The medic looked inside to see a girl—a woman, actually, probably not even twenty—lying on the floor, hands, feet, and mouth secured. She wore a mix of fatigues and civilian clothing. Rosa climbed in and crouched beside her, looking over the gag and zip ties to be certain they were secure. She recognized the restlessness and sweating, felt the heat coming off her. “When was she bitten?”
“I don’t think she was,” Carney said. “She got brains and blood in her face, definitely in her mouth, probably her eyes too.”
“No bites?” Rosa pulled on rubber gloves and produced a pair of surgical scissors, cutting away the girl’s clothes. She didn’t see any bite wounds. “When did this happen?”
“This morning,” said Carney, “in Oakland. We got her out of a church where she was playing sniper.” Then he remembered the many bodies in the street, and the accuracy with which she killed. Perhaps playing wasn’t the right word. “She’s been like this since.”
Rosa checked her watch. It was hard to see as the storm chased the last of the daylight from the sky, and the rear of the truck didn’t have a dome light that came on when the doors opened. She figured maybe nine hours. “Any vomiting?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” said Carney. He looked around for TC. The man was nowhere in sight.
Rosa shook her head. “It’s unlikely. If she’d done it with this gag in place, she’d have choked to death.”
Carney looked back into the truck. “She’s sick, probably the virus.” He pointed. “That gag stays in place.”
“No argument,” said Rosa. She lifted the girl’s eyelids one at a time. The right eye was clear and white, but the left had a milky, yellow tint, and the pupil was both enlarged and a cloudy blue, like a cataract. She wrapped the girl in a blanket she found draped over a cardboard case of peanut butter. “We’ll know in another twelve to fifteen hours,” she said, climbing out of the truck. “She’ll have to be watched. If she starts to vomit, we’ll have to get that gag off and clear her airway.”
Carney shook his head. “I don’t know why I saved her in the first place, and I sure don’t know why I’ve kept her with us this long. She’s going to turn into one of those things. What’s the point?”
“Doc, what will we know in twelve to fifteen hours?” Xavier asked.
“Whether she’s going to pull through,” said Rosa. “It could be the slow burn I told you about, exposure to infected fluids from something other than a bite. Inside twenty-four hours the victim either comes out of the fever, or turns.”
No one spoke as that sank in, the sway of the barge rocking them all gently.
“You mean she could live?” asked Carney. “What are her chances?”
Rosa shrugged. “Not great. I saw only a few cases, and only one that lived.” She glanced back at the girl. “I’ll stay with her, if that’s okay.”
Carney nodded.
“What’s her name?” asked Xavier.
“I have no idea,” said Carney, walking back along the side of the truck. The priest, medic, and hippie exchanged glances, followed by introductions. Calvin quickly filled them in on their odyssey into Oakland, and how Evan had come to be with them. Xavier found that he liked Calvin at once, attracted to his easygoing, confident manner. He was clearly a person to whom people looked for answers and guidance, and the priest suspected he would be a good man to have around in a crisis.
The journey to a nearby boat ramp took only a few minutes. “Coming in now,” Evan called from the wheelhouse, and a moment later the barge shuddered as its hull slid up onto angled cement. Carney soon had the Bearcat riot vehicle they had taken from the prison on the access road beside the lagoon.
The large hippie family joined them minutes later, having paused to break open some snack and soda vending machines back at what turned out to be a yacht mooring, sales, and maintenance facility. A bearded young man named Mercury pushed Evan’s Harley up beside the Bearcat, as Xavier and Rosa climbed out to join the group. Carney walked up a moment later, but TC stayed in the truck. Watchful eyes scanned the vacant buildings as evening came on fast under a stormy sky.
“If my sense of direction is right,” said Evan, “the helicopter landed somewhere over there.” He pointed to the northeast, across the lagoon. Warehouses and hangars stood in gray rows where he was pointing, some with streets between them, all with darkened windows.
