Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters

by John L. Campbell

  Dean threw off the blanket and sat on the edge of the sofa, putting his head in his hands. Heat radiated into his palms, and a headache throbbed behind his eyes. His entire body hurt.

  “Juice, Daddy!”

  Dean held up a hand. “Okay, sweetie. Can we use quiet voices?”

  “Juice, Daddy,” Leah called in a whisper. “Juice, please.”

  “Nice manners,” Dean said, forcing himself to stand. “Good girl.”

  Leah smiled in the darkness and went back to looking out the window. Dean walked slowly to the kitchen and flicked on the light switch, frowned, flicked it several more times, and then stopped and shook his head. He retrieved a foil juice packet and punched a straw into it. Where were Dylan and Shana? He vaguely remembered them saying something about going out. Had they left Leah here with Dean passed out on the couch? Why would they— Then he remembered pointing his pistol at Dylan. They had wanted to take Leah. With that memory he retrieved the Glock from where it had slipped down between the couch cushions and reseated it in his holster. Bending over made his head thunder, and he had to resist the urge to collapse back onto the couch.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing over the juice. “What are you looking at?”

  Leah took a long sip. “Ickies.”

  Dean squinted into the winter twilight, the apartment’s living room window giving him a view of a short lawn leading to a sidewalk and then a parking lot. The dead were everywhere, slow-moving shadows passing between cars, walking across the lawn. Dozens. Hundreds. And they were heading toward this row of buildings. It was another surge.

  Dean’s heart raced as he took Leah from the chair, setting her on the floor. “Time to be super, super quiet, okay, baby?”

  “Not a baby.”

  He took a deep breath. “No, you’re a big girl. Can you be quiet?”

  She nodded.

  “Play quietly with Wawas, okay?”

  “And with Raga Ann,” she said, running to her two stuffed toys.

  Dean looked outside again. It was nearly dark, had to be after five o’clock. Where were Dylan and Shana? They should have been back before the sun went down. The dead kept coming, staggering into the parking lot from some place beyond, heading this way. Would they try to get into the apartments? Maybe, if they smelled prey inside. Dean knew they would. How would he hold them off, and for how long? No help would be coming. He did a quick mental inventory of his ammunition, the math difficult to process in his heavy head. It told him he could hold for about fifteen minutes at the most.

  Could he barricade the door, keep the two of them inside and wait for the surge to pass? But if even one of them caught a scent, or heard a sound—and a two-year-old could stay quiet only so long—the others would follow. He imagined dozens of dead people crammed onto the concrete landing outside, hammering at the apartment door while more choked the stairwell. Their only way out would be blocked, and there was no way he would risk a three-story drop from a window with a toddler. Even if they kept the dead out, they would starve to death in here, or die from lack of water.

  Dean got moving, trying to toughen himself against his aching body and head, to ignore the fiery throb in his bitten hand. He grabbed the papoose carrier off the floor where Shana had dropped it and collected their go-bag, now always kept properly loaded and ready. Then he filled canteens with water from plastic jugs and pulled on his MAC-10 harness. He loaded a second nylon bag, this one with a long shoulder strap, packing it with extra clothes for Leah, the rubbing alcohol and gauze, her coloring book and crayons. He bribed her with a chocolate chip granola bar so he could pack up Wawas and Raggedy Ann without a fight.

  “We’re going out for a while,” Dean said, setting the papoose carrier down so Leah could climb in.

  Still gripping the granola bar, she ran past him, into the hall. “Potty!” she yelled back. Her daddy had brought back an actual potty chair with an image of Dora and Boots on the seat, and Leah cherished it.

  Dean’s eyes shot to the door. “Okay, honey,” he whispered. “Quick, quick.”

  Leah returned a minute later and let her daddy put her coat on, a padded pink thing with a fur-trimmed hood and a bunny on the chest, smiling when he called her a “good girl.” Then she scrambled into the papoose pack, an experienced pro. Dean hoisted the weight and settled it on his back, slinging the two nylon bags and the hunting rifle over his shoulders.

