Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  What few ships there were, tankers and freighters and car carriers, had already raised their gangplanks and were casting off. People shouted and waved, pleading for them to come back, and many even leaped into the oily water to swim after them. The dead slammed into the crowds packed along the edges of the piers. Hank sped away into a maze of long steel containers, still carrying Baxter.

  The dead were in there, too.

  Cut off on all sides, he climbed to the roof of a forklift and hurled his dog onto the top of a rusty blue cargo container, then jumped after him. Both man and dog made it. Baxter barked in approval, and Hank discovered with relief that although several of the dead managed to climb onto the forklift, they weren’t coordinated enough to make the jump, and tumbled off into the gap.

  Once the hordes were done with their victims on the piers, they wandered, and soon discovered two meals trapped on top of the container. By the end of the day there were more than a thousand of them surrounding the long metal box, groaning and reaching. They didn’t go away, and no one came to the rescue.

  Hank Lyons lasted four days in the open before lack of water claimed him. Baxter nervously licked Hank’s dead face for five minutes, until his master groaned and climbed slowly to his hands and knees. The Jack Russell danced around him happily, and then leaped into outstretched arms.

  After Hank ate Baxter, he wandered to the edge of the container and fell off into a crowd which no longer cared about him.

  Bakersfield

  Francis Miller Presbyterian Hospital swelled to capacity and beyond, and Bakersfield General had been turning people away for hours. Those who had been clawed and bitten by the walking dead shared the crowded hallways and lobbies with patients suffering gunshot wounds, burns, and injuries from traffic accidents. People with broken bones, severe cuts, heart attacks and pregnancies-come-due waited among the bitten, every available bed, gurney and wheelchair filled. Outside, the U.S. Army was setting up sandbag and barbed wire perimeters.

  Exhausted staff tended to the worst cases first, as best they could, but still patients died of their injuries in the crowded corridors without ever being seen. The deceased rose within minutes, and those same corridors turned into slaughterhouses with no way out.

  Dr. Charles Emmett walked slowly up a fire stairwell and pushed through the door at the top, out onto a gravel roof. He took off his white coat and stethoscope and let them fall, making his way to the edge of the six floor building. Muffled screaming came from below, along with the sound of breaking glass. He looked over the side to see the dead shambling out of the hospital, attacking soldiers erecting defenses to protect them from outside threats. Gunfire and screams filled the air.

  He looked at the sky and took a deep breath, as the rooftop door banged open behind him with a chorus of snarls. He stepped off, leaning forward, and hoped he would land on his head.

  Bakersfield General folded at almost the same time. It was a scenario repeated across the state, and within hours, streets throughout California were crowded with walking corpses dressed in scrubs, lab coats and hospital gowns.

  U.S.-Mexico Border

  The defense of the crossing from Tijuana lasted four days. The Mexican side fell first, and thirty-thousand corpses pushed north, using both the main road and stumbling across the shallows of the Rio Grande. Even supplemented by army units, U.S. Border Patrol officers simply didn’t have the firepower to hold them back, and the fences couldn’t withstand the relentless shaking and pressing weight.

  A new kind of undocumented visitor crossed the border.

  Chula Vista rolled up the next day, the ranks of the dead increasing as the wave surged north. By the time it reached San Diego, the city was already on its knees. The Mexican swarm finished it off.

  Riverside

  Buck and Stuart stood on a mound of earth, latex-gloved hands shoved in the pockets of their FEMA windbreakers. They wore goggles and surgical masks, not as any sort of protection from OV – their medical experts had said with confidence it was not airborne – but to shield them from the stench and the lime. It didn’t help much. The corpses reeked, and the lime made their eyes burn. The grumble of a nearby bulldozer forced them to shout.

  “I think they just finished the new trench.” Stuart pointed across the soccer field towards a yellow bucket loader. It huffed diesel as it rotated on its tracks, swinging its jointed arm. A line of flatbed military trucks was waiting a short distance away from the digger, cargo decks piled with bodies.

