Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  “I am God’s chosen voice,” Peter said, “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 Brother Peter Dunleavy knew them well.

  ELEVEN

  Alameda

  “We’re going to get stuck.” Bud hit the brakes and ran the van up onto a sidewalk, clipping a plastic real estate flier 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 the 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 10mm 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, due to 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, super storms, civil disorder… If a person had the means, and their family 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.

  People 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!”

  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 red brick 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 jumped out and locked the shotgun to her shoulder as her uncle moved towards 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 towards the narrow horizontal windows to see an 80’s 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 backwards Kangol hat. They ran towards the bay roll-ups.

  A door between the garage and the firehouse itself 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 towards 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 12 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 t
o 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 upwards. 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 with 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 small 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, alright. Ugly like my sister’s husband!” He let out 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 which 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. 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 that 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 only be opened from the outside 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 50 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.

  “Thank you!” The woman hugged 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 man’s 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 Turner, 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 agr
ee 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. “Ya’ll mind if I smoke?”

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

  TWELVE

  Marin County

  The heavy CO, their lone 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 was footage of boats, all shapes and sizes, swarming across the San Francisco Bay and heading out to sea, and high level scenes of Oakland International showed the airport as a sea of flames. 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. 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, armored vehicles fired, smashing buildings and abandoned cars. They kept coming.