“We can’t rest here.” Xavier switched his AK to his left hand and hooked an arm around the teacher’s waist, helping him straighten up. Alden put both hands to his chest. He had dropped his pistol somewhere.
“Just . . . a minute . . . more . . .” His face was the color of paper, the rain pasting his hair to his forehead.
“We’ll go slowly,” the priest said, getting him moving. Alden started walking, shuffling like the dead around them. Pulaski and Tricia were half a block ahead of them already and not slowing. Xavier was able to move a hundred feet before he stopped to bring his rifle up, dropping a moaning vagrant that had lurched into their path. A woman dressed like a prostitute walked behind him, staggering on one broken high heel, her graying skin covered in bites. Xavier sighted on her head and pulled the trigger.
Click. The magazine was empty.
He ejected the clip and reached for another, but the pocket he carried them in was also empty. He had lost count and used the last magazine without realizing it. Xavier dropped the now-useless rifle and tore the crowbar from where it hung beside his pack, taking two steps forward and smashing the prostitute’s head. The creature made a hoarse wheezing sound and crumpled.
He turned back to see Alden on his hands and knees, gasping for air. A trio of corpses closed in on him from the sidewalks, two on the left and one on the right, moving faster as they neared their prey. Xavier pulled the .44 Bulldog from his back waistband, waiting a heartbeat until they got closer. The high-caliber revolver went off like a cannon; at ten feet it blew most of a corpse’s head off. The one beside it didn’t hesitate and lunged. Xavier sidestepped and ducked a swinging arm, shoved it with the crowbar to make it stumble past, and then stepped in to press the Bulldog against the back of its skull.
An explosion of red and gray chunks blew across the road.
The third one was on Alden before Xavier could turn, and the teacher fought back weakly at the snarling, snapping thing. The priest leaped to them, dropped the crowbar, and grabbed the creature by the hair, jerking its head back and shoving the Bulldog in one ear. The blast left him holding a clump of scalp with a fragment of skull clinging to it.
“Get on your feet, Alden. Get up now,” Xavier demanded.
The teacher nodded and slowly climbed to his hands and knees, sucking air like a goldfish out of its bowl, eyes clenched shut. The priest recovered his crowbar and helped him the rest of the way up, taking him around the waist again and getting them moving. Only four blocks to the expressway. Pulaski and Tricia were nowhere in sight.
The two men stopped moving only long enough for Xavier to reload the .44 and then moved a block, another, and soon they were at the raised mass of I-280. Thunder rumbled above and the rain kept on, a cold rain that smelled of the sea. Fortunately there was no cascade of corpses spilling over the high guardrail, and Xavier figured that if the dead had been up there, Pulaski and Tricia would have triggered them when they came this way. Assuming they did come this way. The priest moved them into the shadows under the span, Alden limping and gasping beside him, hands still clamped to his chest. The priest scanned the darkness, watching for the movement that would signal an attack. Nothing came at them, and again Xavier was struck by how surreal it was to be able to move for blocks at a time, after so many days spent creeping and hiding, making no progress.
Then they were back into the rain, still moving east on Sixteenth, Xavier watching the highway back over his shoulder, expecting to see corpses tumbling off this side. Blocks behind them, the ranks of the dead were swelling, filling the street, an army moving forward at much the same speed as the priest and the struggling teacher. Only they didn’t need to stop and rest and just kept coming.
“We’re going to be okay,” Xavier told his companion. “We just need to go on a little farther. Stay with me, Alden.”
The teacher nodded and made a grunting noise.
They passed a sprawling furniture showroom and a long warehouse that had been converted to a technology company, the streets eerily devoid of the dead. Xavier wondered again why that was but accepted it as a gift. Other than the five rounds loaded in his Bulldog, his pocket held only one squat, heavy bullet.
At the intersection where Owens Street came in at an angle to join Sixteenth, a major traffic accident jammed the road. Xavier saw that a Loomis armored truck had tipped over onto a silver BMW convertible and flattened it. A pair of taxis was piled against the back of the armored truck and had been crushed by a red-and-black Boar’s Head delivery truck. A minivan had come in from the right, smashing into what was left by the taxis, and a cement mixer had somehow ended up on top of them all. The rear wheel of a motorcycle, folded nearly in half, poked out from the bottom of the pile. The whole mess was blackened by fire, and a charred corpse dangled from the rear window of one of the taxis.
Two figures crouched behind the armored truck, the bigger one peering around the side at what lay beyond. Xavier helped Alden limp up behind them, and Tricia began crying when she saw the teacher. Alden sat on the pavement and leaned back against the truck, eyes closed and breathing hard, hands pressed to his heart as if it might jump right out of his chest.
