Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  The olive-green, canvas sides of the truck were splashed with blood. Thousands of shell casings littered the pavement, rifles lay on the ground where they had been dropped, and the still bodies of people in civilian clothes were everywhere. The walking dead, killed a second time. No one else was here, not a single body in uniform, walking or otherwise. Silence blanketed the intersection.

  “Where are they?” Taylor whispered.

  “Hell if I know.” The sergeant whispered back. The big truck sat in the center of the intersection, and he walked slowly around the front and looked in that direction. There were only abandoned cars, fallen bodies and a building burning in the distance. Nothing moved.

  Taylor touched Skye’s shoulder, and she jumped. “Sorry,” he said, smiling. “Will you stay right here and keep watch the way we came? In case some of the ones we shot were only knocked down? They’ll head this way.”

  Skye looked. She could see a couple in the street, but they were a good distance away, beyond the last intersection, little more than heads moving behind cars. “Sure.”

  Taylor nodded and turned away, then looked back. “What’s your name?”

  “Skye Dennison.”

  He smiled. “Skye. I like that.” Then he moved off, rounding the back of the truck. The street in that direction looked the same, empty except for a couple of moving figures far off.

  “Taylor.”

  The soldier answered his sergeant’s summons, coming up to stand beside him on the far side of the truck. Postman pointed up the last street. Two blocks away, a mass of bodies was swarming over another deuce-and-a-half and a pair of Humvees, while more crawled on their hands and knees, tearing at whatever was on the ground beneath them. The dead were a mix of civilians and people in camouflage.

  “Overrun,” whispered Taylor.

  Postman nodded. “Radio said First Platoon put together a collection point for refugees, remember? What do you bet that’s what they’re feeding on?”

  “Which means there’ll be more of them in a few minutes.” He shook his head. “We need some high ground.”

  “Copy that,” Postman said. “Let’s gather ammo, look through the truck,” he jerked a thumb at the big vehicle, “and seize one of these rooftops.”

  Taylor began ejecting magazines from rifles he found on the ground, shoving them into a shoulder bag. Sgt. Postman moved around to where Skye was still standing watch. “Hey, Taylor’s girlfriend, you’ve been doing good.”

  She blushed. “It’s Skye.”

  “Okay, Skye, we’re going to need your help, and we need to move fast. We’ve got a whole mess of tangos…”

  “Tangos?”

  “Targets…T for tango, bad guys. There’s a bunch of them a couple blocks that direction, and we want to be gone before they decide to come this way.” He asked her to climb into the truck and throw down anything which looked like it was medically related, and anything marked MRE.

  “Meal-Ready-to-Eat,” he said, then left to rummage through the cab of the truck. Skye set the rifles on the ground and climbed up into the cargo area of the big truck. Right away she found a heavy, green plastic box with a red cross on it. The sergeant said to throw things down, but she didn’t think that would be a good idea with this, and spent several minutes figuring out how to drop the tail gate. Then she climbed out and lifted the box down, carefully setting it on the street.

  She went back up inside and resumed her search, and a couple minutes later Postman joined her. He had a new, olive-green bag hung across his chest now. “There,” he said, pointing to a stack of cardboard boxes. “Toss those out.”

  Skye saw they were indeed stamped MRE. “It won’t hurt them?”

  The sergeant picked up a pair of heavy, rectangular metal containers stenciled 5.56mm, and shook his head. “Nope. The damage comes after you eat them.”

  Soon they had a small pile at the back of the truck. Taylor rejoined them, his shoulders heavy with belts of Velcro pouches, a pair of rifles on his back, and a long, padded case. He unzipped the case and showed the contents to Postman. To Skye it looked like a science fiction hunting rifle with what looked like a long, black can at the end of the barrel. Postman nodded. From the back of the truck the sergeant produced three camouflaged backpacks. He hung one on Skye’s back, and began packing it with individual MREs from the cardboard boxes. Each looked like a brown, plastic bundle about the size of a paperback.

