Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  It’s over, Vlad thought. There would be no putting the genie back in the bottle now.

  “Get us down there,” the Air Force sergeant said.

  “Not a wise idea,” said Vlad. “They cannot be contained.”

  “Goddammit, those are our guys down there! Put us down right now!”

  The Russian pushed the cyclic forward between his knees and nosed the Blackhawk over the fence, over the sea of bodies, looking ahead for a safe landing spot. In the back, the sergeant was telling his men to lock and load.

  “Ranch House, Groundhog-7.”

  No reply.

  Vlad repeated the call, and received only silence. He took the bird in fast and low, ensuring his landing zone was clear of flaming debris, then flared and pivoted sideways, touching the wheels down a hundred yards ahead of the first wave of walking dead. Without a word the sergeant led his tiny squad out the door, taking off at a run towards where a small knot of men were kneeling and firing. Vlad lifted off at once and took the Blackhawk back towards the collapsed fence.

  “Ranch House, Ranch House, this is Groundhog-7. I am taking station over the western breach, awaiting instructions.” Behind him, RJ went to work with his door gun, sending long streams of automatic fire down on the heads of the crowd.

  Ranch House did not respond.

  The view from the cockpit revealed that the situation was far worse than Vlad had originally thought. He could see a half dozen other places where the unrelenting pressure of the dead had finally flattened the fence, and that was just on this side of the base. Reason assured him there would be many more. Fixed defenses and mobile patrols had been overwhelmed immediately, and the dead flowed in like the lava Rocker had described; slow, spreading, unstoppable and absolutely fatal. They flowed across streets, manicured lawns, between buildings, and out across the tarmac. This was not an infantry base; there were no armored vehicles and only a small percentage of the personnel were armed.

  RJ soon exhausted the ammo supply for the left gun, with little measurable effect, but still unhooked and moved across, snapping back in at the right door and getting that M240 rolling. It sounded like a chainsaw. Vlad rotated the Blackhawk to give him the best exposure, as the bullets chopped into the mass below. Bodies went down in little groups, heads disintegrating under the high power fire, but the gaps were instantly filled by more.

  There was some radio traffic, though nothing from the tower. Another inbound C-130 ten miles out announced that it was turning back towards Nevada. A pair of Navy helicopters which had gone down to Bakersfield this morning transmitted that they would head south and try to reach the USS Ronald Reagan, supposedly now somewhere off the coast of the Baja Peninsula. One pilot reported that he didn’t think he had the fuel to make it, and might have to set down so the other chopper could pick up his crew.

  Vlad looked at his own gauge. The trip to Lost Hills and the subsequent time over Lemoore had cost him a third of his fuel. If the Reagan had moved south as the Navy bird reported, it was beyond his reach. Even if the ship was still somewhere off the coast of LA, it would be cutting things close, tight enough that an unexpected headwind could bleed off the last of his fuel right over the city. The additional problem would be finding the vessel in the first place, since the Blackhawk had no direct comms. An aircraft carrier might seem exceptionally large, but on open ocean it was very small indeed, and every minute spent over the water visually searching for it would burn precious fuel. As a pilot, Vlad had imagined his own death many times; fire, crashes, combat. Drowning or being eaten by sharks, however, was not one of the ways he would choose. It didn’t matter; the carrier was too far away.

  “Lieutenant, three o’clock,” RJ called.

  Vladimir looked to the right across the field. He saw Rocker’s lone Super Hornet still on the ground, and he wondered what had happened to the young fighter jock. That wasn’t what RJ was drawing his attention to, however. Another Blackhawk sat on the deck close to a cluster of buildings, rotors turning, masses of the undead coming in at it from all sides. A small circle of men was falling back to the chopper, firing in all directions. Vlad recognized the tail number as Conroy’s bird, his former co-pilot.

  “Hold tight.” The Russian banked hard and roared across the base towards the surrounded helicopter, while RJ loaded his last box of ammo. Ahead of them, the defenders began to fall, and two men with rifles turned and leaped through the open side door as Conroy began to lift off.

