Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead

by Campbell, John L.

  Some humans had publicly proclaimed their sensitivity, and in the days and hours leading up to an earthquake they had complained of dizziness, ringing in the ears, headaches, and anxiety. These claims of forecasting were often determined to be coincidence or even outright fabrications, but proved accurate (and inexplicable) just often enough to make believers out of some people. Within the scientific community, however, a scientist professing any formal belief in human sensitivity to earthquakes ran the risk of ridicule and professional disregard at best, and at worst, denial of research grants.

  The dead were sensitive. All of them.

  Not only did they sense impending earthquakes, they were able to determine the direction and approximate location of the epicenter. They were drawn to it. Now the dead from over a hundred miles away in all directions were slowly being drawn to a point where, on the surface, a pair of cracked asphalt streets intersected in the middle of the deserted naval air station.

  As before, it was the friction of the Hayward Fault that sent shocks out in a wide, growing circle.

  • • •

  Within San Francisco, the quake had assorted effects. In most places a few windows cracked and some car alarms went off, but other areas experienced more damage. In almost every case, the eyes witnessing the events were dead and uncomprehending, and the bodies in which they resided all faced the same direction.

  Near Alamo Square, backdropped by downtown skyscrapers, the row of escalating Victorian houses known as the Painted Ladies—much photographed and appearing in numerous films and television programs—lost two of their number to the shaking. The Ladies first leaned, hung at an odd angle for a moment, and then toppled in an explosion of wood, glass, and shingles. Two zombies standing on a sidewalk were buried in the collapse.

  At the Palace of Fine Arts, a dozen corpses dressed as joggers stood and faced east on the bottom of the lagoon near the center’s beautiful rotunda. The quake knocked down a row of Greek-style colonnades not far from the lagoon, marble detonating like bombs on impact. The remnants of a grade school field trip, a dozen third-graders all dressed in the same bright-green T-shirts with their name on a laminated card hung around their necks and wearing an assortment of cartoon character backpacks, stood on an adjacent brick path. They were peppered with marble fragments that tore into flesh and would have sent them screaming to the emergency room not so long ago. Now they didn’t even notice.

  The Castro had already burned. The heart of San Francisco’s gay community was a neighborhood of hilly avenues and Victorian buildings, much of it charred and skeletal. The dead rode out the quake standing and shaking in streets filled with discarded bicycles and backpacks, abandoned cars and sidewalk sandwich boards advertising small shops and cafés. One zombie, a fifty-year-old drag queen with a crooked blond wig, torn sundress, and gladiator sandals, stood near a brick wall covered in posters shouting about clubs and political agendas, one of her legs fractured with the foot twisted nearly backward. The heavy makeup clumping on what remained of her face made her appear especially ghastly. Already off balance because of the leg, the creature fell to the pavement when the quake began. Groaning, the drag queen attempted to rise just as a five-hundred-pound piece of masonry from a third-floor ledge broke free and crushed her into the sidewalk.

  Haight-Ashbury suffered more than some areas, in part because of uncontrolled fires that had weakened structures, and also because many had not been that well cared for anyway. The neighborhood famous for its 1967 Summer of Love, hippies, psychedelic rockers, and, more recently, street festivals, cafés, and eclectic shops, had lost entire blocks. Rows of brightly painted apartments resting atop bookstores and boutiques simply tumbled out into the streets, burying cars and the walking dead alike. Most drifters survived the impact of falling brick but were too uncoordinated to pull themselves free of the rubble once it was over, and their fellow corpses wandered past the struggling arms and legs, incapable of helping or even realizing that they should.

  The fires that swept through the downtown section of the city had been spectacular, the intense flames weakening some skyscrapers and causing others to tip over like rotten trees. The eight-second tremor shook great sheets of glass from high windows, and several-hundred-pound guillotines crashed down from on high, detonating in explosions of deadly pixie dust or cutting immobile corpses completely in half. The quake finished off the worst of the leaning towers, filling the streets with mountains of debris and snarls of bent steel.