Rosa nodded. “The airfield is over that way.” When this drew some looks, she said, “I live in San Francisco and I’m in the Navy. I’ve never been here, but the place isn’t a secret. It’s huge, though. If we’re going, we need to move. It’s getting dark.”
“Maybe we should wait until morning,” said Faith, holding her and Calvin’s ten- and twelve-year-old sons close to her sides. “We never travel at night.” Her face, worn from years on the road but normally warm and welcoming, had a strained, cornered look.
“I doubt anyone does,” said Evan, looking around. Everyone shook their heads. “But can we risk waiting and having that helicopter take off before we get there?” More looks, more shaking heads.
“He’s right,” said Calvin. “We’ll stay close together, guns on the outside, and keep moving.” The hippie looked at Carney. “You coming?”
Carney paused, then nodded.
“Maybe you could drive slowly ahead of us, let your headlights show us what’s coming?”
Another nod.
Calvin nodded back. “Couldn’t help but notice the firepower you’ve got in that truck. Spreading it around could—”
“We’re not drinking buddies just yet,” said the con, his lip curling. “You keep your people close to the truck, and we’ll see what happens.”
“I’ll scout ahead,” said Evan, climbing onto the Harley with Maya. Xavier and Rosa returned to the back of the Bearcat, and minutes later the group was moving slowly through the abandoned naval base, the taillight and engine noise of Evan’s Road King vanishing in the thickening gloom of twilight.
In the cab of the rumbling Bearcat, Carney glanced at his cellmate. TC just grinned at him, planted his boots on the dashboard, and cracked open a Red Bull.
FOUR
Naval Air Station Alameda—now called Alameda Point—closed in 1997. Before that, its 2,500 acres had served naval aircraft and provided a berthing for Pacific Fleet ships since before World War II. It was made up of over thirty miles of road and three hundred buildings, from hangars and machine shops to barracks, administration facilities, and on-base housing for military families, as well as the infrastructure to support them: shopping, theaters, barbershops, food service, laundry, and recreation centers.
Over the years since its closing there had been several attempts to create modern housing developments. It was, after all, prime waterfront real estate in a densely populated area. In each case, developers had withdrawn—or been asked to—and so throughout the base were signs of partial demolition and halted ground clearing. Many places were still occupied by silent heavy equipment parked next to towering mounds of gravel and broken brick. Repurposing the base had met with numerous complications. There were issues of soil and groundwater contamination as a landfill in the southwest corner had been found to contain PCBs and was the subject of a Superfund project, as well as concerns over flood plans, local wildlife, and legal issues. There were existing leases to consider, and a stubborn historical society that had hired some expensive lawyers and planted its feet, determined to hold its ground. The Naval Air Museum, which included stewardship for the World War II carrier Hornet, had proven a worthy adversary in the battle to reclaim the valuable property.
The old base wasn’t entirely abandoned. Some buildings had been converted to fitness clubs, design studios, tech companies, auction houses, and nightclubs, as well as a training facility for the City of Alameda Fire Department. Several reality shows—Angie’s Armory among them—regularly filmed out on the old runways when working with
explosives. A plane crash had been staged there for one movie, and still another film company had actually constructed a great looping road around the airfield in order to film a car chase.
Most of the three hundred buildings, however, were vacant and decaying in the sea air. Cavernous hangars were home to pigeons and gulls; two- and three-story barracks sat behind dead, brown lawns while weeds grew unchallenged up through sidewalk cracks and asphalt. Vandals had had their way, broken windows and graffiti marring what had once been clean, uniform structures.
Back when it was a naval facility, a high, sturdy fence topped with razor wire had encircled the base, well maintained and regularly patrolled. Now, decades after the closing, the fence was in disrepair: cut or pulled aside in places by curious explorers, rusted and sagging in others, or missing altogether to permit demolition and the passage of bulldozers and dump trucks. The roads into the vacant blocks of the on-base housing sections were closed off only by sawhorse barricades and No Trespassing signs.
