Sallinger slept in the seat beside her, leaning against the door of the vibrating cab. A short distance out of Truckee, Skye had stopped long enough to administer a shot of painkiller from Bracco’s kit. The Ranger’s tight expression relaxed almost immediately, and he soon drifted into oblivion. Now she was alone, fighting the wheel and staring out at the storm. Her biggest fear was coming upon an abandoned car hidden beneath the snow, something that would destroy the blades and leave them stranded. So far there had been no derelict vehicles in this direction, or if there had, they’d been off to the side and she’d passed them without notice. A traffic jam like the one they’d encountered on their approach to Truckee, blocking both lanes and the shoulders, would be the end of them. She watched the road nervously.
More than getting stuck out here, or accidentally driving the plow off the side of a mountain, Skye thought about the thing chained in the back. Would the single bolt securing its restraints be enough? If not, Skye had no doubt she would find out quickly enough; if the bolt failed, the enormous Hobgoblin would tear the cab apart to get at them.
Another hour passed, and as the altitude and incline increased she was forced to slow the plow to a speed just above idle. The wind was coming in savage gusts now, making even the multi-ton vehicle rock. She passed a sign on the side of the road, covered in white but with bits of blue showing through, and a short distance after this the plow came upon an exit ramp. A lull in the gusts cleared visibility for a moment, just long enough for her to catch a glimpse of what was at the bottom of the ramp.
It was a travel center, a large, low building seen through a gray haze across a parking lot, with a tall sign and covered gas pumps, the silhouettes of tractor trailers lined up nearby. Close to the highway, at the near edge of the parking lot was a snow-covered bus. A gust of wind obscured the scene again for an instant, then briefly cleared.
Skye could see two figures hip-deep in the snow beside the bus, locked in combat and frozen together in death. Her left eye’s strange and superior vision brought the details close, and she could see that one of them was a dark-haired Hobgoblin, a female with her hands locked on the flattened skull of her victim. The human was also a woman, a blonde whose hair had frozen about her pale face. She was holding a pistol up under her killer’s jaw, and the top of the creature’s head was blown out.
Statues now, slowly being covered in snow.
You took it with you. Skye thought about the courage it must have taken to go out like that. A very brave woman. And then the wind returned and swept the scene away behind a curtain of white.
Skye kept driving.
They couldn’t go on. The highway had grown increasingly difficult to see as the storm grew in power here in the highest elevations, but now it had disappeared completely behind a white-out. Even the plow markers beside the road had vanished, and Skye feared she would tear through a guardrail and send both the sleeping Ranger and herself to their deaths in a ravine.
Can’t stop here.
Can’t go forward.
But she did go forward, following the useless headlight beams, driving blind. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth, and her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The snow-blower churned, carving a snail’s-pace path.
After another half an hour, rubbing the right guardrail had become a regular occurrence, sometimes accompanied by the squeal of grinding metal. The storm swallowed most of the light, and the wind now vibrated the glass in the windshield.
An off-ramp appeared on the right, and she almost crawled past it unseen. Skye braked, made a choice and steered the rig down the slope, chewing deep snow before her and spitting it out in a white column. She stopped when she reached what she believed might be the bottom. Beyond would be the on-ramp leading back up to the highway, and she could vaguely see that another road ran across the nose of the plow, passing under the interstate to her left. The darkness of the underpass looked inviting, a place to shelter from the wind. She was about to wheel the plow in that direction when a break in the gusts revealed a pair of small buildings to her right; an old gas station that looked as if it had been abandoned long before the plague, and a small log cabin-style house on the lot beside it.
Skye cranked the wheel and drove right at the buildings, blowing a path up onto what might have been the cabin’s yard and stopping in front of the door. She pulled down her now-torn face mask, cinched the shredded hood of her jacket tight, grabbed an M4 and went outside.
The wind was a knife that cut into her breath.
It looked deserted; there were no cars that she could see, so she mounted the snow-covered steps to the front door, trying the knob and hoping she wasn’t walking into the shotguns of present tenants or the teeth of former. She encountered neither, and found only a small, silent home evacuated by its family, probably people she had seen or shot as they drifted through Truckee. There was a fireplace, a supply of cut wood and food in the kitchen cabinets.
Skye went back to the plow to retrieve Sallinger.
Her plan was to stay until the storm broke. Skye insisted on Sallinger having the bigger of the two bedrooms, where he could sleep stretched out on an actual bed in order to get the rest he needed. After two days of this, along with complaints of cold and boredom (she’d found only a few magazines and not a single book – the former residents weren’t readers, apparently) she helped the Ranger move to the small living room where he could sit with his leg extended on a footstool, closer to the fire and not so isolated.
The storm raged outside, bringing on a void-like darkness at night and only a pale charcoal during the day. The fireplace was their source of survival. Skye slept in a chair next to a front window…when she slept at all. She’d moved the plow so that its tail faced the house. She wanted to know if that snowy lump in the back decided it was tired of being chained up.