  Near Fisherman’s Wharf, zombies that had been piled up against chain-link fences, moaning at the clusters of barking sea lions out on old piers, stood in packed groups facing east, all shuddering as one. When the quake ended, they returned to their incessant pushing, only to find that the tremor had weakened the fence’s footings. As the chain link gave way, several hundred bodies tumbled into the cold waters, reaching out to the distant animals. Within minutes the surface was split by dozens of dorsal fins, sharks drawn in from the Pacific that had been circling the aging docks, now breaking away in a feeding frenzy among the sinking bodies. The sea lions watched, huddled closer together, and stayed out of the water.

  At Pier 39, those who had once flocked here for chowder in bread bowls and tickets to Alcatraz now tottered off their feet and rolled on the ground for a while, a few entangled with fallen canopies or cut by broken glass, but none perished. Belowground was a different story. Within the three hundred feet of nearby aquarium tunnels, dead tourists, guides, and maintenance workers stood in the shaking darkness, their eastern focus not even pulled away by the loud cracking coming from the thick glass offering views of what lived beneath the bay’s surface. Several sharks cruised past, and in the murky distance a herd of corpses stumbled slowly over slime-coated rocks.

  When the observation windows imploded like baritone grenades, the bay made such a violent entry that bodies were smashed against the far concrete wall. The dead didn’t even register surprise.

  Out on the most central portion of the Golden Gate Bridge, the mindless dead stood staring at the bay amid a river of burned automobiles. At their center was the beige mass of a silent M1 main battle tank. The bridge had survived countless quakes over the decades of its existence, but this time the steel supports beneath a fifty-foot section of reinforced concrete gave way, and that section of road dropped into the waters below. A dozen cars, two dozen zombies, and the tank plunged silently after it.

  The damage was more severe on the Oakland side. Sagging, abandoned warehouses and poorly constructed apartment buildings collapsed, and the downtown section, decimated by unchecked fires just as San Francisco had been, saw office buildings crumble like matchstick towers. Just to the north, a refinery pipe that serviced tanker ships ruptured, dumping petroleum into the bay at a startling rate. Within western Oakland, up the length of Peralta, the pavement buckled and split, leaving a jagged, three-foot-wide crack in the earth, one side two feet higher than the other. Cars, trucks, and a pair of city buses slid into the crack and came to rest on edge, wheels tilted upward. More than two hundred zombies disappeared into the crevice as well.

  Their absence didn’t make a dent in the legion of walking dead moving through Oakland.

  • • •

  Maya was a Californian. She had been through earthquakes before, knew what they felt like, and although this was the biggest she could remember—she had been born after the killer in ’89—and eight seconds of shaking was a very long time, she wasn’t nervous. Part of this was that for her, it was a silent event, one of sensation. And she recognized that had the warship been floating free and not snugged up tightly against the pier, she probably wouldn’t have felt it at all.

  Her binoculars went immediately to the crowd of people gathered at the end of the pier. Though she couldn’t hear their cries of alarm, she saw their looks of terror as they clustered tightly together until the shaking stopped. When it did, they were none the worse for it. There appeared to be
no injuries, and the pier was just as solid as it had been. She turned the binoculars toward the naval base in time to see a hangar at the edge of the airfield silently drop from view, replaced by a rising cloud of white dust. Her breath caught at the sight, wondering if that was the hangar in which they had all taken refuge. If so, it was now a grave marker for her mother and uncle, tightly wrapped in plastic tarps and laid gently in the shadows of a back wall.

  She did not notice how the dead stopped moving for the duration of the event.

  Thinking about loss turned her attention back to Evan, her father, and the others, and the binoculars sought out the aircraft carrier. It was now a long shadow on the water as the day faded into twilight.

  Come back to me, Evan. The words had turned into a silent prayer.

  TWENTY-SIX

  On the carrier, the earthquake barely registered. Only a small portion of the carrier was dug into the sea bottom near the bow, and the sheer size of the vessel displaced the rest of the vibrations. Down in the hangar bay, Carney had bigger problems than odd trembling. There were just too many of the dead and by the time Carney realized that, he was reaching for a fresh magazine that no longer existed.

