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?” he 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?”
The khaki officer 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 calm 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 towards 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?”
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 towards 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 still, 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.”
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 which 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.”
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 teenaged girl in a bloody tank top. A black woman in a floral print housecoat shuffled up to the gate as they watched, 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 cinderblock 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 crisis, 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 bite proof 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, and 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 mph, 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 towards 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.
“Brave new world,” whispered Carney.
TC grinned and waved at the dead cop, then lit two cigarettes from a pack he had found in a locker, passing one to his friend. “Where we going, brother?”
Carney put the Bearcat in gear and started pushing one of the patrol cars out of the way. “Mexico.”
THIRTEEN
San Francisco – The Tenderloin
They learned fast. Single file and quick was best, moving between cover and keeping out of sight, dumpster to doorway and down alleys. They slipped into unlocked buildings when they could, standing still and holding their breath until the dead passed. Silence was their ally. By the time night settled over the city, Father Xavier and his group had traveled a total of six blocks. They had seen no indication of an organized evacuation, no military or police activity, and only heard the occasional helicopter without actually seeing one. A jaded voice within the priest suggested that any evacuation would take place in the upscale neighborhoods, and the dregs of the Tenderloin, as usual, would have to fend for themselves.
As they went, they watched and learned about the dead, an easy task because they were everywhere. Xavier paid close attention. Generally, they were slow and seemed to have a short attention span, frequently wandering with no apparent sense of purpose. At times they were motionless, standing still, maybe swaying a little, sitting on bus benches or propped against walls, staring at nothing.
The priest knew now what the absence of a soul looked like. Though he understood they were dangerous killing machines, his heart ached for them, and for the lives they had lost and would never regain. He couldn’t think of them as evil.
Their balance was poor, and they were prone to trip over curbs or obstacles in the street, falling and slowly getting back up. There didn’t seem to be any communication among them. When prey was around, however, their lethargy vanished, and Xavier’s group had witnessed up close the horror which followed, powerless to do anything to stop it. A young woman in a miniskirt and bare feet, her legs badly bitten from her ankles to her thighs, stumbled out of a doorway and into the street, dazed. She stood in the open, crying, hands pressed to her ears and eyes squeezed shut.
It attracted attention.
Corpses fifty feet away not immediately react to her presence, which told the priest their range of vision was probably short. Her crying, however, caused creatures up to a block away to immediately turn towards the sound and start moving. Their clumsy gait seemed to improve, and they moved faster, a few even breaking into a sliding gallop. Hearing more acute than vision. Speed and coordination improves when pursuing prey. The girl didn’t even put up a fight.
Other events drew them; fire, gunshots, loud noises, car engines. Xavier suspected that whatever passed for instinct in them interpreted these stimuli as belonging to live humans, and thus food. As for their feeding, he couldn’t begin to understand what benefit eating had for a dead, and likely decomposing, body.
They could climb a little – over low obstacles like abandoned cars – and could manage stairs, though not swiftly. Xavier had seen one struggle up a lowered fire escape stairway, then stop and lose focus, bumping its hips against the railing until it tumbled back down. The resulting fractured leg didn’t prevent it from walking, just exaggerated its limp. He had seen others use doorknobs, but had not seen any tool use, and for that he was grateful. They were weapons all by themselves.
The most fascinating thing they learned, and perhaps the most helpful, was that the dead were both relentless and did not react to injury or pain. No matter how badly maimed their bodies were, they kept on coming, and there were plenty of limbless corpses moving through the streets to validate
this. In one case, a dead woman made her way down the sidewalk, arms extended and probing ahead of her, while her head was twisted backwards from some hideous accident. She made frustrated grunting noises.
They had seen this relentlessness in action from concealment at the mouth of an alley, looking out at an intersection where a city bus had slammed into the side of an orange, municipal dump truck. A handful of passengers were trapped on board, their screaming muffled behind glass as the dead encircled them, hammering at the sides and making the bus shake. It started slowly, with one or two detecting movement or noise from within, and in a short while handfuls were gathering. When the people inside started screaming, the dead appeared in droves, and soon there were more than a hundred pressing in on all sides. Someone on board had a pistol, and slid open a window to fire into the swarm. Six shots went off at point blank range, and only one of the dead went down. Xavier strained to see what had been different about that one, but at this distance he couldn’t tell.
Someone on board couldn’t take it any longer, and opened the door in an ill-conceived escape attempt. The dead poured in, and it ended quickly.
Now, an evening chill coming on with a light fog, Xavier and the others stood in the darkness of a mom and pop dollar store which had been trashed by looters, a fact which made a couple of them shake their heads at the irony. The street outside was filled with wrecks, broken glass, and moving figures. They were little more than silhouettes in the fog, drifting silently among the cars. At the end of the block a lone street light was on, but no others. There were no lights in any of the block’s ground floor shops or apartment windows above.
Pulaski stood beside the priest, holding a tire iron. “We’ve wasted all our daylight. You better be right.”
Xavier hoped he was. Directly opposite them was a four story brick building with graffiti covered walls. The ground floor, once a store of some kind, was boarded over with weathered plywood and covered in spray painted tags, the most prominent of them a big, black 690K. To the left, the street level doorway which would lead to the apartments above stood open like the black mouth of a crypt.
Omega Days Page 10
