Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead

by Campbell, John L.

  Peter said nothing. His sexual fantasy had distilled down to just the throat-slitting part.

  Angie closed the door and jogged up the street toward the tavern, assault rifle to her shoulder, eyes roving for threats. There was still only the one, but that could change quickly. The ghoul at the van’s open driver’s door had been licking and biting at blood on the pavement, its lips ragged and front teeth broken or scraped down to nubs. It looked up at the soft boot treads on the sidewalk, at the metallic snap of Angie clicking the Galil’s built-in bayonet into place, and let out a growl. A sharp thrust and the bayonet plunged through its eye, piercing its brain.

  She used a small flashlight and inspected the van. There was blood on the driver’s seat and spattered on the inside of the windshield, several ragged buckshot holes piercing the van’s skin where Margaret said she had shot at it, but no one was inside. The weapons and supplies in back appeared untouched. Had Maxie crashed the van and been pulled to his death by corpses? She prayed it was nothing as simple or merciful as that.

  Pausing to listen first at the tavern’s door, she eased it open and was immediately hit by the odors of cigarette smoke and something sour and rotten, different from the scent of the dead. Flashlight gripped tight against the Galil’s front stock, she held the weapon firmly to her shoulder and went in.

  A candle was glowing in a red jar on a table near the bar, an open bottle of whiskey and a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray beside it. Maxie’s .32 rested on the scarred wood beside the candle. The man himself sat in a wooden captain’s chair, leaning back from the table and rocking on the rear legs. His shirt was stained a dark red down the entire right side, and in the candlelight his face had a lumpy, jaundiced appearance.

  Angie advanced quickly, rifle muzzle pointed at his face, and swept the hideout pistol onto the floor. “Tell me why.”

  Maxie made a croaking sound and leaned forward heavily onto the table, one hand reaching for the cigarette, the other the bottle. He looked up at Angie. His right eye was swollen shut, the lower right side of his face a big, infected lump. Pus dribbled down his neck, which was swollen as well. He grimaced as he swigged from the bottle, then took a drag off the cigarette. Smoke hissed out from between clenched teeth.

  “Chinese bitch,” he growled, unable to properly open his mouth. “Saw her in the side mirror, blastin’ away with that shotgun.” He chuckled, a deep, wet sound, as if the infection had spread to his throat as well. Maxie was that sour rot she had smelled.

  “Lucky shot,” he said. “Piece of buckshot caught me below the ear, still in there. Smashed my jaw, messed me all up.” He set the bottle down and took another drag, groaning with the effort. “Funny, don’t you think, Miss Angie? Survive the zombies, get killed by a woman don’t even know how to shoot.” He tried to smile, exposing a single, gold-capped tooth. Even that small movement was painful.

  Angie leveled the rifle muzzle at his forehead. “Why did you kill them? Why Bud?”

  Maxie laughed, and then cried out. He raised his fingers to the swollen buckshot wound and winced, then looked at her with his good eye. “Ain’t got no nice, neat answers for you, missy. No Scooby-Doo wrap-up. Some folks is just bad.”

  Her finger tensed on the trigger.

  Maxie closed his eye. “Go on, now. Do what you come to do.”

  The shot didn’t come, and Maxie opened his eye. Angie’s rifle was lying on the table, but she was no longer standing across from him. Then a hand gripped his hair from behind and jerked his head back sharply, making him scream through his teeth.

  Angie whispered in his ear, showing him the blade of Peter’s hunting knife. “I’ve got a better idea.”

  • • •

  Maxie opened his eye and looked around. Through an open door he heard a screech of metal as Angie’s van backed off the fire hydrant and then rumbled down the street. Not that he was able to define any of this, exactly. It all indicated food, though.

  His eye looked around, vision slightly cloudy. The floor below him was wet and red, and just beyond, a motionless body was slumped in a chair at a table, clothes bloody, another corpse squatting beside it, feeding on one limp hand. Maxie wanted to be there. His eye rolled in its socket and fell upon the seated body again.

