Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road

by John L. Campbell

  The M4 made its louder popping sound a moment later, but the bullet whined past the ear of a skinny out near the garbage truck. Skye blew out a long breath, adjusted and put it down with the next bullet.

  Now that she had a feel for the angle, range and wind, Skye went to work in earnest, methodically shooting at targets closest to her first. Left to right and back again, she dropped the frozen dead in the street out front, high-velocity rounds shearing off skull-caps and clumps of matted hair, punching through bone and blowing out the backs of heads. With her first thirty rounds she figured she scored effective hits six out of ten times.

  Not good enough.

  Pausing only long enough to insert a full magazine and wipe the optics clear, she leaned back into the rifle and fired into the blowing snow. A corpse dropped. Two more. A neck hit; tick upward and squeeze, bullet hitting the bridge of the nose and putting it down. Now a pair fell, a single, another pair.

  Bodies were starting to fill up the street in front of the Coburn, so Skye extended her range, hunting left up Main and then right to the intersection and beyond, not forgetting the cross street that led out toward the railroad tracks and the Truckee river beyond. The dead collapsed in every direction.

  Skye’s accuracy increased to seven out of ten headshots, then eight and finally nine as she emptied her third magazine, automatically wiping the optic clear every third shot without realizing she was doing it. She no longer felt the wind or even heard its wail. There was only the POP of the muzzle, the metallic CLACK of the ejection port spitting an empty casing free, and the movement of spring-loaded rounds rising from the magazine into the chamber, something felt more than heard. And there was her heartbeat, steady, strong and even.

  Her field of fire extended again, clearing the dead away from the ambulance, then away from anyplace she could see within two hundred yards. Time became meaningless.

  “Moving!” shouted Cribbs, bringing Skye out of the Zone. She blinked behind the ski mask, looking over her optics and seeing only the fallen dead.

  Cribbs rappelled easily down the face of the hotel, boots thumping onto the sidewalk canopy. There were corpses under there beating at the front doors, and they would have to be cleared out so Bracco could exit. Skye couldn’t see them, so they were Cribbs’ problem.

  The master sergeant completed his descent over the edge of the wooden canopy, dropping out of view. Short bursts from the squad automatic weapon immediately followed. The firing didn’t last long, and then she heard the thumping of Cribbs banging on the hotel’s front doors. Soon after that, both Cribbs and Bracco were in the street below, hurrying through the snow toward the ambulance in the intersection, jumping over fallen bodies. She wiped her optics again and tracked them as they closed on their objective.

  Cribbs reached the ambulance first, checking down both sides with his rifle and then between the open rear doors. When he didn’t fire, Bracco shot past him and vaulted into the ambulance while the master sergeant turned to watch their backs.

  Skye swept the area looking for movement. She could see the slow-moving silhouettes of the dead out near the tracks, their details obscured by the storm. To the left the street was empty, and down to the right the only thing standing was the corpse of a ten-year-old moving in a stilted gait out from behind the distant RV where she’d done her earlier shooting.

  With a slow exhale and a correction for wind, Skye sent a single, high-velocity bullet down the street and punched a hole in the dead kid’s forehead. She was back to scanning before the body hit the ground.

  To the sniper, it didn’t seem long before Bracco was coming back out of the ambulance, a long, dark blue object tucked under one arm. He and the master sergeant started back for the hotel immediately, stopping only once so the older Ranger could fire a burst down the side street, along the side of the hotel Skye couldn’t see. Then they were moving again.

  Something lurched from between the buildings directly across the street, a frozen dead thing swinging its arms as it broke into a gallop toward the two Rangers.

  Skye shot it, smashed its collar bone, swore softly and fired again. This time it fell and didn’t get up. Below her, the two men were once more out of sight, pounding at the front doors. They opened and slammed shut a moment later, and the sniper allowed herself to stand down for the moment, cradling the rifle and watching the street, ghostly breath curling from the mouth of her death’s head.

  Oscar had been right; this was the easy part.

