Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road

by John L. Campbell

  The snow came to her chest, and Pepper floundered in it, unable to move her legs. She fell over sideways, arms flailing, and grunted as she dropped into the cold, white shroud, snow covering her face and getting packed into one ear.

  It took several minutes of thrashing and kicking to get back on her feet, and it winded her.

  The cold was deeper out here, more penetrating than it had been inside, and she realized that although the tour bus had turned into a refrigerator, it had protected her from a wind that dropped the outside temperature an additional fifteen degrees. An ear full of snow didn’t make things better. No more than ten feet from the bus and already her entire body was shivering.

  “You’re stupid,” she muttered behind the bandana, pawing at her ear. “What a stupid way to kill yourself.”

  A minute of stomping gave her a small area to move around in, and she set the plastic milk crate in the snow, stepping up to get her bearings above the white walls all around her. A man wouldn’t have needed the crate, she knew, but Pepper Davis was less than five and a half feet tall, and although the snow wasn’t quite that deep, she needed more elevation to get perspective on what was waiting beyond her immediate location, and to know in what direction to start moving.

  The bus was at her back, the travel center straight out across a snowy, unbroken field. She wasn’t going there today. Her ultimate goal was more to the left and much farther away, a distant pair of gentle white bumps rising above the surface. From here her destination looked as if it were on the other side of the world.

  Pepper shook her head. She’d never make it. Why bother trying?

  Right. Get back on the bus, hide in bed under the blankets. Get warm.

  “Shut up,” she told the snow.

  First things first. She looked to the right, finding a point about twenty feet from where she stood. She hoped it was twenty feet (or even the right spot) and worried because she’d never been good at judging distances. A mistake could easily bring this little adventure to a fatal end.

  As if there was ever going to be any other type of outcome.

  Pepper slung the milk crate strap over a shoulder and pushed her body forward, stomping heavily. After a few feet, she began using the plastic bowl to scoop at the snow ahead of her, tossing the contents up and out of the space she was creating, continuing to stomp the snow flat. It was awkward at first, but she began to develop a rhythm and soon was making a narrow, high-walled lane. Every couple of feet she stopped to stand on the crate to ensure she was heading in the right direction, not angling off or turning in a slow circle. Progress was ponderous, but it felt good to be doing something instead of cowering in the bus.

  Pepper didn’t think she’d be able to hang onto this positive feeling once she arrived. The objective for this little mission was the place where she’d been ambushed by the sleeper – and almost caught by Fiddler – during yesterday’s supply run. She’d lost it all; backpack and pillowcases full of food, her flashlight and then the barbecue fork, barely making it back to the bus with her life. The supplies were still out here, hidden under the snow.

  The dead were probably still out here too.

  No, not probably. They’re here.

  Pepper kept digging and stomping.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said between scoops. She shouldn’t be making this side trip, shouldn’t be wasting the energy. Her real objective was out across the parking lot (other side of the world) and she should have been digging the trench in that direction.

  “I need energy for that,” she said behind the bandana. “I’m hungry.”

  Dumbass. The point to crossing the lot is so that you’ll be able to finally protect yourself and get the food safely. But why do the smart thing?

  “Shut up.” She wasn’t sure if that was Scott’s voice she was hearing or just noise in her own mind. It didn’t occur to her to be alarmed that she was hearing voices in the first place.

  No, you shut up.

  Pepper stopped and mounted the milk crate once more, looking around. Her path stretched about twenty feet behind her in a rough line to the bus. If she’d judged this correctly, she should be right on top of the place where she’d been attacked and forced to drop her supplies. A chill suddenly crawled up her back as she thought about the bloodless, blue-eyed thing that had tried to devour her, and her hands shook as she shouldered the milk crate once more.

  The snow had been knee to thigh deep when she dropped the bags (she made a mark in the snow wall) and they would have sunk a bit when they hit (she made a lower mark) so they should be right about at this depth. The plastic container went to work, and she started scooping out deep, horizontal grooves where her lowest mark was, turning in a slow circle.

