Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters

by John L. Campbell

  “I will,” the warlord said. “I promised, didn’t I? But let’s visit the playpen first.” He hopped from the throne and walked to Garfield’s son, taking him by the hand and leading him out of the room.

  Garfield cried, “Drew!” before Lassiter roughly shoved him in the same direction. Russo walked behind, still filming. The elder Briggs gave his grower a look, but Wahrman just shrugged, and the two of them followed last.

  • • •

  The high-ceilinged room echoed over a pool that had been drained but still made the place smell of chlorine. Coleman lanterns placed around the rim threw an orange glow across the room and created a pit of shadows within the pool itself. A heavy iron bolt had been driven into one cement wall, and secured to it by a six-foot chain was Lenore Franks, more than four months dead and rotting, snarling and tugging at her leash.

  “Why did you keep that?” Little Emer’s father asked.

  “Because she was hot for an old lady,” the biker lord said, throwing a wink at Lassiter, who beamed back at him.

  “You need to get rid of it,” his father said, waving at the woman with a look of revulsion. “You need to clear out this whole fucking place.”

  The younger Briggs gave the man a handsome smile. “I like it. Maybe I’m working out some issues from my fucked-up childhood.”

  “You’ve got fucking issues, all right,” Big Emer said, then gave him a crooked yellow smile. “Can you spell sociopath, Junior? Need me to unscramble the letters?”

  The warlord glared at his father, clenching his hands. Even now the man could turn him into a frightened little boy with a word. How he despised the diseased bastard.

  “Put him on the diving board,” Little Emer said, and Lassiter immediately shoved Garfield out onto the textured white board. The mortgage broker stood there, hands bound behind his back, staring into the pool. A whine rose in his throat.

  “He’s gonna walk the plank now?” Big Emer sneered, lighting his sixty-second cigarette of the day. “I didn’t know the Romans did that.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, old man,” the warlord whispered, not looking at his father as a rush of heat ran into his face.

  “You’re like a little boy,” the elder Briggs said, “playing Let’s Pretend. Grow the fuck up, will you?”

  Little Emer turned and looked at his daddy under his eyebrow ridge, teeth bared. The rage boiling within him pushed away his childhood fears for a moment, revealing Big Emer Briggs to be old and sick and able to cut with words, nothing more. It was empowering, liberating. “If you speak again,” Little Emer said, “you go in with him.” His voice was even, his eyes flat and dark.

  Wahrman the grower reached for the pistol in his shoulder holster, and Little Emer pointed at him without taking his eyes off his old man. “Lassiter!” he barked. “If this fuck draws down on me, spray the whole fucking room with that AK. No one left standing, not even me.”

  Lassiter snapped the bolt on his assault rifle and leveled it at the grower. “Got it.”

  Russo leaped across the room to stand behind the former armored-car driver, still filming, but now over the man’s shoulder. The grower left his pistol in its holster.

  Little Emer smiled at his daddy. “Let’s have some fun.”

  Out on the diving board, James Garfield was shaking so hard the narrow strip wobbled beneath him. Tears streamed from his eyes as he stared, his whine rising to a wail. The warlord took Drew’s hand and led him to the edge of the pool. “Want to play with your friends?” he asked, patting the boy’s head. “There’s toys down there too.”

  Drew stared at the far wall and said nothing. He took no notice of the things moving in the pool below, making the room echo with their moans and snarls. He didn’t see the cloudy, dead eyes, the reaching gray hands, didn’t notice short legs and small feet shuffling over the blue tile bottom, kicking plastic toys and balls out of the way. Once the clothing had been brightly colored and covered in cartoon animals and superheroes, with a few swimsuits and small hospital gowns thrown in. Now it was all stained and dark, and Drew noticed none of it. Ever since he had seen the dead come pouring into the supposedly safe area at the fairgrounds, ever since he had seen—though Daddy had missed it—his mommy pulled down and torn apart, Drew hadn’t noticed much of anything. His young mind had recoiled from the ceaseless horror and taken him to a quiet inner place where none of it could touch him.