NAS Alameda was not secure. Despite its empty and remote nature, it was not free of the dead.
Calvin and his group followed the slow-moving Bearcat on foot as it traveled through the evening streets, keeping close together. They stopped only once, when they found a trio of landscaping trailers parked along a curb, loaded with lawn mowers and tools. They collected whatever they could find: spades, hedge clippers, long-handled limb saws, and scythes. Ragged and armed with these primitive weapons, they resembled a small, medieval army marching behind a siege engine, heading off to war.
In the rear of the armored truck, Xavier sat on a bench watching Rosa as she knelt beside the infected girl on the floor, cooling her forehead with a damp rag and checking her pulse every so often. He knew he should be praying for the girl, but he wasn’t. He had told Rosa he was a priest, but was that really true? While ministering to Alden as he died, Xavier had thought that maybe he hadn’t lost his faith after all and could possibly reclaim what he thought he had forsaken. When the dead had him cornered on that San Francisco dock, he had begun to pray, but did that mean anything? Was it only reflex, a habit? There had been no stunning revelation of faith, no sense of God’s return to his life. As Rosa had pulled the patrol boat into the Alameda dock, he had stood ready with the shotgun not because he feared he would be facing the dead, but because of the armed strangers arriving on the barge ahead of them, his fellow man.
No, still not a priest. And now he was a liar as well.
He wondered what would become of the girl on the floor. She would turn, most likely, and have to be put down. Who would do it? Could he? Not if he had any hopes of regaining God’s grace. He wondered about the men up front too. They didn’t feel like corrections officers, and they had almost certainly come across this van and made it their own, filling it as they scavenged on the move. There was a hardness to them, a dangerous feeling with which he was familiar, and he decided it was more than a little likely that both they and the riot vehicle had come from the same place. They would require watching.
The seat rumbling beneath him, Xavier thought again about the God he had served for most of his adult life. Had He done all this and ended mankind? That was what he had been taught to believe, that everything was God’s will, whether it made sense or not to men. It was all part of the mystery. But this . . . this nightmare. It flew in the face of the idea that He was a loving and merciful God. But then didn’t most terrible events do that? School shootings and genocide, war and famine, even the gut-wrenching poverty and homelessness he had seen in the Tenderloin. Now this, the eradication of mankind at the hands—teeth—of the walking dead. It was enough to make a faithful man doubt. What chance did he have, a man with no faith at all?
The Bearcat rolled slowly through the base.
In the cab, TC glanced into the back, then leaned toward his cellmate, speaking in a whisper. “What the fuck are we doing?”
Carney glanced at him. “Looking for a helicopter.”
“We’re supposed to be looking for Mexico, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“So what the fuck?”
Carney looked at him from the corner of his eye, still keeping his attention on the road ahead. “What are you talking about?”
TC glanced in the back again. “It’s supposed to be you and me, putting distance between us and high walls, man. How did we end up babysitting all these motherfuckers?”
“TC, you been sleeping this whole time? You know goddamn well how we got here.”
“We’re supposed to be free,” the younger man pressed. “On the road and taking whatever we want. We don’t answer to nobody no more. Now you’re taking orders from that hippie like you were his—”
Carney’s eyes turned to slits as he stared at his cellmate. “Say it. Go on, call me his bitch and see what happens.”
TC looked away and said nothing.
Carney shoved the back of TC’s head hard. When the younger man whipped back around, Carney bared his teeth. “You little punk. You think you’re strong?” His voice was a snarl. “You think you’d even be alive if it wasn’t for me? You’d still be cuffed to that bar, as dead as the rest of them.”
TC started to say something, but Carney cut him off. “Any time you want to try me, boy, you just jump. Any . . . fucking . . . time.”
