Skye rested a hand on the ammo can beside her, fingers drumming on it like the rain. She looked at the high steeple, at its windows, thought about the view it would command. She gripped the can’s handle and bolted to her feet, sprinting across 32 St., weaving in and out of turning bodies and reaching arms, going through the wrought iron gate and slamming it behind her. An open padlock hung on the bars beside the gate, and she quickly threaded it through the latch hole and snapped it shut.
The dead came to the fence, reaching through the gate.
“I’ll be right with you,” she said.
Holding it one-handed by the pistol grip, Skye braced the M4 against her shoulder, and carrying the ammo can in her other hand, let the rifle muzzle lead the way through the double front doors of the First Baptist Church of Clawson. There were three freaks in here, two heavy black ladies in the pews and a black man in a janitor’s uniform near the pulpit. All three let out a moan upon seeing her, and shuffled forward. Skye took them down quickly. A check of the rest of the church – basement filled with tables and chairs and cardboard boxes, back rooms and closets, a tiny kitchen with a rear door – showed that she was alone.
The door to the bell tower opened to a high shaft, with steep plank stairs climbing the walls in a tight square, an open space rising through the center. It had a musty smell, and the flutter of pigeons came from high above.
Skye pounded up the stairs two at a time.
Emeryville was behind them. They kept to the surface streets now, avoiding the concrete spaghetti bowl where the freeways met at the head of the Bay Bridge, all of them packed with dead vehicles and dead Californians. The Bearcat rumbled south on Hollis Street, the raised stretch of the Nimitz Freeway off to the right, sections of which had collapsed during the earthquake of ’89 and crushed people inside their cars on the lower deck.
The riot vehicle weaved in and out of abandoned cars and overrun roadblocks, crunching over the walking dead while others pounded fists against the armored sides. There were definitely more of them now, mostly black and Hispanic as the truck rolled through a poor Oakland section of shabby houses, decaying apartment buildings and businesses with steel roll down gates and bars on the windows. Trash, graffiti, stripped cars and skinny, dangerous-looking stray dogs colored a neighborhood of auto body shops, liquor outlets and corner bars, pawn shops, check cashing spots and small stores selling cheap clothing.
The wipers beat steadily at the constant rain, the sky gray and puddles forming in the street. Carney looked out at the neighborhood and wondered if it looked much different than it had before the plague. Oakland, despite improvements over the past decades, was still a city known for its poverty, violent crime and double digit unemployment. Many of his former prison mates had come from here, and the streets were still filled with people wandering without purpose, and dangerous killers. No, not terribly different, he decided.
In the passenger seat, TC had his boots up on the dashboard, drinking a Red Bull as he watched a movie. Carney had found a small, portable DVD player with a folding screen, and an AC adaptor for the Bearcat. TC was watching a Quentin Tarantino movie, clearly having trouble keeping up with the director’s style of jumping back and forth through time and locations, but howling laughter at the over-the-top violence.
It was important to keep him occupied. For TC, boredom was a trigger for violence.
The Bearcat reached an intersection where Peralta crossed at an angle, a much wider boulevard of businesses and chain restaurants. Carney let the vehicle sit and idle.
TC looked up from his movie. “What’s up?”
“Just thinking.” So far their search for a suitable boat had been a bust. Carney consulted his map. He could angle south for a bit and then cut back west, towards Oakland’s waterfront. Maybe they would have more luck.
TC went back to his movie. “Yeah! Kill that motherfucker!”
Carney stared out past the thumping windshield wipers and listened as one of Tarantino’s characters beat someone to death. TC didn’t use the ear buds for the player, and the crunch of bones and a man screaming filled the riot vehicle. Tarantino got the sound right, the impact anyway. But the screaming wasn’t realistic. In life there were only two or three grunts, and then nothing more.
1996, and Bill Carney was doing okay. His parole officer was happy that he was working, keeping out of the bars and coming up clean on his piss tests. Out after only three years on a burglary charge, Carney didn’t plan on blowing his second chance. Cindy was working part time and just over two years clean and sober. Little Rhea was eighteen months, a blue-eyed heartbreaker crawling at high speed and starting to do a little furniture walking. She had her daddy wrapped up tight; in his eyes she could do no wrong. Carney was thinking about going to the community college in Sacramento, so that maybe someday he would be supervising auto mechanics instead of being the guy with the greasy hands and torn knuckles.
He came home from work early. Rhea, wearing yellow jammies with a pink bunny on the tummy, was napping on a blanket on the living room floor. Only she wasn’t napping. Her face was blue, her skin cold as Carney picked her up. She had choked to death on a tiny, blue Bic lighter. Strewn across the coffee table was a fix kit; spoon, stretch of rubber tubing, syringe, small square of crumpled foil with some white powder in it, all next to a cluster of empty beer cans.
Carney found them in the bedroom, naked and sleeping, Cindy entwined with some bearded guy he didn’t know. Fucking and sleeping off a high while Rhea died in the next room. He found what he needed in the closet.
