in a wad of sleeping bag as if he were a baby bird in a nest. The Russian pilot had produced a small toy helicopter from somewhere and given it to the boy, who flew it with a still-chubby hand, entranced by the spinning plastic blades. With the binoculars Maya could see Vladimir’s face split in a homely smile and didn’t fail to notice that Sophia was less interested in the boy’s play and more occupied with sneaking glances at the helicopter pilot and sitting as close to him as possible.

Her heart ached and returned to Evan.

Wherever he was, was he thinking of her? Or had she been so cold as to change the way he felt about her? Her mother had told her men could be that way, that a man in love would endure an unthinkable amount of pain, forgiving nearly anything, but that he could also, without warning, come to a point where he simply switched off. Their hearts turned hard all of a sudden, Faith had warned, and that would be the end of it.

“Be careful, Maya,” her mother had said years ago, after having her own sharp-tongued exchange with Calvin. Her eyes had looked concerned. “Men put up with our moods, with our casual cruelties, but don’t think for a second that they ever forget a single hard word. They love us, they’ll die for us, but they remember.”

The spat between Faith and Calvin had been merely a marital squall, blowing in hard and rainy and blowing back out again just as fast, leaving sunshine in its wake. But Maya never forgot what her mother had said.

Did I do that to Evan?
she wondered. No, she wouldn’t entertain that possibility, even if it could be true. It was the kind of pointless thinking that people gnawed at before jumping from high places. He was with her father, and they were fighting to stay alive and create a refuge for the people on Alameda. He was safe, but too busy to be hurting over a spat. She decided that would be her answer every time she began to doubt and worry. It would see her through.

Maya panned the binoculars out across the old naval base beyond the lagoon. Being this high up on the vintage warship allowed an impressive view of the streets and airfield, of the vacant buildings and overgrown parade ground and sports fields. She swallowed hard and her heart began to thump faster. There were so
many
of them now, the streets and worn, grassy areas crowded with slow-moving figures. They seemed to drift without purpose, wandering in all directions once they reached the base, but more continued to stream in like cattle in a slow-motion stampede, focused on a single direction, then drifting once they arrived. They were all in a hurry to get nowhere.

She checked the road that ran beside the seaplane lagoon and led to the pier. Aside from a couple of strays, it was empty. Loners could be easily dispatched hand-to-hand without alerting the mob. But there were thousands on the base now, maybe tens of thousands, and if they ever discovered that there was prey trapped out on this pier . . .

Hurry, Evan,
she thought.
Come back for us.

And then the warship began to tremble beneath her.

•   •   •

I
t was a magnitude 5.5 earthquake and lasted a total of eight seconds. It was moderate by earthquake standards—the San Francisco quake of 1989 was a devastating 6.9—but it nonetheless demonstrated a seismic yield equal to 2.7 kilotons of TNT, the equivalent of the energy expended during the Oklahoma City bombing.

The dead felt it coming a full three seconds in advance, and wherever they were within two hundred miles of Oakland, no matter what they were doing, they ceased all activity except to turn and face the epicenter, remaining in that pose throughout the eight seconds of shaking.

Back when there had been scientists to debate the topic, sensitivity to earthquakes had been a controversial subject, made even more so when the suggestion was made that not only animals, but some humans exhibited out-of-character emotional and physical behavior in advance of tremors. The general public had long come to accept as fact that animals often displayed sensitivity prior to earthquakes: chickens clustered together and grew hysterical, mice experienced convulsions, pigs bit at one another’s tails, and fish jumped out of the water. There was a little science that supported these actions, claims of
piezoelectricity
—electric charges that accumulated in solid material in response to mechanical stress—or chemical changes in groundwater. Evidence, however, was anecdotal and not much studied. Most considered it pseudoscience.

Some humans had publicly proclaimed their sensitivity, and in the days and hours leading up to an earthquake they had complained of dizziness, ringing in the ears, headaches, and anxiety. These claims of forecasting were often determined to be coincidence or even outright fabrications, but proved accurate (and inexplicable) just often enough to make believers out of some people. Within the scientific community, however, a scientist professing any formal belief in human sensitivity to earthquakes ran the risk of ridicule and professional disregard at best, and at worst, denial of research grants.

The dead were sensitive. All of them.

Not only did they sense impending earthquakes, they were able to determine the direction and approximate location of the epicenter. They were drawn to it. Now the dead from over a hundred miles away in all directions were slowly being drawn to a point where, on the surface, a pair of cracked asphalt streets intersected in the middle of the deserted naval air station.

As before, it was the friction of the Hayward Fault that sent shocks out in a wide, growing circle.