  “It’s going to fill right up,” Buck said.

  A hundred yards behind them, a helicopter sat at one end of the soccer field, its blades turning slowly. Soldiers in full chemical gear, looking like google-eyed insects in their green chemical suits and protective hoods, relaxed as they walked in pairs around the field, rifles slung. The fighting was further west, and this was a secure area. They were happy not to be up on the line.

  The trench in front of the two men had quickly filled. A hundred feet long, it was stacked end to end with bodies covered in white powder. Several were still moving. The bulldozer was pushing earth back into the trench at the far end. Closer to the mound where Buck and Stuart stood, two men from the World Health Organization were moving along the trench, both in full, white hazmat suits with plastic face shields and oxygen tanks. One carried an electronic tablet, the other a long metal probe attached to a hand-held black box. He would stop at the edge, probe one of the bodies, say something to his colleague who would tap in some data (Buck wondered how he managed to work a digital tablet in those bulky gloves) and then they would move farther down the row.

  “Bet those suits are uncomfortable,” Stuart said.

  “Worse for the grunts.” Buck nodded at a nearby pair of soldiers. “The W.H.O. guys probably have little air conditioners in there.”

  They watched the men in white suits work, not even a little curious about what they were testing. Both were exhausted, dark circles under their eyes, unwilling to do more than stand on this hill of dirt and watch. Not that there was much for them to do. FEMA had sent them to organize disposal, which they had done. Their only job now was to wait for instructions and go where the chopper took them next.

  They looked out at the field. “Still plenty of room for more.”

  The park was a beautiful green expanse of trees, bike trails and sports fields at the east side of the LA suburb. Heavy equipment had turned it into a mass grave, and this trench was the fourteenth dug and filled since daybreak.

  Plenty of room. Stuart nodded slowly. It was a physical act just to keep his eyes open. They both knew there probably wouldn’t be a chance to dig and fill more trenches. The Army reported that the line was holding, but the two men had been through this yesterday in Compton. The skinnies would start slipping through the perimeter, compromising the line, and the Army would fall back or even be overwhelmed in places. It would be no different here; the only question was when. The dead were pouring out of LA by the tens of thousands.

  Buck grimaced. “Skinnies” was a term the Army had used to refer to the local population during its ill-fated adventure in Somalia twenty-plus years earlier. Now everyone used the term, including civilians. It had gone viral, so to speak, and wasn’t that just hilarious? He supposed it was appropriate, though. As the walking dead decayed, they shed much of their fluid (not all, he cautioned himself – they were still juicy enough to infect you) and grew emaciated, rotting skin drawing tight against their bodies and features. It was as good a name as any.

  The man with the long probe stopped to jab his device towards one of the lime-coated bodies, one that was struggling to pull itself out from under other motionless corpses. The edge of the trench suddenly collapsed, and the man tumbled in on a cascade of crumbling dirt, dropping his tool, arms flailing. His buddy ran the other direction, waving at two of the patrolling soldiers.

  Buck and Stuart didn’t move, didn’t call out. They just watched.

  The man started crawling back towards the edge, his moveme
nts slow and uncoordinated in the bulky suit. The ghoul in the lime pit caught hold of one of his legs and used it to pull itself free of the other bodies. Then it scrambled onto the man’s back and began tearing at the suit. Within moments the bright red of blood splashed across the white fabric, and the man rolled onto his back in an attempt to fight off the creature. It straddled him, ripping away his mask, and then worked its face in past his raised arms, getting at the exposed flesh.

  Two soldiers trotted up to the edge of the trench, raised their rifles and fired, hitting the powdery ghoul in the head. It slumped over, and the man turned to start climbing again. One of the soldiers shifted his weapon and fired again, blowing out the back of the WHO man’s head. The bulldozer didn’t stop working.

  Stuart yawned. “How much longer do you think?”