  “That’s food?” Skye raised an eyebrow.

  The soldiers both shrugged. “So they tell us,” said Taylor. He and Postman stuffed medical supplies and more MREs into their own packs, then unsnapped their body armor and let it fall to the pavement.

  Taylor saw Skye’s question before she asked it. “They’re not shooting at us. It’s unnecessary weight.”

  Skye nodded, nearly staggering under the weight of her own pack and one rifle. Then she looked at these men, especially at Taylor, close to her own age. They were carrying extra rifles, ammo pouches, helmets, even metal cans of what she figured were extra bullets, and both bore it easily, without complaint. Skye decided she was going to have to toughen up.

  “High ground,” said Postman, nodding at Taylor, and the younger man led off, motioning for Skye to follow. He took them down the street left of where the undead civilians and soldiers were swarming, his rifle pointed ahead and sweeping from left to right and back again as he advanced. Skye stayed close, paying attention to the way he moved, how he placed his feet, how he handled his weapon. When Taylor and the sergeant spoke, she listened to their brief, clear was of communicating, picking up on what had at first sounded like slang, but to them was a language unto itself; Tango meant target. Directions were expressed in terms of the face of a clock, “your six” meaning behind you. Letters were expressed in words, Alpha for A, Bravo for B and so on. They spoke in meters and klicks, kilometers, and it made her wish she had paid more attention to learning the metric system, beyond knowing the size of a two liter bottle of soda.

  It didn’t take Taylor long to find what he wanted. Without warning he angled from the center of the street and headed to the sidewalk. A Starbucks with some metal chairs and umbrella tables outside occupied the ground floor of a building next to a flower shop, and between them was a door with a frosted glass window, the street address stenciled on it in gold numbers. Taylor moved to the door, found it unlocked, and led them inside.

  They were in a small foyer with black and white tile on the floor, facing another door with a frosted glass window. One wall held a row of built-in mailboxes with name labels stuck to each. The interior door was probably the kind which had to be opened by someone in an apartment above by pressing a buzzer, but the power was out and the door opened easily. Taylor led them up a stairway into a hallway lined with doors, a battery powered emergency light showing that it was empty. Stairs on the left led upwards, and the soldier climbed, moving on the toes of his boots, rifle aimed high as he crept up the steps.

  Another hallway, another stairway. Taylor led them quickly up. On the next landing they heard something snarling down the hallway, and both soldiers moved in next to each other, rifles pointed. Skye tensed, waiting for the crack of their weapons, but whatever it was must have been inside one of the apartments. Nothing moved in front of them.

  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 foldi
ng tool from one pocket. Skye recognized it as a Leatherman, a multi-purpose tool just like the one she had gotten her dad for Christmas a couple 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.”

  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, taking a seat on the edge and 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 towards the intersection with the deuce-and-a-half 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 conditioner 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 which 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.”

  TEN

  Oakland International Airport

  There were eight of them now; the reverend, 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 towards 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.

  Peter 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 in. 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 Peter, 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 outwards. The Gulfstream 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 doorframe, and then didn’t exit so much as he fell out backwards, 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 Brother Peter 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. Brother Peter 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 repeatedly refused his offers to come to his hotel room) ran whimpering towards the emergency slide of the United flight, as if she could somehow save the fallen flight attendant. Peter 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, 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. Peter 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,” said Peter.

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

  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.”

  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. They had been right.

  Brother Peter gave them all the same angelic smile which romanced the camera and drew in followers worldwide, the smile he used for his book covers, tent revivals and television interviews. It was a genuine smile, for he had found an inner peace he had not felt in many, many years. It was a serenity brought on by a sudden understanding that God had a plan for him, a place in this new world. A warm, unconditional love came with this knowledge, and he knew what he had to do right now. There would be more, he was quite certain of that, mysteries which God had yet to reveal, and assuredly would in due time.