  It had been decapitated.

  From its new resting place on top of the bar, Maxie’s head glared out at the feeding corpse and rasped in frustration. He was so very hungry.

  SIX

  Positioned at the edge of the airfield where the base’s buildings began, the hangar was large enough to have once housed a B-52 bomber. It had since been converted into a nightclub, featuring a long bar, booths and tables, a large dance floor, and a stage for live bands. A row of windows down one side looked out at a lot where the Bearcat and Harley were now parked beside a white van and Maxie’s Cadillac.

  Near the stage, speakers and lighting equipment in rolling cases remained where they had been left by a band that would never play again. The quilted packing blankets used for the equipment were now being used as bedding for sleeping children. Adults curled up where they could, in booths or against walls, heads in each other’s laps. It had been a long time since any of them slept, and almost everyone collapsed as soon as the group got inside.

  A perimeter check uncovered a few fire exits—closed and secure—and showed that despite the area occupied by the nightclub, more than half the hangar remained open and unused. Fortunately, no drifters had been discovered in the echoing space. There was no power, of course, and the only illumination came from moonlight through the windows as the clouds finally broke apart.

  Carney sat in a chair near the windows, dozing with his M14 across his knees, and Jerry, the big comedian, slept lying down in front of the entrance doors, a shotgun beside him. Before he went to sleep he joked that if a zombie was strong enough to push his mass away from the doors, the group had bigger problems. There were smiles, but no laughter.

  TC sat on a stool at the bar, staring at his shadowy image in a mirror on the back wall, still without his shirt. He liked the way people looked at him when he was bare-chested: the men with nervousness, the women with curiosity. He had waited until Carney nodded off before helping himself to the tequila, and now one hand curled around the bottle, the other a shot glass.

  Darius, the sociology professor rescued by Rosa, and who had failed to kill Xavier, quietly went behind the bar to look for bottled water. He gave TC a smile and nod—which was not returned—and began checking the cold cases. TC poured a shot and raised the glass, inspecting the golden liquid before downing it. He smacked the glass on the bar and let out a gasp.

  The professor glanced at him and then the bottle, seeing how much was already gone. “Maybe you should go easy on that,” he said softly, not wanting to wake the others. “We’re all going to need clear heads.”

  TC cocked his head, and the corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Is that right?” He poured another shot, then leaned his elbows on the bar, holding the glass in both hands and dropping his voice to a matching whisper. “You remind me of someone.”

  Darius smiled and waited.

  “Yeah, a little bitch I punked out at the Q. I used to rent him out for smokes.”

  The professor stiffened as if slapped.

  “What do you say, dark meat? I like those pretty beads in your braids. Why don’t you come sit on my lap?”

  The sociology professor ducked his head and hurried away, and TC watched him go in the mirror, chuckling. “Maybe later, chocolate,” he murmured, downing the shot.

  In an office against one wall of the hangar, Margaret Chu slept in a chair, her shotgun leaning in a corner. The sick girl was still bound, lying on the carpeted floor near a desk. Wrapped in a packing blanket, her face glistening with sweat, the young woman tossed and mumbled through the gag. Rosa had made the girl as comfortable as possible, and Margaret volunteered to stand watch and
deal with her if and when she turned. Contrary to Xavier’s concerns about group panic over an infected person in their midst, there had been little argument. Everyone was too tired. Margaret wished she knew the girl’s name, but she would probably never find out. She knew what was coming.

  In the adjacent office, Rosa Escobedo finished giving Dane a shot of Demerol and placed a Band-Aid over the puncture. The bite wound at the back of his knee was freshly dressed with a clean bandage, and he sat propped against a wall, unspeaking and unable to meet anyone’s eyes. Maya stood near her father, rubbing his back, and nodded her thanks to the medic. Rosa closed the door on the way out.