  Buck pulled away his goggles and rubbed at tired, stinging eyes. The soldiers had resumed their patrol, and the other Health Organization worker had not returned to the trench. “Probably tomorrow, depends on how long it takes to put the equipment on the trucks. The line should hold that long, at least.”

  “North?”

  “Or farther east. LA is done.”

  They watched as a teenager covered in lime and missing an arm, tried to claw its way out of the trench. The bulldozer buried it.

  “I heard they might pull us back to Denver,” said Stuart.

  Buck looked at his colleague. Had the man not been listening during the morning briefing, or was he just too tired to remember they had been told Denver was already gone. He was about to remind him when he saw men scrambling out of the cabs of the distant flatbeds, followed by the driver of the bucket loader. They all ran to the right. A moment later a Humvee came tearing across the soccer field, a soldier in the turret facing backwards unloading a long stream of .50 caliber rounds.

  The dead had arrived. They came out of the trees to the left, surging through a playground and across a baseball field, an endless line of them, a thousand, ten thousand, more.

  “Oh shit,” Buck said. “C’mon.” He tugged his friend’s sleeve and they began to run for the waiting helicopter, its turbines winding up in a loud hum, the rotor blades spinning into a blur. The FEMA men waved their arms as they ran, shouting, an army of the dead behind them.

  The chopper lifted off while they were still fifty yards away, and banked out over Riverside. The World Health man in the helicopter’s doorway took off his white hood and waved at the two running figures until they were out of sight.

  Redding

  Many considered it California’s last population center of any significant size before the Oregon border. Stephen Farro, Redding’s mayor for the past six years, stood on the sidewalk outside the small regional hospital next to his grim chief of police. A line of school buses was pulled to the curb and waiting at the entrance, while hospital staff helped patients to board.

  “I don’t see what else you can do, Steve,” the chief said.

  Farro didn’t reply. What else? He had wrestled with that question and come up with this answer. These people were all infected, and there was no way to reverse it. They would become dangerous, a threat to the citizenry. He had a responsibility to the town.

  “I’ve got one of my boys waiting,” the chief said.

  “Only one? Can he handle all this? Why not more?”

  “It’s Andy Pope.”

  Mayor Ferro looked away. He had never cared much for Andy Pope, a sly, weasel of a cop who skirted right on the edge of abusing his police powers, and had an obsession with both guns and violent movies. The perfect man for this job.

  “He’ll do fine. And I can’t spare any more, not since the Army didn’t show up like they promised. We got sightings not only on the edge of town, but inside as well.”

  The mayor looked at his chief. “We’re not contained?”

  “Hell no, we’re not contained. Robbie Morris called in that he’d seen a mob of ‘em coming down the off-ramp of I-5, then went off the air and didn’t respond to calls. Derrick Link went out to have a look, and we haven’t heard from him either.”

  Farro looked back at the buses. The patients were being told they were being moved to a quarantine area. Instead they would be driven out to the gravel quarry where Andy Pope was eagerly waiting with a scoped assault rifle. Most were likely too weak to put up much of a fight or run very far, so it wouldn’t take long.

  A woman in her forties and a girl of fourteen, both wearing pale blue hospital gowns, were about to climb the steps of a bus, and stopped when they saw Farro. “Steve?” the woman called.

  The girl said, “You’ll come to see us soon, right Daddy?”

  The mayor looked away.

  Sacramento

  Luther and Wanda, both dressed in the light purple scrubs of orderlies (now splashed with blood) sprinted down the sidewalk, the hospital burning behind them. Flaming bodies were walking stiffly out of the inferno and into the street. A rifle cracked several times and then went silent. Luther carried a long-handled screwdriver and Wanda a fire extinguisher, both dripping with red and gray. The orderlies were wiping madly at their faces, rubbing their eyes. That last fight in the fire stairwell had been messy.

  Corpses ahead on the sidewalk. They darted right, down the cracked cement driveway of a three story house converted to apartments, a shabby thing sagging on its foundations. The weed choked back yard was empty, and they bolted up the rear steps and through an open kitchen door, slamming it behind them.