They cooked canned food in the fireplace, and went through a case of diet soda she’d found in a kitchen cabinet. Some meager first aid supplies from a bathroom fed Bracco’s dwindling kit, but nothing could replace the painkillers Sallinger needed. Concerned they would run out, and equally worried about addiction, she convinced the captain to alternate his shots with handfuls of Ibuprofen.
They played cards (he won) and Scrabble (she kicked his ass), watched and listened to the storm, and talked. Sallinger told her about his parents and growing up in Albany, New York, about his time in the Army and the places he’d been. Skye talked about her time alone, hunting in Berkley, the story of taking the Nimitz with her friends and her time in Chico, but nothing about life before the plague, and nothing too personal. Both were careful to keep the conversation light. Each had painful memories and deeply felt losses that could be triggered like land mines. For Skye, the idleness and quiet made her think often about Carney, and sometimes she could feel the hurt in her chest. A few times she retreated to the second bedroom and cried into a pillow, angry at herself for being weak, but feeling just a little better for having let some of it out. She knew it would never leave her completely; that was the price of loving and losing someone.
Three or four times a day, Skye pulled her death’s head ski mask in place before going outside.
“You look like a badass in that thing,” Sallinger said. “Goddamn terrifying.”
Skye smiled behind the fabric.
“You would have made a good Ranger,” he acknowledged, “if they’d let women in.”
“And how screwed up is that?” she’d said, slinging an M4 around her neck to hang against mostly empty ammo pouches and the holstered .357.
“Obviously they never met you.”
She shook her head. “I would have been a discipline problem. Trouble with authority. And I wouldn’t have been properly motivated.” She waved a hand. “It took all this…” Then she’d gone outside before she could step on a landmine.
Her visits to the bed of the massive plow, conducted both in the daytime and at night with a flashlight, served one purpose; to ensure the chains were still securing
the Hobgoblin. She’d decided that if the thing even started to get free, she’d put a round in its head, research be damned. Each visit the chain was secure, though sometimes the links had shifted through the lift hooks a little, indicating that the creature was still “alive.”
Sometimes Skye would climb into the bed and crouch at the tail end, watching the snowy figure. Once it tipped its head forward, and snow sifted away from its features, revealing a pair of close-set, yellow and black eyes glaring at her. The Hobgoblin showed its black baboon fangs and uttered a low, throaty rumble, but it did not thrash against its chains.
Being this close to the thing gave her a chill far beyond the effects of a mountain storm.
“I should just kill you now,” Skye murmured. “Empty a full magazine into your ugly face. If I didn’t think we could use you…”
The Alpha’s jaw worked, the black tongue moved, and in a hissing croak it said, “…sssSkyyyee…”
It was all the young sniper could do not to blow it away right then. But they – whoever they were - would need to study it, if not to come up with a cure then to find a way to eradicate its entire species.
“Stay right there, bitch,” Skye said. “There’s a scalpel with your name on it.”
It was the last visit where the creature spoke, or did anything more than just stare at her.
Within five days of their arrival, the storm abated, surrendering to a cold, blue sky with a pale sun. Skye loaded the plow with canned food and blankets, helped Sallinger up into the cab, and soon they were back on the interstate, traveling slowly and leaving a rooster tail of white in their wake.
By mid-morning they crossed from California into Nevada, the depth of the snow lessening with every downhill mile. It turned out that the diesel in the full tank had been enough, and even at their slow pace, they reached the outskirts of Reno at just past noon.
THIRTY-SIX
“You said you were from here, right?” Sallinger asked. He’d slept during the trip down from the mountains, and now rubbed his hands at his face, groggy from the effects of the drugs.
“I was,” Skye said quietly, looking out at the city of Reno in the distance, the mirrored glass of its buildings reflecting the afternoon sun, gray clouds scudding across a sky already sliding toward evening. As brutal as the storm had been in the Sierras, here it seemed to have just brushed past, leaving a dusting of snow, perhaps half an inch that was already almost completely melted away. The dashboard temperature gauge read that it was thirty-nine degrees outside, positively balmy after Donner Pass.
Another silent city before them, but not uninhabited.
How many people used to live here? Four hundred thousand? Skye knew they would still be there, drifting through the streets in their relentless quest to destroy the living.
They were stopped on the interstate near the Keystone Avenue off-ramp, an endless river of abandoned cars and trucks stretching before them; Reno trying unsuccessfully to evacuate. They had already used the heavy rig to push some vehicles out of the way – she’d turned the snow-blower equipment off quite some time ago, as it was no longer needed – but there would be no bulling their way through this mess. Skye knew her way around Reno, however, and could use the surface streets, provided they weren’t also jammed. Switching to a smaller vehicle, assuming they could get one to start, wasn’t an option because of the deadly cargo they had chained in the back.
Staring out at the traffic jam, Skye didn’t notice her side mirror, or the image of the crimson-skinned horror sprinting up the highway behind them.
“Where’s this facility?” Skye asked.
“Far side of the city, just beyond Sparks. I think the exit off I-80 is near Lockwood?” Sallinger rubbed his eyes. “There’s a big industrial park near the road we need. The base is about ten miles north of there, out in the desert.”