  Captain Sallinger groaned as Corporal Bracco fitted him with the rigid leg brace he’d taken from the ambulance. Covered in a soft, dark blue fabric, it ran from the ankle to the upper thigh. The corporal pulled and then pressed down on four Velcro straps, tightening the device and immobilizing the fractured leg.

  Sallinger hissed through his teeth.

  “Sorry about that, sir,” Bracco said, then dug into his medical kit and came out with a syringe.

  “Negative,” said the master sergeant, melting snow dripping from his camouflage jacket as he stood behind the couch. Bracco looked up with a silent question.

  “Hit me with it, Bracco,” said the captain, closing his eyes.

  “Negative, sir,” Cribbs repeated, pointing at the corporal, who reluctantly tucked the painkiller injection back into his kit.

  “Oscar, what the hell?” The captain opened his eyes and looked up at the older man.

  “Not until we get you secured in the cab of the plow, Captain,” said the master sergeant. “Then you can go to wonderland. I need you clear-headed until then. Sorry.” His eyes said that he was not sorry, and would not be argued-with.

  The officer stared at him for a moment. “I’ve got the ugliest mother in the Army,” he said, then sagged back onto the pillows, holding back another groan.

  “And my son should have been a doctor or a lawyer instead of a knuckle-dragger.” He looked at Bracco. “Square it away.” The corporal put his kit away, shouldered his pack and checked the magazines in his ammo pouches before pulling on his gloves and ski mask. Cribbs pulled his own mask down, transforming his face into a leering skull. “Rooker, as soon as we’re outside, you bolt these doors and haul ass up to the roof to cover Skye’s back.”

  “But the captain-” the young Ranger started.

  “Will be fine right here in front of the fire. Make sure those doors are locked tight.”

  “Nothing can get to her up on the roof,” Rooker protested. “Why do I have to-”

  Cribbs jabbed the boy in the chest. “I’m going to throw you off the fucking roof. Do as you’re told. She’s not going to bite you.”

  “Unless you piss her off,” said Bracco. Rooker could hear the grin behind his mask.

  “She’s going to cover our ass,” said Cribbs. “You go cover hers.”

  After a moment the young Ranger gave his sergeant a half-hearted nod, then went to stand near the doors. Cribbs and Bracco moved into position.

  “Top,” said Sallinger from the couch, making the older man turn. “You cover your own ass out there.”

  “Yes sir,” he replied. Then Rooker was yanking open one of the double doors, and the two Rangers raced out into the white of a strengthening storm.

  The dead of Truckee were on the move, and their ranks numbered in the thousands. A couple of blocks away and coming up behind the hotel, blue-white corpses covered in frost filled the streets, shoulder to shoulder as they converged on the Coburn.

  They had been moving since last night, many from as far away as the shopping center, the place where the Army had created a refugee collection point. The wind masked their rising moans and carried the sound away, as relentlessly the mob of walking dead moved closer to their destination.

  This mass migration was no random coincidence, and they hadn’t been drawn here by any stimuli or their own instinct.

  Truckee’s dead were being herded and driven.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Master Sergeant Cribbs had never felt so exposed.

  Even in Ira
q, during the heaviest days of desert fighting or patrolling a narrow street in a city filled with hostiles, where every dark window could be hiding an insurgent with Jihad on his mind and an AK-47 in his hands, he had never felt like this. He and Bracco were crossing open ground through a curtain of white, where every bump in the snow was a potential ambush.

  Fast. Smart. Deadly. These were the calling cards of the U.S. Rangers, but Cribbs was feeling none of them at the moment. Despite his training, combat experience and the self-confidence that came from a lifetime spent in Special Forces, the master sergeant sensed that Death was not on his side this time. It was here, but it had come to punch Oscar’s ticket at last.