  Xavier and Evan were waiting in the darkness of the big hangar, and the three of them moved off to sit on the back of the stage. They were all exhausted and said nothing for a while, just stared into the dark and listened to the silence.

  “We’re not safe here,” Xavier said at last. “It only feels like that because it’s quiet and nothing’s happening. That’s going to change. They’re going to find us here.”

  “And it’s too hard to defend,” said Evan. “Too many doors, all those windows.”

  Rosa sighed. “Those aren’t the only problems. Food and water are going to be an issue. It didn’t take long to scavenge through this place. We found some soda and bottled water, some bar snacks, but it won’t last long. There are supplies in that armored truck, we saw that, but only if those guys decide to share, and even then it’s going to run out quickly with this many people.”

  Xavier nodded. The group now numbered just over fifty.

  “People are going to start getting sick,” Rosa continued, and shook her head when the two men looked quickly at her. “Not the virus. But hygiene is a major problem for all of us, and there’s not enough water to drink, much less bathe. Then there’s poor nutrition. Most of us have been living on canned food and crap for over a month. It’s going to start taking its toll.”

  The priest knew she was right. Before the outbreak, he had been careful about his diet, exercising regularly and boxing four or five times a week. He had lost weight, noticed the loss of muscle tone and a growing flabbiness. He itched all the time and was developing boils from a lack of adequate washing. The others were experiencing the same.

  “Living outdoors all the time,” the medic said, “poor nutrition, poor hygiene . . . even the people who were in good health before this are going to decline, and then there’s that elderly couple from the firehouse. The man has MS and the woman is on oxygen, which will run out soon. Two of Calvin’s kids are diabetic. . . .” Rosa shook her head.

  There was the scuff of a boot in the darkness, and they turned to see Carney walking toward them, rifle slung. He rubbed at his unshaven face. “Mind if I join your meeting?”

  Xavier nodded. “I think it’s important you be here. I didn’t want to wake you, though.”

  “What’s on the agenda?”

  “Bad news,” said Evan.

  Carney chuckled. “Is there another kind?” He squatted and rested his arms on his knees.

  Rosa tipped her head toward the offices. “That man is going to turn. The girl too, probably. We’ll have to handle it fast.”

  “And quiet,” said Evan. “Gunfire attracts them.”

  Carney nodded. Before he dozed off, he had seen at least a dozen of the walking dead drifting past the hangar on their way to the airfield. None seemed interested in the group’s hiding place, but he knew that was only because they didn’t know there was food inside. “How long does insulin last if it’s not refrigerated?” he asked. “It’s been two hours since I had to shut the Bearcat off, since that cooler shut down. I see that Calvin brought it inside.”

  Rosa nodded. “He’s just taking precautions, because he doesn’t know when he’ll ever find more. Insulin can last at room temperature for about a month, and in fact that’s how you want it to be when you inject it. I’ve heard cold insulin hurts like a bastard. If you have an extra supply, though, you should keep it cold.”

  Carney chuckled and shook his head. “I was afraid it was like shellfish.” That got a soft laugh from all of them. He looked at Evan. “How did he keep that thing powered before? They couldn’t have just let a car run indefinitely.”

  Evan shook his head. “Calvin had a generator in the back of his van. They’d fire it up when they were camping or stopped for the night.” He looked at the others. “They’ve got a lot of gear in that caravan we abandoned in Oakland, stuff we could really use.”

  Xavier looked at the inmate. “And you’ve got a lot of gear in your truck. We were just talking about food and water.” The priest let the sentence hang there, and the others watched and waited for a reply.

  Carney looked back at them. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a choice. I’m not that big of a prick that I’m going to keep it all for myself, but with this many people it’s not going to last more than a few days. We better have a plan soon.”

  Xavier smiled and nodded his thanks.

  “How’s your partner going to feel about that?” Rosa asked.

  “I’ll deal with him,” Carney said, already knowing how TC would respond.

  The woman looked at him. “Who were you, before all this, Carney?”