  He had humped more weight than this in Iraq, and in triple-digit temperatures, but never in such a weakened state with a raging fever. This felt like three hundred pounds, and sweat broke out on his forehead. He closed his eyes for a moment as the headache beat at his eyes from behind, holding onto the door frame as a wave of dizziness washed over him. For just a moment he heard the hiss of an RPG round slashing through hot air, heard a boy from Montana screaming as he crawled across the sand, looking for his legs.

  A tiny hand caressed his right cheek, and a small head pressed against the back of his own. “Love you, Daddy,” said a soft voice in the darkness. Dean opened his eyes. No desert, only a dark living room and his daughter’s warm breath on his neck.

  His eyes narrowed and he bared his teeth. “Hoo-ah,” he whispered, reaching back and gently squeezing the little girl’s fingers. He looked at his bandaged left hand. It was steady. From the front hall closet he retrieved an aluminum baseball bat he had discovered earlier in their stay. He paused, hand on the doorknob, then flicked the lock and stepped onto the landing, bat raised. There was nothing out here, and the stairs down to the next landing were clear. The moans of the dead floated into the breezeway.

  “We might have to run a little, okay?” Dean said.

  Leah clapped her hands. She loved the bouncing.

  “We still need to be super quiet. If you see an Icky Man, just close your eyes.”

  Her hands pressed against his cheeks from behind. “Will they get us, Daddy?”

  “Never,” he breathed, and they descended.

  The second-floor landing was clear, and then they reached the first-floor breezeway that cut through the building. To their left, nearly filling the opening that would lead to the parking lot, was a three- or four-hundred-pound silhouette on tree trunk legs. Its pants had burst at the seams, and its button-up shirt had popped open to reveal a massive, distended belly.

  Even in the poor light Dean knew it would be green, its dead flesh marbled with black streaks, ponderous and sloshing. One of the wet ones, as he had come to call them. The creature made a thick gargling sound, as if the slime that swelled its body filled its throat as well, causing the neck to bloat. The sound came again, and it started toward them.

  Dean moved away to the right and was about to exit the breezeway when a dark shape lunged from the bushes beyond the opening. Dean swung the bat and was rewarded with a metallic thunk as it rocked the zombie’s head to the side, causing it to stumble and fall. He didn’t stay to make the kill. He started running.

  Dean headed down the sidewalk that ran the length of the building where their apartment was, seeing two dozen staggering shapes moving toward them across a grassy commons. Another figure appeared on the sidewalk, arms reaching, and Dean hit it on the run with an overhand strike, driving its head like a railroad spike, staving in its skull. He was past before it buckled to the ground.

  The exertion of running with all this weight and swinging the bat made white spots swim in his vision. He felt his balance slipping.

  “Potty, Daddy,” Leah said, her voice a hush in his ear.

  “You already went potty,” he whispered back, stopping at the corner of the building and leaning against it with one hand, breathing hard and looking for movement. Then he dashed into another breezeway.

  “Potty chair,” Leah said. “Potty chair.” She patted a hand on his shoulder for emphasis.

  “Daddy will get you a new one,” he gasped, and then they were out of the breezeway and into another parking lot. More ghouls moved among the vehicles, many changing direction as they turned his wa
y. Dean kept running as the white spots began to fire off like paparazzi flashbulbs. The headache slammed the back of his eyes, and he felt like vomiting.

  On his back, Leah said no more about the potty chair. She balled her hands into fists and pressed them to her eyes so she wouldn’t see the Icky Men.

  Moans pierced the evening, feet scraping on pavement as dead things turned, and Dean ran. He took them across a road, down a sidewalk, turned at a corner, and ran for two more blocks before turning again. Five times he had to swing the bat to clear their path, knocking the dead aside but not killing them.

  One creature caught hold of the papoose pack nylon, snarling and reaching for the small pink-clad figure within. Leah screamed, and that time Dean did stop to make the kill, grunting and hammering the bat into the creature’s head until the skull disintegrated, growling like an animal as he crushed the hated thing.