  Handfuls of the dead galloped after them and scrambled aboard as well.

  Groundhog-7 was almost there when Conroy’s bird became fully airborne, close enough to see the side window of the cockpit suddenly splashed red. The chopper staggered and tipped sideways, racing horizontally through the air and dropping. The Blackhawk’s engine made a high-pitched death whine as it streaked towards the ground, and then there was a tremendous blast as it crashed…

  …into NAS Lemoore’s tank farm of jet fuel.

  “Aepno!” Vlad cried, banking away sharply and accelerating, pushing the turbine for all its power. Behind him there was a deep boom which he felt in his chest cavity as the first above-ground tank erupted, an enormous bomb which sent a flaming pressure wave of shrapnel in a three-hundred-sixty-degree circle. The blast set off others, the giant tanks going off like a string of firecrackers.

  The pressure slammed into Groundhog-7, lifting it from behind and hurling the aircraft forward, nose down, trying to knock it out of the sky. Pieces of metal banged and rattled of the fuselage, and a frantic warning buzzer sounded in the cockpit. The helicopter dropped towards the flat roof of a barracks building, turbine intakes sucking at the super-heated air, and the cords in Vlad’s neck and arms jumped out as he hauled back on the cyclic.

  The Blackhawk pulled out ten feet above the rooftop, low enough for the wind from its blades to scatter gravel like a dust storm. Then it was roaring across the base.

  Vlad whispered something in Russian, a little prayer his mother had taught him, and slowly gained elevation. He shut off the warning buzzer – a caution that his air intakes were suffocating, though no longer – and aimed the chopper towards the tower. He circled it, calling repeatedly on the radio, and still getting no response. No one moved behind the glass. He pulled away, looking down as the streets of the naval air station filled with the dead. Many were charred black from burning fuel, civilians who had come here seeking sanctuary and found something worse than death.

  The pilot made a slow, low level inspection of the base, seeing no more firefights. “RJ, do you see anything on your side?”

  The gunner said nothing.

  “RJ?” Vlad twisted in his seat to look back into the troop compartment. The metal decking was slick with blood, and RJ was flat on his back, jumpsuit scorched, a blackened twist of metal jutting out of his throat. His eyes were open, staring up at nothing.

  The Russian cursed softly. The man had probably been killed instantly when the jet fuel tank went off. Vlad told himself that even if he had known his gunner was hit, and was able to find a safe place to land, there wouldn’t have been anything he could do. Nonetheless, he felt the weight of the man’s death. He could rationalize it all he wanted to, but he knew his dreams would have something quite different to say about it.

  If he lived long enough to sleep again.

  He continued his slow patrol across the length of the base, searching for survivors, finding only the walking dead as they continued to file through the breaches. If anyone was down there, they were out of sight, hiding in a building and beyond Vlad’s help.

  A howl at his right ear made him flinch left as fingernails clawed the corner of his seat. Vlad twisted to see RJ on his feet, the metal still in his neck, reaching with both arms. His eyes were filmy, and he hissed through bared teeth. The door gunner’s safety line, still clipped from his harness to a ring on the floor of the troop compartment, held him back like a vicious dog straining at the end of its leash. The dead man lunged against it, coming up short, able only
to touch the corner of the pilot’s seat. He moaned, and kept at it, jerking and snapping his teeth.

  Vlad put the Blackhawk into a hover and slipped a small automatic from a zipper pocket of his flight suit, just beneath his armpit. “Forgive me, tovarich.” He shot RJ in the face, and the gunner’s body collapsed to the decking.

  The pilot looked down for a moment, and then looked at the map strapped to his right knee. It showed secondary and tertiary landing zones – both military and civilian - as well as places he might find the JP-5 fuel his bird consumed at a rate of 0.74 miles per gallon. He knew that most, if not all, were out of date and already overrun.