  The man didn’t respond, and the silence went on so long it didn’t look like he would. Then he stood up and folded his arms. “For the last seventeen years I’ve been an inmate at San Quentin for double murder. My wife and her lover were drug addicts who let my daughter choke to death, and I killed them both in their sleep. I’d do it again.” He looked at their faces and nodded. “More than you were expecting. Careful you don’t ask questions when you’re not ready for the answers. Is this going to be a problem?”

  Xavier looked at the man, at the years of grief that tried unsuccessfully to hide behind hard blue eyes. “Are you going to be a problem for us?”

  “No,” Carney said, delivering the word without hesitation.

  Xavier wasn’t ready to ask the same question about the man’s partner, however, for it was now obvious where the two had met. “People change,” the priest said. “Your word’s good enough for me.”

  The inmate pursed his lips. No one had ever said that to him. He turned to look at the medic. “I answered your question, Doc; now I have one. What is all this?” He waved an arm. “How is it, exactly, that the dead are walking around wiping us out?” It was the question, one with which they had all wrestled, yet for the most part they had been on the run and fighting to survive too often to care about the answer. Now here it was.

  Rosa shook her head. “I’m not a doctor.”

  Carney laughed and sat down on the stage beside her. “Oh, no, Doc, I’m not letting you get away with that.”

  “Look,” she said, “I got my degree and finished pre-med, but actual med school hadn’t started yet. I’m just a medic.”

  “And that makes you the closest thing we have to an expert,” Carney said. “So let’s hear it. You must have a theory.” The others looked at her as well.

  Rosa hesitated, and then shook her head. “I can tell you what I heard and what I saw, give you my opinion, but that’s all. You need a virologist.”

  They nodded for her to go on.

  “Okay. We’ve been calling it a virus, but that’s just an assumption based upon how it acts. It could actually be something hidden in the genetic code. I don’t know if anyone’s done any lab work on it, so I can’t say. Let’s call it a virus for now.”

  “The Omega Virus, that’s what the news called it,” Carney said.

  “Right,” Rosa said, nodding. “But it’s more complex than that. There’s something else at work, maybe even a separate strain of OV. The virus is acting like a blood-borne pathogen in the sense that fluid exposure can give you the disease, almost certainly will give you the disease, but if it’s not through a bite, it isn’t always fatal.”

 
They all thought about the girl in the other room.

  “How is that even possible?” asked Evan. “Fluid is fluid; if it’s infectious it wouldn’t matter where it came from in the body.”

  The medic shrugged. “I didn’t say it made sense or that it’s right. It’s just a theory based on what I’ve seen, both in the field hospital and out there.” She waved an arm. “Maybe it has to do with the carrier, some mutation in the walking dead. An autopsy on one of them might explain more.”

  “But even if one of the dead doesn’t kill you outright,” said Xavier, “the bite eventually will.”

  “Yes,” Rosa said. “The bite triggers the fever, and it’s always fatal. But it’s not what turns you.”

  “Bullshit,” said Carney. “You get bitten, you turn. Simple.”

  The medic shook her head. “Wrong. You get bitten, it kills you, and then you turn. Death is the problem here, and that’s why there has to be something else at work.”

  They stared at her.

  Rosa looked at each of them. “Ever see someone turn who hadn’t been bitten?”

  They nodded, Carney with a startled look on his face. He remembered the overweight corrections officer guarding them who’d gone down with a heart attack, only to rise again minutes later. Xavier remembered the San Francisco cop he’d seen who had been lynched, and probably died from the hanging. Yet there he was, dangling by the neck and jerking about.

  Rosa saw the realization. “It’s death,” she said. “The doctors at the field hospital speculated that OV was already inside all of us, leading some to believe it was in our water supply, or more likely, airborne. Either way, it lies dormant, without symptoms, waiting for a specific trigger, which appears to be death.” She dug a water bottle out of a cargo pocket while the others experienced a brief crawling sensation as they imagined the corruption lying silently within them.