  Bracco was leading, his rifle to his shoulder, muzzle pointing the way. Cribbs followed fifteen feet back as the corporal moved along a trail through the snow made by the earlier passage of the walking dead. They had passed several already, fresh kills slumped to the sides, felled by the sniper atop the building to their rear. Following the trail allowed them to move faster than they would if they’d had to slog through fresh, thigh-deep snow, but it made the veteran Ranger nervous. Walking on trails was always a bad idea, and these creatures tended to follow one another. Wasn’t it likely that they would be using the same trail? That they were right now coming at the Rangers from the opposite direction, possibly in overwhelming numbers?

  POP-POP. Bracco’s rifle barked against the wind, and the corporal called, “Tango down.” A moment later they moved past the newly fallen corpse of a girl in a tank top and cut-off denim shorts. From behind them came the distant shots of their sniper, Skye firing her M4 in measured beats, reaching out to targets the two men couldn’t see but assumed represented the dead somewhere in their proximity. They pressed forward, reaching the railroad crossing on the road, then Bracco led them left, onto the tracks. The blocky gray shapes of the railyard and municipal sheds could be seen in the distance, occasionally obscured by a gust of swirling white. There were no zombie trails in the snow here, and the two men were forced to slow as they forged their way through deep powder.

  Five hundred feet to go.

  POP…POP…POP… Skye’s rifle was still going, eliminating threats somewhere ahead or to their sides. He hoped.

  They reached the point where the tracks split, continuing their journey over the mountains or breaking left toward the railyard, the deviation concealed under the snow but identified by a track signal jutting up from the surface. Cribbs saw the mound of snow at the base of the signal shift suddenly as Bracco moved past, saw a pale head and reaching arm rising from the crust.

  “Right flank!” Cribbs yelled, and Bracco leaped left, pivoting toward the threat. The master sergeant triggered the SAW at a distance of only twenty feet, chopping the corpse apart, its head disintegrating.

  Bracco scanned the area with his rifle for only a moment before he was moving again, Cribbs shuffling after in his trail, watching the white veil around them.

  Four hundred feet. Three hundred.

  Figures coalesced out of the storm around them, clusters appearing on the tracks ahead and rising from the snow where they had lain dormant, waiting for the stimulus of passing prey. They were bone-white, sexless and dressed in rags, and their moans carried on the wind. At least a dozen ahead, more than that to the side.

  Too many.

  Bracco shouted, “Action forward!” and began firing.

  “Keep pushing!” the master sergeant yelled, putting the SAW to his shoulder and firing in short bursts. There was no way he could move, steady the weapon and make head shots all at the same time, especially through the obscuring snow, and the older Ranger had to stop every few feet in order to make his shots count. In his left peripheral, Bracco’s shape moved farther away into the storm, his M4 cracking.

  Where the hell was Skye?

  Through her optics, she’d seen the two men leave the road and start traveling the tracks, steadily closing on their objective. Hunting through the lens, she picked out slender gray shapes ahead of them. POP…POP…POP… She was losing accuracy as the wind and snow intensified, forced to expend three and four bullets to make each target drop. She cursed herself and the dead, cursed the snow sticking to her sights that now demanded she wipe them clean between every shot, slowing her fire.

  “Hey, Miss Dennison,” Rooker called. He was behind her on the roof at the master sergeant’s insistence, covering her back. This was stupid. The dead couldn’t climb, and even with an entire roof between them, Rooker didn’t want to be up here. “Miss Dennison!” he called again.

  Skye didn’t want him here either. He was an unnecessary distraction. “Not now, Rooker!” she yelled back, trying to sight the M4 on a pair of skinnies lurching toward the two men. A miss…another miss… Bracco and Cribbs were now about a football field’s distance from the plow barn and the railyard, and more unfriendly shapes were closing on them. A lot more. Why was that?

  She swung the rifle left to the objective. There was the dome-shaped sand barn, and the giant plow beside the shed. All clear. She ticked right to the fenced railyard holding the field hospital filled with penned corpses.

  Empty.

  There were no more drifters lining the fence as there had been before.