  The two inmates had managed to push forward nearly half the length of the hangar, drawing even with a space between a pair of giant aircraft elevators on one side, and the first in a row of helicopters against the wall on the other, rotor blades folded back for tight storage. TC had cast aside the empty automatic shotgun in favor of the Navy M4, a weapon that required more accuracy. In his fury he had switched to firing full auto, quickly burning through his ammunition.

  The dead fell, but new corpses took their places.

  “I’m empty,” Carney shouted, reversing his M14 so he could use its heavy wooden stock as a club.

  “Me too,” yelled TC, thirty feet ahead of him. The younger inmate dropped the rifle and pulled the long wrench from his belt, caving in a corpse’s head, rushing another, putting it down, and searching for more.

  They were going to be surrounded and overrun. Carney looked around desperately, spotted an open hatch on the wall, headed for it. “TC, this way!” He drove his rifle’s butt plate into a gray face, knocking it aside but not killing it. “Now, TC!”

  TC swung the wrench like a home run slugger and crushed the side of a sailor’s head, just as two more leaped upon his back, making him stagger forward. One bit into the Kevlar body armor; the other chewed into an empty pouch on his shoulder where a radio would normally sit. TC whirled, shaking them off, beating them both down with the wrench.

  Carney reached the open hatch, finding a space with sets of rising and descending stairs, and another corridor. A zombie stumbled through after him from the hangar bay but tripped over the knee knocker and fell flat. Carney finished it with the rifle butt.

  “Any fucking day now!” he shouted through the hatch.

  TC swung, crushed a collarbone and made a corpse’s head flop to one side, then ran for the hatch. A dozen zombies lurched after him, hundreds more angling in from the far reaches of the hangar. TC jumped over the body in the opening, boots sliding in gore. “Up or down?”

  Carney started up a stairway, his cellmate close behind. In less than a minute the dead from the hangar bay began pouring through the hatch, moaning and clawing at each other in their eagerness to climb the stairs. The inmates reached the next deck, which offered the option of three hallways or more stairs.

  Corpses began stomping down the metal risers above them.

  Carney took off at a jog down the center passageway, another poorly lit tunnel that looked like every other one on this goddamn ship, passing doors marked PUBLIC AFFAIRS and JAG, some with an officer’s name posted to one side. When he came to the end of the hall, he was facing a door marked STUDIO.

  “They’re coming,” TC said, looking back. A mob of shadowy figures pressed up the hallway, their moans reverberating off the steel.

  Carney worked the dog handle on the hatch and entered the dark room. TC followed without hesitation, slamming the door behind him. They stood in the blackness, unmoving as they waited for their eyes to adjust, straining to see, trying to listen over their own heavy breathing.

  A low croaking from somewhere in front of them said they were not alone.

  Carney dropped his rifle and shed his pack, digging through it. He came out with a handful of loaded pistol magazines, a nine-millimeter Beretta, and a heavy Maglite. He switched it on, and not ten feet away was a rotting female sailor galloping at him.

  Carney shot her in the face, then let out a ragged breath.

  TC rummaged through his own pack. He hadn’t brought a pistol, but he produced his own flashlight. Together they panned their beams around the room. There was a blue banner on the far wall with Nimitz’s emblem sewn into it, a lectern standing in front of the banner, and a pair of large television cameras on wheeled caddies, cables snaking off toward the walls. To one side was a glassed-in control booth, on the other a row of doors.

  A corpse pressed its face against the control room window, smearing it with gore and biting at the glass. Behind them, bodies slammed into the hatch, and TC threw his weight onto the dog handle just as it started to come up.

  “Hold that,” Carney said, moving into the room.

  TC laughed. “Yeah, no shit.”

  The older man quickly returned with a coil of heavy cable, and they lashed the handle down tight. When TC let go, the handle wiggled a bit, but no more than an inch.