  He didn’t know where he was taking them as they ran by houses and stores with boarded-over windows, past a neighborhood bank with its front doors standing open and twenty-dollar bills scattered in the entrance like dead leaves. He rounded a corner and startled a coyote that was feeding on a limbless torso with a moaning, gnashing head, making the animal yip loudly and skitter into the falling night.

  Dean didn’t know their direction or how far they had gone, but finally he staggered to a halt and wrapped his arms around a lamppost to keep himself from falling, pressing his forehead against the cool metal.

  Leah’s hand touched the side of his face. “Daddy’s hot,” she said.

  “I . . . know,” he gasped. “Super quiet . . . okay?”

  “Super quiet, Daddy.”

  He stayed that way for a couple of minutes, then stood, still holding on, and looked around, his gaze stopping on a nondescript building across the street, brick with a glass front door and blinds in the windows. He crossed, and once up close he saw a shingle next to the door: J. M. SHAPIRO, D.D.S. Dean tried the door, found it locked, and after a quick glance at the street used the bat to smash out the lower panel of glass. Fifteen minutes inside with a flashlight found him what he needed: foil sample packets of antibiotics.

  He filled his pockets with samples, aspirin, and a handful of gauze pads. A three-month-old bottle of Snapple—God, it tastes like ass!—helped him swallow three antibiotic tablets and two aspirin. There was little else of interest here, though he also pocketed some toothpaste and a couple of toothbrushes, a pink one for Leah. Soon he was back on the street, moving at a brisk walk as night came on.

  • • •

  The antibiotics worked and beat the infection. Subsequent cleaning, antiseptic, and a poorly executed stitching job with needle and thread turned a life-threatening dog bite into just an ugly scar.

  Home turned out to be a tiny house with a detached garage tucked behind a small neighborhood convenience store and deli. A high board fence concealed the house’s presence from the street, and although the store was fairly well looted, Dean discovered that the owner used the detached garage as a stockroom, and that had been missed. He found water and soft drinks, canned and dry goods, toiletries, and even some toys for Leah. For himself there were maps, batteries, a few paperbacks, and several cases of warm beer, to which he treated himself on occasion. In a dusty box on a high shelf in the store he found a freestanding plastic and aluminum adult toilet seat for the disabled. After some coaxing and, to his daughter’s delight, permission to use her crayons on the white plastic to personalize the chair, Leah pronounced it acceptable. Dean was sure to bag their waste tightly and pitch it far over the fence into another yard.

  Sometimes it surprised him how so much of what they did revolved around the potty. He and Angie even called it that when speaking to each other, and she once remarked that she hadn’t gone to the “bathroom” since becoming a mother. One time on set between takes, Dean had announced to the director that he needed a quick potty break, and the crew had broken up laughing. The life of a parent, he supposed.

  Dean and Leah lived quietly, and nothing came knocking. There was no sign of Dylan or Shana. On occasion they heard distant gunfire, and several times drifters came sniffing around the yard. Dean would have liked to dispatch them swiftly and silently with his knife, but then he would have had to deal with the bodies. Instead he had waited quietly until they wandered away. He left the house only for water collection, waste disposal, or resupply from the garage, and only when Leah was napping behind locked doors.

  Once, however, after plotting their location on a map, he waited until Leah was asleep and left the house with a can of black spray paint, risking a two-block journey to a house he had seen with a large white wall facing the street. His idea had been to leave Angie another clue, maybe point her toward their hiding place, but after five minutes of internal argument, he left with the wall untouched. The wrong people might see it, and even if they couldn’t interpret the meaning, they might recognize it as something new in the neighborhood. He couldn’t risk it.

  Dean returned to find everything as he had left it, Leah snoozing under a fuzzy pink blanket, clutching Wawas and Raggedy Ann under each arm. While she slept, he waited at the front of the house with all his weapons ready, prepared to engage anything that might have seen him and followed him home. Nothing had. Their sanctuary would hold for now.