“I know where that industrial park is,” she said.
“I know almost nothing about Reno. I’m working from memory of a single truck ride in, and from looking at maps,” the Ranger said, “But if you get us to that area I can find the road.”
The sudden rattle of chain running through steel came from behind them, and they stiffened, both knowing exactly what that sound meant.
“No,” Skye breathed, snatching the M4 from where it was propped between them, flinging open the door and dropping to the wet pavement. The Alpha hit the ground at the back of the plow at the same instant and raced across the highway, chain and a galvanized bar hanging from its front and back, bouncing and scraping the asphalt as it ran. It vaulted the chest-high concrete barrier dividing the east and west-bound lanes, weaving through stopped cars.
Skye snapped the rifle to her shoulder, sighted and tracked that quilled, elongated head, leading it, finger touching the trigger. She squeezed-
-and was hit from the left by a crushing blow to the side of her head.
The shot went wild as the pavement rushed up to meet her.
She dropped the rifle.
And Bracco moved in for the kill.
Even as Skye had been pulling away in the plow, the fever overtook him, and the pistol had dropped unfired to the cement only seconds before his own mass followed it. In a delirium, the big corporal had crawled into the shadows beneath one of the big trucks in the plow barn, curled into a ball and lay there shivering.
The dead wandered in and out of the barn, scenting both him and the oncoming change, and left him alone.
He’d lasted a full day before succumbing, and when he opened his eyes again they were milky, the brain behind them something primitive and dead. Almost at once the newborn zombie shuddered and slipped into a red and black world of flashing sensations as yet another change took over, leaving him on the floor for another twenty-four hours, viral toxins that were more akin to venom coursing through the cells of his dead flesh. Something new eventually crawled from beneath the truck; physically powerful in a way the human Bracco couldn’t have imagined, exceptionally fast and trembling with a lust for violence.
Days of tracking and struggling through snow and storm had kept him on the trail of his maker, bringing him here.
The scarlet-hued Ranger opened one hand and let the heavy bolt and nut that had secured the Alpha fall to the pavement, looking down at the fallen prey that was now crawling to its hands and knees, trying to stand. The Hobgoblin had no memory of Vincent Bracco from New Jersey, of what that had meant or the affection it once held for the girl getting to her feet, the one with the unusual and yet oddly familiar smell. There was only bloodlust and fury.
Bracco shrieked and attacked.
Skye’s vision swam as she crawled and rose, stumbling back away from the creature. She saw two of him, then one and two again, and could see that Bracco had apparently torn away his coat and uniform shirt. He stood there red-skinned and impossibly muscled, far bigger and stronger than he had been in life, a true terror.
She saw the Alpha’s bite in his bicep, blackened and ringed with swollen gray blisters, and she smelled the female Hobgoblin’s acidic saliva not only at the point of infection, but seeping from the dead Ranger’s pores. She’d seen that blistering and caught that smell only once before, and only with one Hobgoblin, not all of them; the dead creature that had stormed the Amtrak train. When she had told Sallinger she was going after mama, she’d simply meant the creature’s gender and impressive size, but now she knew she’d been much closer to the truth. The corporal may have died from the Omega Virus, but it was the female’s bite that had transformed him into this.
She was capable of infecting others with her unique genetics.
The Alpha could make other Hobgoblins.
Skye staggered backward in front of the plow as Bracco shrieked and came at her. She reached for her .357, jerked it from the holster, but Bracco batted it aside with a blow that nearly broke her hand. The pistol clattered across the pavement as he lunged.
Stumbling left, she ducked as he tried to grab her; he was so very fast, but even dazed her body re
acted with an inhuman speed of its own. His hands flashed just over her head, barely missing her, and she knew that if he connected, if he caught her in those massive arms, she was dead. Quick as a snake Bracco spun to face her, but her right hand was already moving in a blur, tearing the tomahawk from her combat harness and striking in a deadly arc. The blade sank into the side of Bracco’s face, splitting flesh and unhinging the right side of his jaw in a burst of black fluid. His eye bulged from the pressure of the blow.
Bracco didn’t even flinch. He jerked his neck, the movement pulling the tomahawk out of her hand. Then he plucked the weapon from his face and flicked it away like a cigarette butt, out into the silent field of automobiles.
He roared.
Her back to the snow-blower, unable to retreat and knowing she’d never dart past him, Skye braced for the impact.
Sallinger knew he’d never manage to get the window open, lean out and get off a shot with the second M4. Not in time, and not with his immobilized leg. He yelled at the windshield as his former Ranger charged in to destroy the defenseless woman.
The captain did the only thing he could think of; he reached across the cab, flicked on the snow-blower switch and dropped the transmission into drive.
Skye heard the machinery explode to life behind her, sensed the movement and felt the air of the spinning blades only inches away from her back. Bracco pounced, hands reaching to grab the sides of her head. Instinctively she dropped to the pavement, tucked into a ball and rolled forward.
Bracco seized air, tripped over the figure on the ground and stumbled. He caught his forward movement a second before tumbling face-first into the blades, and spun again.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 33