At sentencing, the judge used words like “heinous” and “depraved,” stating that the use of a baseball bat on two sleeping people made Carney a monster, and if the prosecution could have stretched their case to show premeditation, His Honor would have happily supported the death penalty. The judge hadn’t been interested in a dead eighteen-month-old with blue eyes.
Carney stared at the rivulets of rain sliding down the windshield. They looked like tears. He took a deep breath and started to turn right onto Peralta, but then hit the brakes. Across the intersection, the street they had been traveling angled deeper into the neighborhood, and a block in that street was filled with the walking dead, more than he had seen so far in Oakland. They were all moving away from him, and seemed to be converging on a small white church.
Some were falling down in the street. Quite a few, actually.
He put the truck in park and grabbed the binoculars off the center console, taking a closer look. Yes, falling down. Because they were being shot in the head. He scanned the area, looking for the shooter, and it didn’t take long to figure the church steeple for the perfect sniper’s nest. As he watched he saw a figure with a rifle moving between the open windows on all four sides, firing steadily. Even at this distance and with her lack of hair, he could tell she was female, and young.
She had some skill, and the bodies were piling up in the street. More of the dead were coming, however, drawn from all angles, emerging from houses and side streets and overgrown yards, too many of them. They were beginning to pile up around the fence, and it wouldn’t take long before they forced their way over or through it.
“How long before you run out of ammo?” he murmured. TC didn’t hear him. It looked like the firing was only coming from the bell tower, and he didn’t see anyone else up there with her. Was she alone? Did she realize how much attention she was drawing? Did she care?
TC looked up from his movie as Carney gunned the Bearcat across the intersection. He saw the dead, saw the girl. “What’s going on, bro?”
“Get your shit and mount up in that top hatch. You’re going to get to kill stuff.” Carney slammed the grill into a zombie, splattering it over the hood and sending the body flying as he accelerated.
“Fucking-A about time!” Then TC’s face went sober and he gripped his cellmate’s arm. “But why now, bro? Why her?”
Carney’s eyes were hard. “Sometimes, brother, people just need saving.”
&
nbsp; TWENTY-NINE
Mission Bay
Alden looked up with a weak smile. “It’s okay. I never…expected to…get this far.” He looked past Xavier at the horde of corpses slowly closing on them, following since they had dropped from the freeway. “You should…get going.”
Xavier shoved the Bulldog into his waistband and knelt beside the school teacher. “We need to get you someplace safe.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Pulaski pointed at Alden. “He’s a dead man, and we’ve got to keep moving. Kill him or leave him.”
“Shut up.”
“He’s been dead weight all along.”
The priest looked at the pipe fitter and bared his teeth. “I said shut up.”
“Fuck you! I’m done taking orders from you!” Pulaski pointed the 9mm at Xavier. “Give me that pistol. Do it slow, or I’ll blow your black ass away.”
Xavier glared at him, saw murder in the man’s eyes, and slowly handed over the Bulldog.
Without taking his eyes or the gun off the priest, Pulaski said to Tricia, “I’m getting out of here. We keep going until we hit Third Street, then cut north and cross the canal at the ball park. The marina is right there. You coming?”
The girl’s hands were clapped to her mouth, eyes darting between the two men, not moving.
Pulaski curled his lip. “Well fuck you, too.” He spit on the ground. “Fuck all of you.” Then he was on his feet and gone, running past the overturned armored truck and out of sight.
Xavier lifted Alden in his arms. “We’re going to find someplace close to hide, where they won’t see us. They’ll pass us by.”
“No! Xavier…this is…stupid.” The teacher tried to resist, couldn’t. “Put me…down.”
The priest ignored him and started towards the sidewalk, away from the campus. “Come on, Tricia.”
The girl didn’t answer, and Xavier stopped, looking back. She was no longer huddled against the truck, but was walking towards the campus, hands still pressed to her mouth.
“Tricia!”
She kept walking, and then broke into a run, holding her arms wide, a rising wail coming from her that made a shiver run through the priest.
“Tricia, no!”
She crossed the curb, and then was running across a lawn, straight towards a dozen corpses. They turned and moved stiff-legged towards her.
“No,” Xavier whispered, still holding the man in both arms as the rain mixed with his tears. He watched her run to her death.
“She’s made…her choice,” Alden said.
Xavier watched until she reached the knot of zombies, and then looked away before he had to see what came next. He headed up 16, in the direction Pulaski had gone, but didn’t see the man anywhere.
“Xavier…”
The priest shook his head. “Don’t talk for a while, Alden.” He kept walking, the horde behind them closing with every step, more of them over on the grass kneeling in a big circle and fighting over fresh meat.
Mission Bay was an odd mix of industrial area, high rise condos, apartment buildings and construction sites. As the terminus for both Caltrain and the city’s light rail system, it was not uncommon to see luxury buildings backed up to warehouses, and neatly groomed parks adjacent to truck depots. More than a few high rise balconies had HELP or ALIVE signs painted on sheets hanging over the sides, and many of these same balconies were occupied by corpses, bumping against the railing or wandering in and out through sliding doors.
