Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  The Humvee came to a smooth stop, and the call of “Security out” had doors opening. Everyone got out except the driver and the man in the turret. Dreadlock man tried to follow, but the corporal in the driver’s seat looked back. “Stay put.”

  The man glared at the corporal and then sat back, sighing dramatically. “Ain’t this some pretty shit.” Skye decided she didn’t like him. She didn’t know why.

  Out on the pavement, PFC Taylor stood next to his sergeant. The intersection was free of vehicles, but they quickly saw that an accident up ahead had backed up cars behind it. Doors stood open, the vehicles abandoned. Somewhere beyond them something burned, making a column of dark smoke. The side streets held only cars parked along the curbs.

  “Morning rush,” said Taylor. “There should be more cars in the streets.”

  The sergeant nodded. “Yeah, but other places are jammed so tight you can barely walk. Why should any of it make sense?”

  “Copy that,” said Taylor.

  Three blocks to their right, an open-topped military truck with six wheels and a canvas cover – a “six-by” – sat in an intersection of its own, men in camouflage moving around it.

  “That’s First Platoon. They’re setting up blocking positions.”

  Taylor looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Blocking positions? Does the brass think these things are going to mount some sort of offensive? They’re scattered and completely disorganized.”

  “Do you see any stars on me, Taylor? I don’t know what the fuck they think. Our orders are to hold here and watch for civilians until we get instructions.” He elbowed the PFC. “But the next time the generals sit me down and ask me how to run their wars, I’ll be sure to voice your concerns.”

  “Good. Don’t forget.” Taylor’s eyes crawled over parked cars and doorways, then up to rooftops. They were now in a more commercial part of Berkeley, an older neighborhood with ground floor shops and apartments above. “What do we do with civvies if we find them? We’re full up.”

  Postman pointed towards the green truck. “We send ‘em down to First Platoon.”

  Taylor used his rifle scope to look down that way. Lots of doorways and alleys, plenty of places for the dead to hide. Those three blocks would be a long walk. “We going to send these guys down there?”

  The sergeant glanced at the Hummer, then at the distance to first platoon. “Not just yet. Let’s see what happens.”

  The radio summoned Sgt. Postman back to the vehicle, because they were only a Guard unit and weren’t equipped with the personal headset and throat mic radios issued to regular units and troops overseas. He returned a couple minutes later and moved around to the hood, snapping his fingers to get his squad’s attention. “That was Sgt. Rodriguez. Second Platoon is engaged to the east.” They all glanced to their rear, as if expecting to see soldiers fighting. “He says a headshot will put them down.”

  In the turret, Private Jay Hayman nodded.

  “So that’s good and bad,” said Postman. “You’re going to have to rely on aimed, single shots, so shooting on the move is going to be pointless. It will conserve ammo, though.” Pvt. Hayman made a sour face. His big, lethal toy was no longer of much use. Machineguns were not precision weapons. He reached down and took his rifle from Skye’s hand, then started turning in a slow circle, looking for trouble.

  “Rules of engagement remain the same. Fire on a freak only if you’re certain it’s not a wounded person walking slowly.”

  “They got to get too close for that!” said the soldier on the opposite side of the vehicle.

  “You’ll just have to work it out, Simpkins.” The sergeant turned to cover his own sector.

  Taylor watched an empty street. And why was that, he wondered? All the streets of Berkeley had at least a few freaks wandering around. Had this neighborhood been evacuated already? He doubted it. The one civilian evacuation plan he had heard of had been a clusterfuck that quickly turned into a buffet for the walking dead.

  The radio squawked with requests for situation reports and several demands for medical airlift. One panicked call for an artillery fire mission made them all glance at one another. A distant crackle of gunfire drifted on the air, along with a far-off siren and the thump of rotor blades. It was coming from behind them, where Second Platoon was supposed to be. Sgt. Postman moved closer to listen to the radio, as Taylor caught movement at the edge of his vision. He snapped the rifle up and tracked the scope in that direction, moving it over cars, over sidewalks, even up across second and third story windows.

  He saw curtains and blinds moving, pawing hands and dead faces pressed against the glass. Taylor shuddered. How many were trapped inside these buildings? How many were still alive, afraid to leave the safety of their locked apartments? What would happen to them? So many, so fast… His National Guard unit in Richmond had been mobilized at four a.m. this morning, and after a quick briefing at the armory, where they drew their weapons and gear and learned the rules of engagement, they were rolling. Information was sketchy and incomplete, most of it beyond believing, but here it was all around them. They had been told that the freaks (no one had come up with a catchy name for them yet, but Taylor had faith in his military brethren) were highly contagious, and transmitted through biting. Those killed by the bites arose as the walking dead, generally slow-moving but relentless. There was some talk about a fever, and speculation that death in any form, bite or otherwise, was playing some role in all this. Their company commander’s brilliant advice? “Don’t get bitten.”

  Most of the soldiers he knew believed that it had been quietly brewing for days, the numbers of the dead steadily increasing, until it began to spill into the streets on a large scale. Civilian police were being overrun, and the few, scattered military units in the area were overwhelmed. Those with internet access stated that it was everywhere. Taylor heard a captain outside the armory speaking softly with another officer, saying the situation had already passed the point of control.

  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 over a dozen, all of them torn up, and they followed the old man into the street. He shuffled on towards 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!” yelled Hayman, up in 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.

  “Motherfuckers!” 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, “Headshots, 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 a
pproaching 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 side-stepping gallop, arms flailing.

  “Action left!” The corporal who drove the Humvee called out and stepped from the vehicle, 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.

  Inside the Hummer, Dreadlock 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, Dreadlock jumped out of the vehicle. Skye saw him run to the right, towards the rear 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, towards a scattering of lurching figures. They jerked towards him all at the same time and started to move faster. Skye was reminded of the way schools of fish all changed direction at once. Dreadlock 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. She ran to the rear as Dreadlock had done, 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 the corporal 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 which 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 ribcage.

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

  EIGHT

  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, had found it this way. Photos of beautiful African American and Spanish 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 burnt 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 S.F.P.D. 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 street light. 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 black ladies shuffled past the window, the kind of ladies who never missed mass 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 to 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?” A large man in a checked shirt 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, mini-vans and SUVs were 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, 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 which 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, which 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, th
e priest thought, it was simply too horrible to accept.

  “Si, si,” 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.

  Over 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, pawn shops and XXX video stores. Vagrants (San Francisco held the title for having the most aggressive vagrants in the U.S.) 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 cart-jackers. 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 said, and they both laughed.

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