  An hour passed, and she dropped onto the milk crate, breathing hard and sweating. At least the trench blocked the wind so it wouldn’t instantly freeze the perspiration to her face.

  No, it’ll happen slow and painfully.

  All that work, and nothing to show for it but wasted time. It was time she could have been spending digging toward her real objective. Pepper looked up at the sun in its pale, cold sky. Still plenty of daylight left. She groaned and stood, then started scooping again on the right.

  The plastic bowl struck something, and Pepper smiled.

  Scoop, scoop, scoop.

  The soggy corner of a red box poked out of the groove, and Pepper shouted in triumph. Digging with her hands now, she uncovered the box of Ritz crackers, pulling it free and then clawing the top open with numb fingers. Three long packages wrapped in brown plastic were inside, unaffected by the snow, and she tore one open with her teeth, greedily cramming crackers into her mouth and chewing so fast she nipped the side of her tongue. She didn’t care. Nothing in her life had ever tasted as good as these dry, salty discs.

  Pepper choked, spat cracker and a little blood, then chewed some snow to wash it down before shoving another Ritz into her mouth.

  Declare victory. Take them back to the bus right now.

  “No,” she said between chewing, “the rest of it’s right here. I just have to dig a little more.”

  Why push it? Come back tomorrow.

  It was weakness talking, she knew, instant gratification trying to turn her back from a decision that had been almost impossible to make in the first place. If she went back now, she’d be facing a second night without heat, possibly her last night.

  A bird in the hand…

  The first package was almost gone, the snow around her feet littered with crumbs. She still had two entire tubes of crackers, and she was so very cold, her fingers numb and her entire body trembling. She’d just go back inside for a little while, get out of the worst of the cold, force herself to ration the crackers. Just for a little while. And if it got too late, there was always tomorrow.

  “No!” she shouted, standing up. She had to go. If she got what she was looking for then she’d come back and get all the food. She’d be able to work on the frozen roof hatch and get heat back in the bus. “No,” she said again, pulling the bandana back over her face and tucking the remaining crackers into a coat pocket, gathering her bowl and milk crate. It had to be now, while there was still light.

  An emaciated, blue-white arm thrust itself out of the snow wall only inches from where the box of Ritz had been. Long, withered fingers with bulbous knuckles made the hand appear spider-like, and this image was reinforced when those dead fingers began groping blindly at the air.

  “Go to hell,” Pepper whispered, tears springing into her eyes.

  Then she started digging again.

  NINETEEN

  Almost everything takes longer than you think it will, Daddy used to say, but almost nothing is as bad as you think it will be. On the first point, he’d been right, Pepper thought as she dug and plowed her way across the parking lot through chest-deep snow, steadily growing demoralized at her slow progress and the new peril of her situation. Daddy was wrong on the second point. Things were worse, and the thing in question
was in the trench behind her now, slowly closing the distance between its teeth and her flesh.

  She stopped and stood on the milk crate, her digging bowl dangling in a hand that had lost all feeling, breathing hard as she peered over the top of her trench. Her destination had grown no closer, it seemed, despite more than an hour’s digging since she’d found the crackers. Pepper turned to look back. The trench made an L shape, the shorter leg a line from the open bus door, then making a left turn and running in a narrow, ragged line to where she was now. Her boots had done a fair job of packing the snow flat, so the return trip would be easier, a simple matter of hurrying down the trench on her way back to the bus.

  You’re not coming back. And you’re not going much farther.

  The thing in the trench was evidence of that.

  It wasn’t the sleeper that had originally torn the backpack from her grip, but a new one, the same one that had thrust its arm out of the snow wall. It wore tattered brown corduroys and a baggy yellow shirt that read World’s Greatest Grandpa, the only clue to its gender. Hunched over as if afflicted by severe osteoporosis (as it might have been in life, she realized) the geriatric’s skin was bluish-white, and wisps of gray hair clung to its rotting scalp. Dead white eyes were locked on Pepper as the thing came after her down the trench, stumbling and awkward, falling with every step and then rising again. It growled behind crooked teeth that had gone black.