  NINETEEN

  January 12—Saint Miguel

  Little Emer Briggs sat on the skull-tipped throne in Saint Miguel’s main chapel, the orange and yellow of sunset lighting the high stained glass with muted colors. Several panes had come crashing to the marble floor during the quake, and there was now a long, jagged crack running from the ground all the way to the top of the bell tower. Some of the windows in the parish school had fallen from their frames during the shaking, but there were no injuries. One of the dog runs had broken free at an intersection, and now a handful of men and women were out rounding up stray collared zombies.

  A fire was burning in the pit in the center of the vaulted room, throwing dancing shadows on the walls. A cluster of armed men and women stood around the flames, watching the emperor hold court.

  “Where did they come from?” the warlord asked. He had one leg thrown over the arm of the big chair, his head leaned back against crushed velvet. His black eyes never left the bound man kneeling at the foot of the stairs leading up to the throne.

  “Answer him,” Lassiter said, standing on James Garfield’s left and giving the mortgage broker a shove with his rifle barrel. Russo stood to the right, filming with his digital camcorder, a crooked smile on his face.

  “They didn’t say,” Garfield responded. He threw a glance over to where Drew stood between two bikers. His son was staring into the flames of the fire pit, unblinking.

  Little Emer frowned. “Didn’t say? Nothing at all?”

  Garfield shook his head.

  “Were they military?”

  “I don’t know,” said Garfield. “Maybe. They had rifles like soldiers do. I don’t know much about those things.”

  Little Emer looked over to where his father was standing, the old man wearing khakis so baggy and tightly belted they looked like a sack, and a dirty wifebeater speckled with blood drops. The man was smoking, watching the captive with prey bird eyes. Wahrman, the grower, leaned against the wall beside him, wearing his sunglasses even in the gloom of the chapel.

  “You said they were looking for someone,” said Little Emer.

  Garfield nodded. “A man named Dean West. One of the women said she was his wife.”

  “That’s probably Angie West, Emer,” Lassiter said. “The TV chick with the gun show. That was her ranch with the bunker.”

  The biker lord seemed to consider the words for a moment. “So Mama’s come looking for her family. Brought along a helicopter and a hunting party. That’s sweet.” He looked at the two bikers standing beside the little boy. “Take some people and go check out that school. From a distance, though, no shooting.”

  Red Hen and Stark gathered some of the people fro
m around the fire pit and left, leaving Drew standing alone. The boy didn’t move from where he stood.

  “Please don’t hurt us,” Garfield said, his voice breaking.

  Little Emer swung his leg down and leaned forward in the throne. “How the hell have you stayed alive this long? You are the biggest pussy I’ve met since the world ended.”

  Garfield made a choking noise and looked at the floor.

  The elder Briggs climbed the steps to the throne, flicking his cigarette butt away and, stifling a series of wet coughs into a handkerchief, glanced at Garfield. In a voice soft enough that only his son would hear, he said, “What’s the story with that group you sent out?” He knew his son was in touch by radio with the group hunting the missing Black Hawk.

  “They checked the golf course,” Little Emer replied. “They’re going to check one of the ranches, bed down for the night, and check the other in the morning.” He curled his lip. “Corrigan refused to go with them.”

  When the older man raised an eyebrow, Little Emer told him how the Army deserter had reported that this afternoon’s quake had damaged the bridge, and he couldn’t risk crossing it with the Bradley.

  “He disobeyed me,” spat the biker lord. “I should have the son of a bitch crucified.”

  Big Emer snorted. “Sounds like he’s the only one with any sense around here. Let those morons with rifles and your asshole biker buddies smoke ’em out, if that bird is even there. Keep that armored vehicle close to home.”

  “Why?”

  Big Emer smirked. “Because you’re likely to need it. If it is that TV girl and her husband out there, they’re not going to appreciate what you did to their family. What you’re still doing.” He shook his head. “They’ll come for payback.”

  “They don’t worry me,” the younger Briggs said.

  Big Emer nodded. “I know. And that worries me.”

  The warlord clapped his hands together loud enough to make Garfield look up sharply. “Anything else you can tell me?” Little Emer asked.

  Garfield shook his head rapidly. “I’ve told you everything. Please, let us go now.”