Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  “Will you be making a withdrawal today, sir?” He hopped the counter. “Why yes I will, fuck you very much.” The cash drawers gave little resistance, and soon he was filling the pillowcases with tightly wrapped bundles of joy.

  Vince held a strap of hundreds up to one of the cameras. “My town, fuckers!”

  The purple dye pack exploded six inches from his face.

  Screaming and blind, Vince clawed his way over the counter and stumbled towards the brightest point of light he could make out, the front doors. His noise drew attention, and the skinnies caught him on the sidewalk.

  He never saw it coming.

  San Jose

  The refugee center lasted five days before it was overrun. The dead massed against the hastily erected chain link fences and finally pushed them over, pouring in among the Red Cross tents. More than four thousand refugees were slaughtered inside of thirty minutes, including the soldiers sent to protect them. Pilots were pulled screaming from helicopter cockpits before they could lift off, and the aircraft sat empty on their pads, rotors turning until they ran out of fuel.

  Malibu

  Claire Mercer was twenty-two, Hollywood beautiful (tucks, Botox and implants which had healed nicely) and on her way to becoming a star. Midnight Beauty was red hot; gorgeous, pampered, twenty-somethings filled with angst falling in and out of love and danger with equally hip vampires. After coming in midway through the season and getting smash reviews, she had been signed as a regular for next year, and handed a fat contract. Those first paychecks had made for a nice down payment on the beach house.

  Her agent was already talking movie deals, maybe a perfume line.

  The flu (the real flu, not that other crazy shit that was going around) had kept her in bed and out of touch with the world for days. She had turned off the cell, disconnected the house phone, and spent her time on the bowl, puking into the tub beside her or curled up and shivering under the blankets. She felt like dying, and didn’t want to talk to anyone. Out-of-touch was what she got, and she missed some important news.

  Now she stood in her living room, an impressive view of the beach and the Pacific beyond rows of tall windows, wearing vomited stained pink pajamas and holding a butcher knife. The dead were smashing their way through all that glass, moaning and tumbling into the house. Claire stood and screamed.

  Her agent would have been proud. It was a horror star’s scream.

  Palm Springs

  Gloria tried to steer and fight off her husband at the same time, stomping the brakes and cranking the wheel hard to the left, into their driveway. Gravity threw him and his snapping teeth away from her (and threw her snarling teenage son across the back seat) long enough for her to crash the Volvo into the side of the house.

  The airbags deployed, saving her from a spinal injury, and pinning her undead husband against his seat.

  Gloria fumbled for the handle and fell out onto the driveway, her nose broken and bleeding from the airbag, and ran for the house, sobbing. Her husband and son managed to get out too, and lurched after her, but she made it inside and slammed the front door, locking it. They pounded the wood, flinging their bodies against it, as Gloria backed into her front room, hands over her mouth and shaking her head.

  All they had wanted to do was stock up on groceries and bottled water, but the supermarket parking lot was like an asylum, people wrestling carts away from each other, pushing and hitting. It was like hell’s version of Black Friday. Then those two things tried to crawl through the open side windows and tore into her boys. Gloria got them out of there in the Volvo, but they died on the way home. For a while.

  Father and son groaned and hammered at the door, and Gloria sat down to cry.

  An hour later a pair of rifle shots rang out from the street, and the pounding stopped. A bullhorn voice echoed through the neighborhood. “This is the United States Marines. All civilians are being evacuated to Twenty-Nine Palms. Come to the sound of my voice, and wave something white over your head. Any persons not waving white will be shot. This will be the only evacuation of this neighborhood.”

  Gloria heard a line of trucks rumbling past, but made no move to go outside. When they were gone, she got out her photo albums and spent an hour looking through them, crying softly. Then she drew a warm bath and placed a razor blade on the marble edge before getting undressed.

  Madera

  Their skin was brown to begin with, but years of working in the sun, moving between orchards and farms and being outside in all sorts of weather had turned it to creased leather. They were people with little interest in their political status, other than avoiding deportation, which was no longer a concern. For them there had been only work and family.

  There were seven families, over fifty people, and they kept to the rural roads, fading into the fields at the first sign of a vehicle or los muertos. They knew how to hide, how to stay quiet. They moved like ghosts.

  Filipe and Miguel walked in the lead, their wives and children in the group behind, everyone keeping up and no one complaining. Theirs had always been a life of labor, a hard life doing the work the gringos didn’t want to do. They had little, and little to lose, so this new life was simply another obstacle to be overcome.

  When los muertos couldn’t be avoided, Filipe and Miguel and the other men swiftly fell upon them with machetes, putting them down fast without drawing attention. Many of the women also carried machetes, and spades and knives as well, for they had children to protect. Like their men, they did not shy away from hard work.

  The town of Madera was behind them now, and the group moved across a tall bean field which they or people they knew might have planted. Staying in single file, they walked quietly down the long rows. Soon they would turn south, their only plan to return to their families and whatever homes awaited them in Mexico. That was as much tomorrow as they considered. They gathered food and water as they went, and packed themselves into drainage culverts at night to sleep, posting guards at each end, moving again at dawn. In the evenings the women prayed the rosary, asking the Blessed Mother to watch over their families.