  She swung to the right, tracking between the railyard and where the Rangers were, and her skin crawled. A mob of the dead, moving awkwardly through the snow, was streaming from the yard toward the Rangers. They had gotten out, but how? If they’d been able to leave at any time, why now?

  Too many questions, and no time to worry about answers. She leaned the M4 against the wall of the façade and unslung the SCAR, checking that it had a full magazine, running a gloved finger around the scope lens and inwardly raging about the down-time in her shooting.

  The battle rifle came up and she put her eye to the scope. Instantly she had a closer, clearer picture, the details of the dead coming into focus. She fired, and the heavier caliber bullet left the barrel at a velocity or 2,342 feet per second, hitting at almost the same instant the suppressed muzzle huffed.

  A rotten head burst open.

  She ticked left, found another corpse moving past the fallen one. HUFF. It went down, and then she dropped another beside it.

  Die, freak.

  “Miss Dennison, the dead,” Rooker shouted. “They’re coming!”

  “Then deal with it!” she screamed, and fired again.

  How the hell am I supposed to do that? Rooker wondered, standing at the edge of the roof overlooking the back of the hotel. Below him was a rear parking lot and a street running behind the hotel, another intersection to the left. The parking lot was filling up with the dead, all of them streaming in toward the Coburn. Beyond, the streets were packed with an endless stream of corpses, all moving relentlessly in his direction like herds of cattle. Even over the wind he could hear their moaning.

  Rooker had nine magazines of thirty rounds each, less than three hundred rounds in total. If he made a headshot with every single bullet – and there was no chance of that happening – it wouldn’t even put a dent in the horde closing on the hotel. He expected that in minutes they would flow around the building and encircle it on its three exposed sides, pressing in. Their mass would shatter the windows, force the doors and then they would be inside.

  He threw a glance back at the sniper at the front of the hotel, a girl he’d wanted to like but who now scared the shit out of him. “Fuck it,” he muttered, pulling a pair of fragmentation grenades from his combat harness, yanking out the pins and letting them sail into the rear parking lot. “Frag out!” he shouted, then went to work with his M4.

  “Keep up with me, Top!” Bracco yelled, walking forward, firing left and right at close range. Zombies collapsed in the snow. Behind him he heard the SAW stop firing, and a moment later the master sergeant was beside him, puffing from a run. “I’m here,” he said, triggering another burst, shearing off heads.

  Before them, silhouettes in the storm began toppling over, targets they hadn’t shot at.
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  “Skye’s back on the job,” Cribbs said, and the two Rangers pushed forward into the crowd, firing together, concentrating their violence to clear a path. More silhouettes appeared in the white veil, only to sag to the snow moments later as unheard shots from the hotel roof found their mark.

  The plow barn was a hundred feet away, and the men kept moving, Bracco switching magazines and the SAW rattling off the last of its belted ammunition. “I’m out,” called the master sergeant, dropping the twenty-two pound weapon in the snow and unslinging the spare M4 from his back, bracing the stock against his shoulder and putting down a figure twenty feet away. Shapes on their right fell, and Cribbs heard the whisper of a 7.62mm round passing just overhead.

  The mass of stumbling figures was thinning as they neared the plow barn, but then out in the blowing gray, maybe fifty feet off to their right, a darker shape ran through the corpses, weaving in and out of them at a speed the dead could never achieve.

  “Did you see that?” Bracco yelled.

  “I saw that,” said Cribbs.

  They had no time to shoot at or even identify it, for the running shape was immediately lost in the storm, but Cribbs felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. He remembered the creature on the Amtrak train, the one that had killed Burke and Moore.

  Hobgoblin.

  Bracco burned off half a magazine with single shots, Cribbs firing to the right and their sniper still reaching out from her high perch to clear the way. Suddenly there were no more moving shapes to their front, and the two men made the final dash to the plow barn. The huge plow they wanted was parked to the left, covered in a heavy blanket of snow, and a pair of high, rolling doors was set in the face of the shed to the right. Bracco moved forward and climbed a steel ladder on the side of the plow, jerking open the door while Cribbs covered him.