  Slow but steady.

  Was it fifty yards back? Was her trench even fifty yards long? She couldn’t tell, but it looked like the Grandpa-thing was about midway down the length of the path she’d created, and had crossed that distance in about half an hour. Another half hour and it would be upon her. Maybe less than that.

  Pepper reached into a pocket and took out a handful of Ritz, chewing them quickly, watching the creature. Then she took her bearings again, slung the milk crate and went back to digging.

  Keep your head down. Dig and push forward. No stopping. Don’t look back.

  Her voice, Scott’s, her mama’s, it didn’t matter now.

  Pepper’s muscles were tiring, and the sun provided little relief from the cold. Only the constant exertion kept her warm, but it was draining her energy, and the crackers weren’t helping much. Besides, they were almost all gone now.

  Scoop, scoop, push, scoop, stomp, push…

  Another stop with the milk crate. Still on course.

  Scoop, push, stomp, stomp, scoop…

  Grandpa growling in the trench behind her. He would catch her, rip her apart and feed on the remains. She would end up as a red stain on the snow.

  Stop it. Keep digging, keep moving.

  The work became mindless, and she let it be that way, turning herself into a machine whose only purpose was to dig and move. Pepper let her physical body do the work as her mind wandered to better times.

  The look of pride on Mama’s face when Pepper signed her first contract.

  The girlish thrill and blush when Luke Bryan kissed her cheek during an awards show.

  Her horses back home.

  Walking slowly through the fields around her ranch on a warm summer’s evening, breathing in the earthy smell of the land, lightning bugs flitting about her while an indigo sky stretched overhead.

  Dig, push, push, stomp, scoop…

  Roses waiting back stage after she won her first CMA, and tears in Daddy’s eyes as he handed them to her.

  Crowds screaming her name in London, Sydney, Chicago.

  Sitting on the porch and having a cold beer with Scott when he was home on leave.

  Scoop, scoop, push, scoop…

  Time became a meaningless thing. Even the snarling of the hungry corpse behind her had ceased to matter as her body went through the mechanics of extending the snow trench. Her energy was flagging, her breath coming in great wheezes, and still she dug and pushed.

  A metallic scrape then, and Pepper snapped out of her reverie. She scooped once more, and the sound of the plastic bowl scraping across metal came again. She brushed at the snow, seeing the color red, something that didn’t calculate. More scooping and wiping, using only her hands now, exposed what was in front of her. A strip of chrome. The top edge of a tire.

  There was a car parked directly across the trench.

  “No!” She pawed at the snow furiously, uncovering enough of the vehicle to see that it was a low-slung convertible with the top down, filled up with snow, its profile not high enough to leave a bump on the surface.

  Blocking her trench.

  A muffled groan came from within the snow-filled car. It was still occupied.

  “No, no, no!” Pepper pounded a fist against the exposed metal, agitating the thing trapped inside. “No!”

  She threw down the milk crate and mounted it, then blinked in surprise. How much time had passed? The two bumps she was aiming for looked to be less than fifty yards away. They were more to the left than expected (her trench had drifted right during the mindless digging) but they were close. She could make it.

  The Grandpa-thing grunted close behind her.

  You can’t make it. It’s going to pin you against this car and eat you.

  Pepper let out a high-pitched scream and jumped off the crate, rushing clumsily back down the trench toward the creature that was now less than twenty feet away. It snapped its teeth and hurried to meet her, hands coming up and hooking into claws.

  The long-handled screwdriver came out of her jacket pocket in a flash, and country music’s sweetheart unleashed an animal cry as she hurled herself into the thing, grabbing it by the loose skin at its neck and flinging it onto its back, coming down on top of it with the screwdriver held high, shrieking and looking like an Aztec shaman about to sacrifice a life to some dark god. She plunged the flat-head blade into one of those white marble eyes, the steel shaft sinking up to the handle, rancid, oily fluids erupting from the wound. The Grandpa-thing stiffened, then went limp beneath her.