Xavier stayed on the sidewalk, the UCSF campus slowly passing on the left, wondering how long it would be before the dead saw them and attacked, knowing he would go down swinging the crowbar, protecting a man beyond saving. But they made it all the way to where 3 Street crossed north to south ahead of them. Beyond was a wall of high rises. The waterfront would be on the other side.
“Just a little farther,” Xavier said.
Alden shook his head, eyes closed and jaw clenched. “Please,” he gasped, “put…me down.”
Xavier carried him across the street, seeing corpses walking in the rain to the right and left, but none immediately ahead of them. They went into the lobby of a condo, where the gray of the day cast the room in deep shadow. Nothing came at them, and he set Alden down on a couch near the concierge desk. The teacher groaned and sagged back against the cushions.
“I’m going to find something to bind that wound.”
The teacher gripped his wrist. “Stay with…me…for a bit.”
Xavier crouched beside him and said nothing for nearly thirty minutes, letting Alden get his breath back. The man’s face eventually relaxed, and when he spoke it was soft but unlabored. “You’ve been in charge for weeks,” he said, “but now you’re going to listen to me.” He was pale, eyes sunk in darkening hollows. “I’m not going to get better.”
Xavier started to shake his head, but Alden squeezed his wrist again.
“We both know what’s going to happen. I’d ask you to kill me, but Pulaski stole your gun.” The teacher smiled. “I don’t think you’d do it anyway.”
“I won’t,” Xavier said quietly.
Alden nodded. “I do want something else, and then I want you to leave. Give me the last rites.”
“I’m not a priest anymore.”
“Bullshit. I don’t know what happened to you, or why you think that. It doesn’t matter. Besides, I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you get to decide.”
Xavier just looked down.
“Do this for me.”
“You’re not even Catholic, are you?”
Alden laughed softly. “Nope.”
“Then why?”
“Please?”
Xavier looked into his eyes, looked at a man who had been nothing but a stranger and was now a friend. “I don’t have any oils for the anointing. And you’re supposed to make confession first.”
“So since I’m not a Catholic, it won’t matter if you take some shortcuts.”
Xavier said nothing for a time, and then closed his eyes and murmured something Alden couldn’t hear before making the sign of the cross. “Repeat after me. My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things.”
Alden followed along.
“I firmly intend,” Xavier continued, “with your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin. Our savior Jesus Christ suffered and died for us. In his name, my God, have mercy. Amen.”
“Amen.”
Xavier then placed a hand on Alden’s head and the other over his own heart, closing his eyes. “May the Lord in His love and mercy help you with the grace of the holy spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.” He opened his eyes to see Alden with a small smile on his face. “I don’t know what good you think that did.”
The teacher closed his eyes, still smiling. “It wasn’t for me.”
Xavier held Alden’s hand until the man fell asleep, his breathing becoming labored again and his body temperature rising, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. He started tossing a bit, murmuring words Xavier couldn’t make out. The priest set the man’s hands together on his chest, made the sign of the cross again, and went out into the rain.
THIRTY
Oakland International Airport
Anderson James had been sulking since they’d eaten the female staffer, and Brother Peter had a black eye.
The swelling and dark smudge would go away, Peter knew. Anderson’s situation would only get worse. Right after the televangelist crushed the staffer’s head with the crowbar, Anderson had gone mad and rushed him, babbling and swinging his fists. One managed to connect before the pilot – Thing One – wrestled the man to the ground. Peter kicked his most trusted aide unconscious.
“What do you think, Anderson? Ribs or rump roast?” The minister was holding a Sharpie marker, gesturing with it. His last male staffer was secured to a vertical pipe by heavy-duty zip ties a
t his ankles and around his throat, arms held together above his head. He was naked, and covered in dotted lines, looking very much like the illustration of a cow often found in supermarket meat departments, identifying the different cuts.
In a corner of the break room, the last female staffer – Sherri, he thought – was on her hands and knees, head bobbing in Thing One’s lap. She had quickly figured out how things were, and was determined to be useful, not to be eaten. Smart girl. Peter would eat her last.
Anderson said nothing.
Brother Peter poked the Sharpie at the young man’s ribs. “Awful skinny. Not much meat here.” The staffer wept silently, both at the pain from the zip ties and at what was to come. He, like the others, had hungrily participated in the feast (except for Anderson) without ever suspecting he would end up on the menu. Now, as his spiritual leader poked and inspected his body, he wondered how he could ever have believed he would not end up as a meal.
The Sharpie jabbed a buttock. “Lean, but still a little there. We can harvest it without killing him, make it last longer.”
The boy began sobbing and shaking his head as much as the zip ties would allow. The girl with the broken leg had spoiled long before they could finish her, and they were left vomiting as their bodies struggled to reject the alien, near-toxic flesh. Her remains had been dumped somewhere in the complex, but that was days ago. They were all hungry again.
“You’re insane,” said Anderson.
“No, I am filled with the glory of Jesus,” Peter said. He crossed the room to where Anderson was also tightly strapped to a pipe against one wall, naked like the other staffer but forced into a kneeling position. He had been there since he dared raise a hand to his minister, and stank of his own filth. He was given a little water, which he accepted, but he clenched his teeth and refused to eat any part of the girl.
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