  Little Emer rubbed the two-year-old’s back. “Don’t you want to play?”

  Drew didn’t respond, didn’t hear his father’s mad shrieking or the hungry cries of forty small figures surging against the pool wall below him, arms reaching into the air.

  “Off you go,” said Briggs, his hand firm against the child’s back.

  When Garfield saw the small figure tumble over the side and disappear into the squirming mass below, he screamed his son’s name and jumped in after him.

  • • •

  It was after ten o’clock that evening when Little Emer heard Corrigan’s Bradley rumble back into the compound. By then his anger at the man’s disobedience had evaporated, but he remained frustrated. The group in the canyon reported finding fresh quad tracks and an area of beaten-down grass where a chopper had landed out at the raid site, but nothing else. Red Hen and Stark visited the elementary school in town that Garfield had told them of but found it overrun with the dead. There was a helicopter out there somewhere and a handful of trained, armed people loose in his city with vengeance on the mind.

  Even the playpen hadn’t eased his troubles. The short victory he had felt over standing up to the old man had vanished at the sight of the disappointed look on his father’s face. Now he sat on his throne, alone in the chapel as the fire burned down to embers. Having an empire had been sort of fun, being able to do what you wanted, whenever you wanted. But his daddy had been right. It was all a game of Let’s Pretend.

  Time to get rolling? he wondered. Gather his boys and hit the road? Soon, but not yet. He wasn’t quite ready to give up his throne, and he certainly wouldn’t let himself be chased away by three or four people with automatic weapons. The warlord lit a joint and smoked in the darkness. He needed some leverage.

  TWENTY

  January 13—Central Chico

  They had chosen the second deck of a small parking garage as their camp for the night. Dylan and Abbie were sleeping in a minivan, and parked next to them, Skye leaned against Carney in the back seat of an Escalade with tinted windows. Angie stood outside by a concrete wall, looking out at the dark city, her Galil cradled in her arms as she took watch.

  Skye looked out at her friend, alone in the night. “Do you think Dean’s alive?” she said.

  Carney didn’t move, warm and solid against her. “I’d like to think so. But this many months, on the run with a toddler? It’s a long shot.”

  Skye sighed. She thought so too, but would never say as much to Angie. She wanted Dean to be alive, Leah too, and Angie said her husband was a combat veteran with some serious skills. Leah’s presence would void most of those abilities, she suspected, preventing him from waging war if the raiders showed up, slowing him down, and attracting the dead with the innocent noise two-year-olds made.

  He was probably dead, Skye thought. She believed Angie thought it too, and because of that, her friend was dying inside. She had offered to stand watch with her, but Angie had brusquely asked to be left alone, and Skye had retreated to the Escalade.

  “That earthquake today,” Skye said, changing the subject, “is that normal? I didn’t grow up in California.”

  Carney shook his head. “That was good-sized, not normal at all. You saw the damage.”

  She had. Several buildings had sagged into the street and crushed cars, telephone poles toppled, and a lot of windows shattered. It had knocked them off their feet as they fled the elementary school, running through the neighborhood. Every drifter they encountered was standing and swaying with the tremor, all facing the same direction. When the shaking stopped, they sta
rted moving at once. It was eerie.

  Skye looked up at Carney in the darkness. “You believe me about what I saw, right? The red drifter that moved out of my rifle sight?”

  “I believe you.”

  She stared at him, looking for the lie. He saw her and laughed. “I do, I believe you. You said you saw it, so you did. It sounds dangerous.”

  “It is,” she said. “Worse than the others. It could think.”

  “And if we see it again,” Carney said, “we’ll kill it just like the others.”

  They were quiet for a while. Skye watched Angie standing motionless as a stone and closed her eyes. “She’s going to decide soon.”

  “Decide what?” Carney asked, his voice soft.