Xavier crouched beside Pulaski, who glanced at him and curled his lip. “Thought you were dead.”
“We almost were.”
“Still plenty of time left in the day,” the pipe fitter said. His shotgun was gone, and he was holding the remaining automatic.
“Why didn’t you just keep going?” Xavier asked.
“We would have.” He gestured with the pistol. “But that’s UCSF over there.”
The priest looked out at a graduate college campus studded with buildings, open greens, and trees. Just like UC Berkeley weeks ago, the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco, had been in its final days before classes started, the grounds crowded with students and faculty. One end of the campus was occupied by a large hospital, and now the place crawled with not only dead students and professors but corpses in hospital gowns and scrubs as well. There were thousands.
“If they spot us, we’re fucked.”
Alden’s voice, soft and shaking, came from behind them. “Fucked . . . anyway.”
Pulaski and Xavier turned as the schoolteacher pulled aside his Windbreaker and lifted his shirt, wincing at the movement as he exposed the flesh just above his hip.
He had been bitten.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Oakland
Christmas. Dad lighting a fire while Mom warmed up cider. Crystal as a little girl, excited and chattering nonstop, asking endless questions about Santa. Dad in a doorway, sweeping Mom into his arms and kissing her under mistletoe.
No.
On a date with Brandon Johnson, laughing at his jokes, making out in his car after the movie. Hours of texting with Kate that night to tell her all about it. Liking the way he made her feel, wondering if she should let him go all the way.
Stop.
Mom teaching her how to make lasagna. Dad running beside her bike after he took off the training wheels. Crystal announcing she wanted to be a veterinarian. The next day announcing she wanted to be an airline pilot.
Stop it.
Hugs. Fights. Quiet times. Trips to the mall. Falling asleep in a lawn chair on a sunny day. Taking Crystal to get her ears pierced. Concerts. School.
Stop it! STOP IT!
Skye growled and gritted her teeth, crunching hard, fingers laced across her stomach and feet hooked under a couch. Up, down, up, down, her abdominal muscles burning. She forced in the vision of her father being taken down, of her dead mother lurching toward her at the head of a murderous pack. She made herself see Crystal, flesh torn and teeth snapping.
A miss is a miss.
Anything other than a head shot is a miss.
A miss is a wasted bullet that won’t kill one of them.
That is unacceptable.
That is unforgiveable.
You will hit.
You will kill them.
> She saw her mother being savaged on the campus lawn, saw the look of terror on her sister’s face, felt her hand in her own as they ran for safety. Saw her being killed anyway. Skye screamed and flipped over, punishing herself with fast diamond push-ups.
Your family is gone.
Your friends are gone.
No one misses you.
No one cares about you.
They took the world away from you.
You will hit.
You will kill them.
All of them.
Skye cried out again and started doing mountain climbers, her thighs and buttocks aching, faster and faster.
All of them. All of them.
“All of them,” she said through clenched teeth.
She collapsed, burying her face in the carpet and heaving with what might have been exertion or might have been sobs, and then forced herself to stand. Wearing black cargo pants tucked into hiking boots and a sweat-darkened tank top, she took her rifle and headed down to the basement of the house she had taken over for the night. There was a small in-home gym down here, a Coleman lantern already glowing, sitting on a weightlifting bench where earlier sweat had yet to dry. Near it was a boxing dummy, a rubberized torso and head on a spring-mounted post, secured to a weighted base. Skye pulled on her pack and rifle for extra weight and began practicing with the machete.
The first trick was to pull it from where it hung on the pack over her left shoulder, without slicing her ear off. She practiced this single move for over an hour, pulling and replacing and pulling again, slowly at first, and then steadily faster until she knew how to keep her head out of the way and still get it out quickly.
She went to work on the dummy.
Skye trained until she could barely lift her right arm, working on the singular skill of pulling the blade and landing a clean, powerful head shot in one motion. Two hours later, the dummy was a mass of shredded rubber, and the head was gone.
When she was done she washed with unscented baby wipes and toweled off. She knew she still smelled bad, and the scalp under her chopped hair was itchy and sour, but she didn’t care. She didn’t put on deodorant, in case they could smell it.
A meal—canned ham, canned corn, and some peaches she found preserved in mason jars in a closet—was followed by some time studying her map. She was south of the MacArthur Freeway now, in Clawson, a part of Oakland, and heading south into the city itself. The neighborhood was a mix of businesses, industrial buildings, and old, clapboard row houses with sagging porches. The dead were more numerous here, and she hadn’t been able to travel through backyards as effectively as before; too much barbed wire, too many flimsy corrugated tin fences that made a lot of noise or threatened to collapse under her weight, too many yards overgrown with high weeds where a freak could be waiting unseen. Instead she jogged down alleys and sidewalks, sometimes down the street itself, rifle held ready, stopping only to shoot.