  He flew the Blackhawk north.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Oakland

  The highway was no longer an option. It was too packed with vehicles, and the dead wandering among them numbered in the thousands now. At the head of the hippie convoy, Evan’s Harley led them down into the neighborhoods of West Oakland. These would have been rough areas before the plague, dangerous and crime-infested. Now the city was infested by a new breed of predator.

  Evan leaned and turned, working the throttle to scoot past clusters of the moaning dead, not stopping to use his weapons. There were simply too many of them, and they had to keep moving. Slow as they were, the creatures still had numbers, and if they managed to make a ring around the motorcycle… Evan didn’t delude himself about their chances if that happened.

  Behind him, Maya wrapped her arms tightly about his waist, leaning naturally into the turns. In one hand she gripped the 9mm Evan had taken off the dead cop in Napa, and she kept her head tucked against the rain. Over the years Evan had grown accustomed to riding in all sorts of weather, but he still wore a pair of goggles he had found on the highway. His clothes were completely soaked and his hair slicked back.

  The cars, trucks and vans followed closely in a line.

  Evan and Calvin planned their route while still on the interstate, spreading a roadmap across the hood of an abandoned car and highlighting it in yellow. The writer committed the street names and turns to memory, and Maya watched the process closely, wordlessly memorizing as well. The map was tucked inside his jacket now, in the event their planned route was blocked and required an alternate way through.

  Thunder grumbled overhead, and the flat gray above was occasionally broken by white flashes.

  Evan ignored the turn onto West Grand Avenue. Although it was a wide road, with more room for the line of vehicles to maneuver, it also led to the Bay Bridge, and there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of corpses coming from that direction. Were they leaving San Francisco, heading into Oakland? That wasn’t a pleasant thought. There were too many of them here already. Instead he kept the convoy headed south on Peralta, watching for 7 Street, which would lead them west to the harbor.

  Where their hearts would be broken when they found it empty.

  Despite the growing threat around them, they had pressed on, pinning their hopes to a phantom hospital ship which would carry them all to safety and a Happily-Ever-After. I’m as crazy as the rest of them, Evan thought, not only a part of them now but a leader. How had that happened? Evan Tucker was a loner and, according to his father, a vagabond who ran from responsibility, chasing dreams. Well, Dad had been right about that last part. Except Evan suspected he was chasing a nightmare now, and he feared what would happen when he caught up to it.

  The intersection where 7 crossed Peralta appeared and Evan stopped the bike, lifting his goggles and wiping at his face. Maya patted his shoulder and pointed to where he was already looking.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  On all four corners of the intersection, large white signs had been attached to light posts, each with a big arrow pointing west up 7. Above the arrows in tall letters was USNS COMFORT, and above this a large, red cross.

  USNS…United States Naval Ship? Faith had said it was there, and here were the signs, pointing to the harbor. It couldn’t still be here, could it? Evan was exhilarated and chilled at the same time, but couldn’t say exactly why he was suddenly nervous. Maya nudged him and kissed his ear, and instantly things were better. He waved to the tow truck behind him and accelerated down 7.

  Very quickly they passed back under the Nimitz Freeway and entered Oakland’s main industrial center, a place of wide streets and sprawling, flat roof buildings. Other than a lone corpse walking stiffly out of a loading dock, the dead were absent. That made a little sense, since this wouldn’t have been a much populated area under normal circumstances. Still, 7 was unusually clear of vehicles, and that bothered him.

  Even in the downpour the place smelled of oil and rust, and rainwater pooled in potholes and ruts in the asphalt made by the passage of thousands of heavily-laden trucks. A rail line on the left followed the street as they traveled through a silent city of warehouses and truck yards, motionless freight cars parked on sidings, paved lots with rows of trailers, cranes and greasy forklifts. Stacked ocean containers – blue, orange, rusty red and green – rose like castle walls in vast storage yards.

  Every block, the signs for USNS COMFORT directed them forward.

  He wondered at the absence of vehicles. If this was an evacuation center, wouldn’t it have been jammed with carloads of refugees trying to get out? He had his answer on the next block.

  It had been extremely organized.