  TC nodded at the pistol in his cellmate’s hand. “Wish I’d thought of that. Don’t guess you got another one.”

  “Nope,” said Carney, “and you wouldn’t need one if you hadn’t blown off all your ammo like you were Bruce fucking Willis.” Carney walked to the door of the control room.

  “Yeah, but what a rush,” TC laughed. A single pistol shot put the control room zombie’s brains on the glass. “Sweet,” TC said, grinning and watching pieces of gray matter slide down the window.

  Carney checked the other doors. One opened into a long electrical room, the other two into an office and a small conference room respectively. None had exit doors.

  “We’re in a dead end,” Carney said, walking back into the studio.

  TC dropped into a wheeled office chair and lit two cigarettes, passing one to his cellmate and tipping his head back, blowing smoke at the acoustic-tiled ceiling. “Fine with me,” he said, stretching out his legs. “I need a break anyway.”

  Carney took another chair.

  “We should have cut out for Mexico when I suggested it,” TC said, huffing smoke through his nose. “That idea’s fucked now.”

  “I told you to take off if you wanted to,” said Carney.

  TC tilted back and ran his fingers through his long hair. “Nah, this is more fun.”

  “Yeah,” Carney said, looking at the cabled hatch, listening as dozens of fists pounded against the steel on the other side. “Fun.”

  TC yawned and dug a can of warm Pepsi and a bag of pretzels out of his pack. “I’m gonna eat, jack off, and take a nap,” he said, popping the can and shaking the foam off his hand.

  Carney nodded and pulled a pouch of jerky from his own pack, looking at his cellmate. You go and take a nap, TC. There was no way he was going to let himself fall asleep in this room with that rabid motherfucker.

  But after listening to TC snore for twenty minutes, Carney did just that.

  • • •

  Despite her impairments, weeks of physical conditioning sent Skye up the exterior superstructure ladder like a gymnast with Angie close behind. By the time she reached the opening to the lowest catwalk level, her left hand had stopped shaking and her headache had subsided to a tolerable buzz.

  Advancing slowly along the tight steel gridwork, elbows nearly touching the railing on one side and the tipped-out blue glass windows on the other, the women moved to t
he seaward side of the superstructure.

  The view from up here was spectacular. Twilight had at last broken through the clouds, turning both sky and sea a dark pink. A strengthening breeze rustled their clothing and threatened to lift Angie’s ball cap off her head. The air was salty and clean, and for just a moment it was possible to imagine the world that was fresh, clean, and not an ever-expanding crypt.

  The glass encircling the interior of this deck was thick and polarized, not permitting them to see what lurked within. They used the catwalk to make a complete lap of the tower, finding that on each side of the superstructure was a hatch to the interior and a set of stairs up to the next catwalk, seaward side and flight deck side. The hatches were stenciled FLAG BRIDGE. The only zombies they found were those Angie had shot earlier from below, and they couldn’t hurt anyone now.

  Angie looked at her partner. “You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

  Skye nodded. “The pain’s almost gone. I’m okay.”

  “Then you decide, up or in?”

  The younger woman looked up through the grillework of the catwalk above. “I’m thinking if we go as high as we can, then they can only come at us from one direction.”

  “You sound like a sniper,” Angie said.

  Skye shook her head. “Sergeant Postman would chew my ass for putting us in a place with no exit route.”

  Angie didn’t know who Sgt. Postman was, but he was sure to be one of the many ghosts haunting the girl. Didn’t they all have more than their share of those? “I think it’s a good plan. We’ll have excellent elevation for shooting, and we can switch off on security to make sure they don’t come at us from behind.”

  “They’ll come,” said Skye.

  Angie could only nod.

  Skye led them up to the next catwalk, a place identical to the level below. Here, however, the hatch on the flight deck side stood open. This was where Angie had shot at the dead officer, who saved himself by accidentally stumbling in through the opening. Skye raised the eyebrow over her now completely white, blind eye. It was an unsettling look. Angie shrugged, and then leaned in through the hatch, rifle first.