She didn’t keep count of her kills.
How high did you have to count before you got to all?
Several hours of sleep in an upstairs bedroom was followed by late-night sniping with the M24, and instead of her normal five rounds she shot eight. Then she was empty, and she had already balanced the odds of finding more .300 ammo against carrying the added weight of a worthless rifle. She zippered it back into its case, gave it a pat, and leaned it in a corner of the bedroom before finishing her night’s sleep.
When morning arrived it was raining, and a freak had found its way into the backyard.
Skye spotted it as soon as she stepped out the kitchen door, fully loaded for the day’s travel. It was a heavyset black lady in a loose purple housedress, what her mother called a muumuu. The two of them used to cover their laughter with their hands when they saw someone wearing one in Walmart. The black lady was barefoot, her skin losing its pigment and her hair falling out in patches, and she groaned as she waddled forward.
Skye strode toward the freak, pulling the machete and swinging, splitting its head in half. She jerked the blade free as it fell, then realized her forehead and right cheek were wet. She wiped a sleeve at it, seeing that she had caught a few drops of dark blood.
It was something that hadn’t occurred to her. Could she get infected that way? She wiped the blade on the muumuu and reseated it in its sheath, then used a baby wipe to clean her face. The weapon would be for emergencies only.
Later that morning she came upon an intersection where a pair of brown, camouflaged Humvees sat parked end to end, just like the kind Taylor and Sgt. Postman had been in when they rescued her, seemingly years ago. The nearest freaks were half a block away, and the intersection looked clear. Still, she approached with her rifle to her shoulder.
Thousands of empty shell casings were scattered across the pavement, rattling under her boots. She moved forward, finding both vehicles empty. There were no dead soldiers, but neither were there any dropped rifles or bandoliers. That made sense. Others were alive out here, and they would have immediately taken any weapons they found. She eyed the heavy machine gun mounted in the vehicle turret only briefly before discarding the idea. It was heavy and cumbersome, and even Postman’s soldiers had said it was worthless for this type of combat. The thought of driving the Humvee wasn’t even a consideration.
A search of the vehicle did turn up some useful things, however. A Maglite with fresh batteries was swapped out for her old one; a couple of rifle-cleaning kits provided fresh patches and gun oil; a plastic-wrapped energy bar provided a snack while she searched. In the rear seat she discovered a pair of hard plastic, cushioned knee pads and put them on at once. They would make it more comfortable to hold kneeling shooting positions.
She left the MREs she found, since she hadn’t used her own yet and suspected they would remain edible for years. Skye was about to move on when she spotted a dark green metal can with a narrow, hinged lid. It was sitting on the rear cargo deck, and stenciled on the side it read, 5.56mm TRACER—DAY 500 ct. Inside, the heavy can was filled with loose ammunition for the M4, each bullet tipped in phosphorescent green. Once again her exposure to movies and video games paid a dividend; she knew what tracer rounds were.
Skye picked it up by the handle and tested the weight. It was heavy, but not as much as it would have been prior to weeks of punishing exercise, and she could always drop it and run if necessary. She would load her magazines later. Now it was time to move.
Three blocks away her little side street intersected with the wider 32nd Street. A liquor store with bars on the windows was on her left, to her right was a little convenience and grocery store with window advertisements all in Spanish, and on the diagonal across the street sat a row house that had been taken by fire long before the plague. The dead were thick on 32nd, and she watched from a crouch behind a rusty car sitting on tireless rims. The air smelled of rot and oil smoke, and it was quiet except for the drumming of the rain on the roof of the derelict car. She watched the street. If she wanted to head farther south she would have to cross, and there were so many corpses drifting up and down it that crossing without being seen would be impossible.
Watching the dead shuffle past made her ache to pull the trigger.
Directly across the street, sitting on the corner, was a white board building with a steeply peaked roof. Narrow, arched windows of stained glass marched down the side, and from here it looked like the property was surrounded by a six-foot wrought-iron fence with sharp tips on each vertical bar. Even more intriguing was the high bell tower at one corner, rising above the main building and capped with its own peaked roof, tipped with a cross. Shuttered windows looked out from all sides of the steeple.
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 32nd Street, weaving in and out of turning bodies and reaching arms, going through the wrought-iron gate and slamming it behind he
r. 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 I-880, and 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, pawnshops, check-cashing spots, and small stores selling cheap clothing.
Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) Page 25