The younger man looked back out the passenger window, his head down. When he spoke, it came out as a whine, but didn’t quite sound genuine. “It ain’t like that. You’re my bro, and you know I appreciate everything you done for me, inside and out. But, you know, I’m just worried that you’re gonna forget.”
“About what?”
“Me. That you won’t need me around.”
“Oh, bullshit. Just keep playing with me, TC. I’ll fuck you up for the fun of it.”
The younger man looked at him then. “I’m afraid you’re gonna forget that you can’t trust none of them. You get that? These are the people who put us inside, these straight-up, law-and-order motherfuckers. Just don’t forget that they don’t give a shit about people like us, man. Don’t you ever forget it.” He looked at his feet.
It had to be the most Carney had heard his cellmate say at one time that wasn’t nonsense or just brainless chatter. But the dog was pulling hard at the chain, and Carney worried what would happen if it broke. “Look at me.” TC did. “I run this show, boy. If I decide to give them our food or guns or any other damned thing, I’ll do it. If I decide to drive away or steal that helicopter or waste the hippie, that’s my decision. It’s my show. If you don’t like it, you can get out right now.”
TC looked back at his boots.
“And the next time you act like you want to throw down with me, you get ready to bleed. Now don’t talk for a while.”
Carney watched the headlights crawl down a vacant street that a sign at a corner identified as Avenue F. He suppressed a shudder, relieved that his cellmate was properly cowed once more, at least for the moment, and reminded himself to never forget what TC was: an animal, violent and dangerous, and most of all unpredictable. He could go from smiling to rage in a finger snap, and despite his hot-tempered challenge to the younger man, Carney wasn’t at all convinced that if they went to war, he would come out on top.
And then there was the matter of what Calvin had told him, that he had interrupted TC when he was alone with the girl. Had something happened? Carney had warned his cellmate to stay away from her, threatened retribution if he didn’t. How far was he prepared to go? He decided now wasn’t the time, and besides, the girl was safe. That black dude with the scar looked like he could give TC a good fight if it came to that. And as for the girl, Carney still wasn’t sure why he felt so protective. Was it because she was about how old his own daughter would have been if she hadn’t choked to death as a toddler? No, he hadn’t even known her. Was it because, inside, Carney had never been able to abide seeing the helpless have no on
e to take their side?
Bullshit, he told himself, curling his lip. Who was he to even try on high morals like that? Wasn’t he the one who left a row of helpless men chained to a bar so they could be eaten by the dead? And hadn’t it been him with that baseball bat in his hands, beating two people to death while they slept? Right, Bill Carnes, champion of the helpless. He wanted to spit. He was a killer and a convict, nothing more. Better to keep things in the short term, stay alert and stay alive, and figure things out as they came. Leave the philosophy to people who could swallow it without choking.
Ahead, the kid and his girl were sitting on their motorcycle, surrounded by enormous aircraft hangars and stopped in the street as it made a turn to the right, waiting for them to catch up. When the Bearcat trundled up to them, the kid gave a thumbs-up and motored down the new street, apparently the last one before the hangars gave way to the airfield beyond.
Carney checked his side mirror, saw that Calvin and his people were still behind him, and followed.
• • •
Are these people with you?” Vladimir asked, looking across the airfield toward the single beam of a motorcycle and the lights of a larger truck behind it. They were several hundred yards away. The Russian helicopter pilot felt exposed, and wished he were airborne.
“I don’t think so,” Margaret Chu said slowly. “Elson! Jerry!” Standing near the white seniors van and the vintage Cadillac, the two men—one a lawyer, and the other, a rotund, stand-up comic named Jerry—retrieved a shotgun and handgun, and came to stand beside Margaret and the Russian near the helicopter. A high school–aged girl named Meagan, who didn’t speak much and avoided direct eye contact, joined them. She carried a lawn mower blade as a weapon, and had refused to be parted from it since the day Angie West found her during a scouting trip and brought her into the group. The blade was stained red, and Meagan would not wipe it away.
Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead Page 4