  Filipe came to a fence and motioned his brother forward. US 99 cut across in front of them, with more fields beyond. Word was passed back that they would be crossing. Filipe pointed down the road, and Miguel peered around the edge of a bean stalk to see a bright blue Saab fifty yards away, off on the shoulder. It was up on a jack, a tire lying flat on the asphalt nearby.

  Even at this distance they could hear the woman screaming inside.

  One of los muertos – the woman’s husband? – was beating at the windshield with his fists. Another dressed in overalls pounded at a passenger window.

  Miguel used wire cutters to clip the fence, and the two men pulled the barbed strands well back, tying the ends to posts. Then they readied their machetes and eased out onto the pavement, motioning for the others. Fifty men, women and children slipped silently past them and trotted across the road, vanishing into the field on the other side. Filipe and Miguel watched the corpses carefully, but they were so intent upon getting into the vehicle that they hadn’t noticed all the potential prey passing a short distance behind them.

  When the last of the group was across, the two brothers followed. There was never a thought of going to the woman’s aid, even though the two corpses could easily be dispatched.

  The gringos were not their people.

  Los Angeles

  From the floor to ceiling windows of his thirtieth-floor office, Lou Klein watched Los Angeles fall. He wore an expensive Italian suit without a tie, shirt unbuttoned and tails hanging out, and stood on the rich carpeting in bare feet. Grey Goose swirled in a tumbler and he sipped, taking pleasure in the burn as it went down. He preferred it with ice, but there hadn’t been any of that in a long time. The hand holding the glass sported a five carat diamond pinkie ring.

  Lou was alone on this floor, perhaps even in the building. Samantha had gone to the roof and jumped to her death hours ago. He pressed his balding
head against the glass and looked down, wondering if she was now dragging her shattered body through the street.

  “Are you still there?” he asked his cell phone. It was the only piece of technology in his office still working, and only because he always kept a spare battery in his desk. The flat screens, the tablets and iPods, the refrigerator and air conditioning vents, all were silent. He missed the iPod. He would have liked to hear Morrison’s haunting voice singing about The End.

  There was a long pause, and then a woman’s voice. “Still here.”

  It was laughable. He had tried to use the phone for seven days, the length of time he’d been trapped here, without making a single connection. In desperation he had finally called his ex-wife, and gotten through immediately. He sipped his Goose and decided that Fate had a twisted sense of humor. Lou Klein was one of the top record moguls in LA, and all that his wealth and influence might have provided – airborne evacuation, a team of mercenaries with armored vehicles to drive him out of the city – was out of reach. There was only Aggie.

  “Are you sure she’s gone?” his ex said. There was no trace of sarcasm or smugness, no reproach.

  “Yes. I saw her fall past the window.”

  Another pause. “I’m sorry.”

  Lou believed her. Even after all the anger and scandal, and despite the fact that Samantha had been the reason for their divorce after twenty years of marriage, Aggie was capable of compassion. She had always been a good woman. Far better than he deserved.

  “She said she couldn’t do it anymore. The waiting, knowing how it would end. I don’t blame her.” When things began falling apart, Lou arranged for a helicopter to meet them on the roof and carry them to Santa Monica. From there a chartered sea plane would pick them up and take them to a little island he owned in the South Pacific, where they would wait out the crisis in comfort and safety. The helicopter never showed. By the time they decided it never would, LA was too dangerous to risk going out on foot.

  “You loved her,” Aggie said. “It’s hard, I know.”

  Lou didn’t agree or disagree. For the last two years he had been questioning if he really did love Samantha, or if it had been something else. A change? Excitement? Passion? Sam had been all those things. But love? He looked down on streets packed with abandoned cars and an overrun military convoy, as well as tens of thousands of walking corpses. The black and white of an LAPD squad car could still be seen in an intersection, the dead flowing around it like a stone in a stream. Its rooftop lights had flashed for a full day before the battery died.

  “I was thinking about Ireland,” he said. “Remember that trip?”

  “Of course.” He could hear the smile in her voice.

  They had been newly married, and one of the groups he had signed had gone platinum, his first success of that magnitude. Flush with cash, they took a spontaneous trip to Ireland as a celebration. It rained every day, but they went out in it anyway, holding hands and laughing like fools, sitting on stone walls and making out in the downpour like teenagers as the locals drove by, frowning in disapproval.

  “That was a good trip.” Lou drank his Grey Goose.

  “It was.” A long silence. “We were different then.”

  “Tell me again that you’re safe.”

  She hesitated, and that told him all he needed to know. Aggie was alone in the big house on Cape Cod, where a wall of glass overlooked the dark Atlantic. Lots of glass. She said there was food in the house and fuel in the generator. “I see people on the beach. Well, not people, but none of them have come up here.”

  Lou looked at the carpet. August on the Cape? It would be packed with summer tourists, which meant it was now packed with the dead. “Stay away from the windows,” he said. There was no reply, and another long silence.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I think the building is on fire. I’ve been smelling smoke for over an hour.”