•   •   •

W
ithin San Francisco, the quake had assorted effects. In most places a few windows cracked and some car alarms went off, but other areas experienced more damage. In almost every case, the eyes witnessing the events were dead and uncomprehending, and the bodies in which they resided all faced the same direction.

Near Alamo Square, backdropped by downtown skyscrapers, the row of escalating Victorian houses known as the Painted Ladies—much photographed and appearing in numerous films and television programs—lost two of their number to the shaking. The Ladies first leaned, hung at an odd angle for a moment, and then toppled in an explosion of wood, glass, and shingles. Two zombies standing on a sidewalk were buried in the collapse.

At the Palace of Fine Arts, a dozen corpses dressed as joggers stood and faced east on the bottom of the lagoon near the center’s beautiful rotunda. The quake knocked down a row of Greek-style colonnades not far from the lagoon, marble detonating like bombs on impact. The remnants of a grade school field trip, a dozen third-graders all dressed in the same bright-green T-shirts with their name on a laminated card hung around their necks and wearing an assortment of cartoon character backpacks, stood on an adjacent brick path. They were peppered with marble fragments that tore into flesh and would have sent them screaming to the emergency room not so long ago. Now they didn’t even notice.

The Castro had already burned. The heart of San Francisco’s gay community was a neighborhood of hilly avenues and Victorian buildings, much of it charred and skeletal. The dead rode out the quake standing and shaking in streets filled with discarded bicycles and backpacks, abandoned cars and sidewalk sandwich boards advertising small shops and cafés. One zombie, a fifty-year-old drag queen with a crooked blond wig, torn sundress, and gladiator sandals, stood near a brick wall covered in posters shouting about clubs and political agendas, one of her legs fractured with the foot twisted nearly backward. The heavy makeup clumping on what remained of her face made her appear especially ghastly. Already off balance because of the leg, the creature fell to the pavement when the quake began. Groaning, the drag queen attempted to rise just as a five-hundred-pound piece of masonry from a third-floor ledge broke free and crushed her into the sidewalk.

Haight-Ashbury suffered more than some areas, in part because of uncontrolled fires that had weakened structures, and also because many had not been that well cared for anyway. The neighborhood famous for its 1967 Summer of Love, hippies, psychedelic rockers, and, more recently, street festivals, cafés, and eclectic shops, had lost entire blocks. Rows of brightly painted apartments resting atop bookstores and boutiques simply tumbled out into the streets, burying cars and the walking dead alike. Most drifters survived the impact of falling brick but were too uncoordinated to pull themselves free of the rubble once it was over, and their fellow corpses wandered past the struggling arms and legs, incapable of helping or even realizing that they should.

The fires that swept through the downtown section of the city had been spectacular, the intense flames weakening some skyscrapers and causing others to tip over like rotten trees. The eight-second tremor shook great sheets of glass from high windows, and several-hundred-pound guillotines crashed down from on high, detonating in explosions of deadly pixie dust or cutting immobile corpses completely in half. The quake finished off the worst of the leaning towers, filling the streets with mountains of debris and snarls of bent steel.

Near Fisherman’s Wharf, zombies that had been piled up against chain-link fences, moaning at the clusters of barking sea lions out on old piers, stood in packed groups facing east, all shuddering as one. When the quake ended, they returned to their incessant pushing, only to find that the tremor had weakened the fence’s footings. As the chain link gave way, several hundred bodies tumbled into the cold waters, reaching out to the distant animals. Within minutes the surface was split by dozens of dorsal fins, sharks drawn in from the Pacific that had been circling the aging docks, now breaking away in a feeding frenzy among the sinking bodies. The sea lions watched, huddled closer together, and stayed out of the water.

At Pier 39, those who had once flocked here for chowder in bread bowls and tickets to Alcatraz now tottered off their feet and rolled on the ground for a while, a few entangled with fallen canopies or cut by broken glass, but none perished. Belowground was a different story. Within the three hundred feet of nearby aquarium tunnels, dead tourists, guides, and maintenance workers stood in the shaking darkness, their eastern focus not even pulled away by the loud cracking coming from the thick glass offering views of what lived beneath the bay’s surface. Several sharks cruised past, and in the murky distance a herd of corpses stumbled slowly over slime-coated rocks.

When the observation windows imploded like baritone grenades, the bay made such a violent entry that bodies were smashed against the far concrete wall. The dead didn’t even register surprise.

Out on the most central portion of the Golden Gate Bridge, the mindless dead stood staring at the bay amid a river of burned automobiles. At their center was the beige mass of a silent M1 main battle tank. The bridge had survived countless quakes over the decades of its existence, but this time the steel supports beneath a fifty-foot section of reinforced concrete gave way, and that section of road dropped into the waters below. A dozen cars, two dozen zombies, and the tank plunged silently after it.