  The dead passed by. The orderlies found towels and scrubbed at their faces over the kitchen sink, thankful that the water was still working, gargling and spitting, rubbing some more. Then they crept upstairs, made sure it was empty, and hid in a bedroom. There was no talk about what they would do, they were too exhausted, not just from the running and fighting, but from the previous forty-eight hour shift without sleep. Wanda passed out on the bed. Luther propped a pillow against the bedroom door and leaned back against it. He tried to sleep, but it eluded him.

  He knew about the bites, about the virus and how it was transmitted. He knew about the life expectancy, and what happened after clinical death. It was the slow burn that frightened him now, the term the doctors used to refer to the condition following exposure to infected fluids, usually by way of the eyes, nose, mouth or open wounds.

  The zombie in the stairwell, the one wearing a security guard uniform… his head had exploded when Wanda hit him with the fire extinguisher. They both caught a face full of gore, and it had gotten into their eyes.

  Slow burn. Symptoms appeared within the hour, and mimicked those of an OV bite; fever, nausea, chills, delirium. It ran for twenty-four hours, the last twelve of which left the victim in a near comatose state. A vulnerable state. At the end of the twenty-four hour cycle, fifty percent of victims died and reanimated within minutes as the walking dead. The other half, however, awoke weak but alive, their immune system managing to fight it off.

  The docs couldn’t explain it, and some proposed that the virus was somehow weakened when exposed to air, opposed to the full dose which invariably came from fluid-to-fluid contact, as in the bites. They were excited nonetheless. Not only did it mean at least some of the infected could pull through, it gave a glimmer of hope for a possible cure. Of course none of those excited doctors were alive anymore at Sacramento Memorial. Walking around, maybe, but not alive.

  The fever came on fast. Luther threw up on himself a short while later, and then began slipping in and out of consciousness, sweating and then shivering. Within hours he was seeing and talking to people who weren’t there, and right at the six hour mark, he fell onto his side, eyes closed, his breathing shallow and ragged.

  In the bed, Wanda went through it all as well.

  Nothing entered the house to disturb them for the next twenty-four hours.

  Luther awoke groggy, his mouth dry and pasty. He needed water, and he had a cramp in his shoulder from lying on it for too long. He blinked and straining, struggled back into a sitting positio
n. He thought he might pass out from the effort, and when he didn’t, he looked around, wondering at his surroundings. It came back quickly, and he sighed, nodding slowly. He had survived the slow burn. Thank you, Jesus.

  Wanda snarled and lunged off the bed.

  Stockton

  Things couldn’t be better for Vince. No more of his girlfriend whining for him to get a better job, no more of his asshole boss yelling when he was late, no one to tell him he was a fuck-up. The world was his for the taking, and he was taking.

  A bright yellow drop-top Corvette sat idling at the curb, and a pair of chromed .45’s hung under his armpits in twin shoulder holsters. He had taken the guns and the car from a rich asshole in his garage. The man had been so busy loading groceries into the car that he hadn’t seen Vince creeping up behind him with a long-handled shovel. Whang! The asshole went down. Half a dozen more hits to the head made sure he wasn’t getting up again.

  He’d burned a couple inches of rubber off the Vette’s tires tear-assing around Stockton, screeching to a stop when he saw a skinny, hopping up onto the back of the seat and blazing away with the twins until it went down. He wasn’t worried about ammo. The rich asshole had boxes and boxes of it in a bag behind the driver’s seat. No cops hit him with lights and sirens, no one yelled for him to stop, to quit being such a fuck-up. Stockton was a ghost town. It was his town.

  A trip to a jewelry store and a smashed case put gold around his neck and diamonds on his fingers. Now for the big score. He faced a pair of glass doors, grinned and shouted, “My town!” as he heaved a cinderblock through one of them. Vince stepped into the Bank of America and flipped off the cameras as he strode across the lobby carrying a handful of empty pillow cases and a crowbar.