  “Can you get out?”

  He looked at the half empty tumbler. “I wouldn’t last five minutes down there.”

  They said nothing for a long time, and Lou began to wonder if he had lost the connection. He stared out the window at the mobs in the street, at the fires sending up a charcoal blanket to cover an already hazy city.

  “Do you want me to go?” Aggie said at last.

  He bit his lip and his chest hitched. “No. Please stay on with me…as long as you can.”

  “I’ll stay on.”

  Lou finished his drink. If he had any balls he would go up to the roof and follow Samantha out over the edge. He knew he wouldn’t, though. Too much of a coward, and no one knew that better than the woman at the other end of his phone.

  “I love you, Aggie.”

  He heard the smile again, three thousand miles away. “I love you too.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Napa Valley

  Evan spent five days leaving the Napa Valley, partly because he was being especially cautious, avoiding the dead whenever possible and taking his time scavenging. His real reason was the desire to put off getting close to heavily populated areas for as long as possible.

  He traveled by day, spending half his nights in businesses or stores, the other half in private homes, preferably those set back from main roads with lots of open space around them. These he scouted carefully before entering, circling and peeking in windows. Twice he had approached houses thinking he would sleep there in safety, only to turn back when he caught a glimpse of a corpse or two wandering through the rooms inside. One time he turned up a long dirt lane towards a Spanish villa resting on a hillside, surrounded by vineyards, but rifle shots (he assumed they were warnings because he wasn’t hit) came from the house and drove him away.

  The houses provided him with thebasics; food, a plastic flashlight, first aid odds and ends from medicine cabinets, a hand held can opener, fresh socks and clean underwear. No firearms, and no ammunition.

  Evan spent a night at a winery, first taking an hour to scout the exterior, then another inside to ensure he was alone. That night he drank wine by candlelight, vintages he never could have afforded, toasting a farewell to the world. It earned him a crushing hangover the next morning, and he spent another day there trying not to move around too much and nibbling crackers, hoping to keep them down. He wrapped two good bottles in bubble wrap and tucked them away in his saddlebags.

  A visit to the Napa County Airport revealed that half a dozen small planes were still present, tied down and covered in tarps. The place was deserted, except for a handful of the dead, but it was of no use to him. Evan didn’t know how to fly, though he briefly considered trying his luck in a cockpit. He quickly dismissed the idea as he pictured himself lifting off, only to slam nose down in a fireball seconds later. Surviving this thing and then dying from dazzling stupidity would be an affront to every good person who hadn’t made it.

  The dead were everywhere, at least by rural standards, he supposed. Mostly they were lone wanderers or little knots shuffling along a road or across a parking lot, some walking out in fields or trying to untangle themselves from where they had gotten mixed up with a barbed wire fence. They were scattered, and easy to keep away from out in the open. A few times when he had no other choice, he accelerated and drove the Harley right through them, hunching low over the handlebars and tucking his elbows in to avoid reaching arms.

  In five days he had only seen two survivors. He didn’t count whoever shot at him, because he didn’t see them. The first was a man in a straw hat driving an ancient Chevy pickup, heading in the other direction, his bed filled with cardboard boxes and metal drums. He threw a wave as he passed but made no effort to stop, and Evan didn’t turn to follow him. He didn’t want to get shot at again. The other was a woman in her thirties wearing sweatpants and what looked like a fireman’s coat, carrying a golf club. As soon as she saw Evan and his Harley she ran off the road and disappeared around the back of a house. Evan sat idling on the dotted yellow line for an hour, waiting to see if she might come into v
iew again, but she never came back.

  Still making his way slowly south, he took a trip into the outskirts of American Canyon, a burg below Napa. There he gassed up at a quiet Shell station, using a hose and a hand pump to draw the fuel from an underground tank. He had never done anything like that before, and was proud of himself for pulling it off. Snacks and sodas from inside went into his saddlebags and pack to supplement the canned goods he had found in the houses, and he sat for a while on a big trash can drinking a Coke and looking at the empty road and silent buildings, listening to the wind. A hawk floated high above in a lazy circle, unconcerned with the demise of the human race below.

  A quarter mile into town, just off Lincoln Highway, he found a Big Grizzly Tackle Shop. The front windows were broken and the power was out, just like everywhere he had been. He left the Harley out front and went in with his police shotgun.

  The corpse was on him the moment he stepped inside.

  Snarling and grabbing with filthy, blood encrusted nails, it lunged from behind a postcard spinner, knocking it over. A man about his size dressed in khakis and a button up shirt, it gave off a green stench, its flesh rotting and turning black around savage wounds. Evan yelped and shoved at it with the shotgun, its teeth grating at the stock and one hand pawing at the metal. He pushed the barrel into its belly and blew a hole in it.

  The thing fell back on its butt, and then climbed to its feet, blackened organs and a loop of intestines drizzling out through the fresh hole. Evan choked down a surge of bile, aimed at its head, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Cursing, he racked a shell into the chamber and tried again. This time the thing’s head disintegrated, the blast leaving Evan with ringing ears.