  Pepper yanked the tool free, then began stabbing repeatedly into a head that gave way as if made out of paper mache. “No! No! No!” Soon it was unrecognizable as having once been human, and a smear of green and black stained the snow around it. Tangles of wet gray hair clung to the screwdriver.

  The odor hit her, and Pepper crawled away to retch up bile and Ritz crackers.

  She stayed that way for a while, then crawled to some clean snow and used it to clean off her face, chewing and spitting to wash away the taste of vomit. With a moan and a long exhaled breath she climbed to her feet and went back to the buried car, exchanging the screwdriver for her digging bowl.

  “I knew you could do it,” Scott said. He was in his bloody camos, floating several inches above the lip of the snow trench.

  Pepper barely looked at him. She wanted to go back to the tour bus with her remaining Ritz crackers, sit down and cry until she froze to death. “Either help me dig, or shut the hell up,” she told her brother through clenched teeth. Taking a deep breath, she started scooping her way around the front of the buried convertible.

  The corpse trapped somewhere inside moaned.

  Pepper ignored it.

  She’d had to dig a horseshoe-shaped trench; down the side of the convertible, across its grille and half way back up its other side. When another bluish arm – this one a woman’s wearing lots of gold bangles and rings, a small shamrock tattooed on the wrist – shot out of the snow from the driver’s side, Pepper simply moved around it, turned right and started digging farther into the parking lot.

  “You can…take over…the world,” she breathed between scoops, “…but you’re too stupid…to unlock…your seatbelt.”

  Pepper used the milk crate more often now, correcting her angle to keep herself on target. Her fatigue was growing to the point that if she strayed too far off course, she wouldn’t have the strength to angle back to her original path, much less the power to fight off another attack. The remaining crackers had dwindled just like her energy, and were now gone, used to the last crumb to fuel her di
gging.

  Scoop and stomp. Press and claw at the snow. Scoop some more.

  The trench was empty behind her, but she wondered just how long that would last. She imagined them moving beneath the surface, drawn to her heat and smell and noise, especially that nasty little one she called Sunny. Pepper could picture the dead little girl snarling and snapping, clawing feverishly at the snow, tunneling forward on hands and knees without making so much as a ripple on the surface.

  Cut it out. You’re not doing yourself any good.

  She’s coming right for you, angling in like a rabid little torpedo.

  Above, the sun was beginning its final slide toward the tips of the mountains, and the shadows were stretching out across the parking lot’s white expanse. As the sun fled, the temperature dropped. Pepper calculated that she had a little more than an hour of direct sunlight left, and after that, she’d be alone in a frozen twilight.

  When the sun goes down, the monsters come out.

  Those weren’t her words, they were Scott’s, but she remembered them well enough. When she and Scott were eight, one of her brother’s favorite past-times had been terrifying his twin sister, and he’d managed to plant that single thought so deeply in Pepper’s head that she’d actually begun to see their silhouettes slinking among the trees and shadows around the house. Soon they were flitting past the nightlight in the hallway outside the upstairs bathroom, even shifting in the dark corner of her frilly pink bedroom. Several times she was convinced she heard them sliding across the hardwood floor beneath her bed.

  They know you’re scared, Scott had said. It makes them hungry.

  Finally Pepper had gone to her parents in tears, refusing to sleep without the lights on. Daddy had spanked Scott’s ass good for that one, and her brother had given her a sniffling apology. A man-to-man talk between father and son about a boy’s duty to protect his sister ensured that Scott never tormented his sister again (at least not about monsters – they were siblings, and nothing could prevent every conflict), but his words and her childhood images had never left her. Even as an adult, she slept with the bathroom light on and the door cracked, never sharing her fear with anyone, not even her husband during their short and bitter marriage.