  The road ahead was blocked by a pair of desert camouflage tanks parked nose to nose, a ten foot gap between them. Several weapon-mounted Humvees stood to the sides, and a pair of sandbag gun pits had been built near the tanks. A corridor of razor-sharp barbed wire formed a funnel which would have permitted only a few people at a time to pass between the tanks. A control point.

  To the left, a truck yard behind a high chain link fence had been turned into a parking lot, refugee vehicles lined up inside in endless rows. Evan was reminded of how people were directed to park in the fields at state fairs.

  Bold-lettered signs around the control point announced, NO WEAPONS BEYOND THIS POINT, and DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. More signs pointed up Maritime Street to the right, past a truck weigh station. These read QUARANTINE AREA and INFECTED ONLY, and had red arrows.

  The tow truck idled up beside the Harley, and the VW van stopped behind them, Calvin walking up holding his assault rifle. “I’m going to be doing some apologizing to Faith,” he said. “She was right all along.”

  Evan looked around. He wasn’t so sure. The control point was abandoned, and the ground was covered in shell casings. The body of a soldier was draped face-down over the sandbags of a gun pit. Nothing made a sound here except for the engines and the rain. “Let’s see what’s on the other side.”

  After a brief conversation the tow truck driver, a long-haired, bearded man named Kyle, backed his rig up to one of the Humvees and ran out his cable. Several minutes later he was dragging the Army vehicle out of the way, creating a ten foot wide gap between the rear of the tank and the brick wall of a warehouse. It would be enough for the convoy to squeeze through. Minutes later they were moving once again up 7, deeper into the industrial park.

  More rail lines appeared, more rows of silent boxcars and flatbeds sitting on rails. Ocean containers were everywhere; on trains, on trucks, stacked on the ground behind walls of chain link. In one open, paved area, a huge orange and white Coast Guard helicopter stood as a quiet sentinel.

  They came to the water. Here the road curved until it reached an attractive stone building with a sign reading INTERNATIONAL MARITIME CENTER, a museum of some kind. Past it, the road split in three directions; one cut back into the complex, following another rail line; one continued south along the edge of a park; the third traveled out onto a stretch of land with more train tracks and container yards, eventually coming to a long wharf with a row of high, white cranes used for offloading ships.

  Oakland Middle Harbor was gray and choppy in the rain, a horseshoe of land which opened to the greater bay at the far end. Closest to them, right on the water, sat an environmental
oasis among the industry, a large green space of trees and trails, playgrounds, picnic areas and a baseball diamond. An Army field hospital occupied most of the ball field, square, green canvas tents planted in orderly rows and marked with red crosses.

  But it had been overrun.

  Torn and blood-splashed canvas fluttered in the breeze, empty ambulances stood with rear doors open, and people in both camouflage and civilian clothing moved stiffly among the tents. Out here near the road they saw torn fences, burned military trucks, and a California Highway Patrol cruiser so riddled with bullet holes it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s death car. The road out towards the cranes and wharf was peppered with abandoned luggage and coolers, empty wheelchairs and walkers, and dropped toys.

  Evan pulled his binoculars from a saddlebag and looked out at the long, white ship tied up at the distant wharf. It was the length of an aircraft carrier, boxy with giant red crosses standing out brightly against its snowy hull.

  Launched as an oil tanker in 1976, Comfort was converted to 70,000 tons of hospital ship eleven years later, operated by a mix of civilian and naval medical personnel. Its deck boasted a landing pad capable of handling the world’s largest helicopters. Below, Comfort was equipped with twelve operating rooms, intensive care, obstetrics, radiology, a burn unit, dental and optometry facilities, labs, a pharmacy, and beds for over a thousand patients. It could produce its own medicinal oxygen, and distill up to 300,000 gallons of seawater into drinking water every day. Its proud history of service included Desert Storm in the ‘90’s, New York Harbor after 9/11, Iraq, post-Katrina New Orleans, Caribbean and Latin American humanitarian relief, and three trips to Haiti in response to both civil unrest and the earthquake of 2010.