  She hesitated. “Decide that Dean’s dead. Then it will be time to go after the ones who burned the ranch.” She felt Carney nod slowly. “We have to go with her,” Skye said. “I have to go.”

  “And where do you think I’ll be?” asked the ex-con.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I talk too much.”

  Carney’s big chest shook with a laugh. “Yeah, right.”

  She smiled in the darkness. After a while she said, “Want to fool around?”

  “Do you?”

  Another sigh. “Not really.”

  “Me either.”

  Skye smiled again and shifted closer against him, burying her face in his chest, breathing him in.

  • • •

  Angie rolled her shoulder where TC’s bullet had passed through, then rubbed at the soreness in her forearm, the fracture still healing. Both hurt. The hurt in her chest was worse.

  She was out of tears. Standing at the four-foot wall of the parking garage, staring down at dark buildings and streets where there had once been life, Angie realized she had been here before. Except then it had been the rooftop of a firehouse in Alameda, looking down upon a world fast being overrun by the walking dead, alone and longing for her family. Nothing had changed but the location.

  Dean would have gone down fighting, she knew, down to the last bullet and knife thrust, using his bare hands to give Leah just a few more seconds of life. For her daughter, she prayed the end had been quick, and that she hadn’t been too scared.

  A single tear rolled down her cheek. Almost out of tears, she thought, and a tiny, sad smile accompanied her sob. There was nothing left in her world, only death. The moans of earth’s new conquerors floated through the night air.

  The tear dried on her face, and no more followed.

  Then, at five minutes past midnight, the earth began to tremble again, a mild vibration at first, then steadily building, shaking left to right and up and down at the same time. Cracks raced across concrete flooring and up pillars. Parked cars slid into one another, and Angie had to hold on to the concrete wall to keep from falling. Beyond the parking garage, the second story of a house dropped inward with a cloud of drywall and splintered beams.

  Foreshock, Angie’s mind screamed. The one earlier in the day had been a foreshock, a warning of things to come. The thought was only a flash from a primitive place deep inside her brain, but in that instant she knew it was true. The quake built in intensity, stretching out in length and violence.

  The door to the minivan rolled open and Abbie cried, “What’s happening?”

  The groan of the moving parking garage drowned out the woman’s cries, and Angie lunged for the Escalade, banging a fist against its hood. “We’ve got to get out of here!” she screamed.

  Then there was a roar of broken concrete and twisted rebar as the support pillars on this level crumbled, dropping the upper deck onto Angie and her friends.

  • • •

  Ten point six. Four minutes long. The most massive earthquake in the recorded history of civilization. It was the great killer, the one feared for generations, the stuff of apocalypse and nightmares.

  The devastating shocks felt in Chico, California, were merely ripples from the epicenter 170 miles away. That location was centered beneath the old naval air station at Alameda, and the destruction it wreaked was biblical. Cities fell, mountains and ridges shifted and collapsed, and the Pacific Ocean rushed in like a wild animal intent upon the kill.

  For those in the San Francisco Bay Area who felt the full force of Mother Nature’s murderous blow—Father Xavier, Rosa, Evan, and others—the quake was only the beginning of the nightmare.

  TWENTY-ONE

  January 13—Near the Skyway

  “There,” Braga said, pointing the flashlight with Titan standing beside him. In their other hands they carried shotguns. “There.” He moved the flashlight beam. “And over there too.”

  Each time the circle of light stopped, it revealed dead people moving slowly toward them over the bare ground. Their three pickups and the burned remains of the Franks ranch were behind them, the place where the raiders had tried to settle in for the night. They had all learned of the arrival of the walking dead when one of the men from the trucks stepped away into the dark to urinate, then screamed as something caught hold of him. There was a brief flurry of gunfire as half a dozen corpses were shot down making their way toward the trucks. Now the bikers stood on the dirt road near their Harleys.

  “How many you think?” Titan asked.

  Braga turned and panned the flashlight left to right on the other side of the road. A dozen more dead faces snarled back at them, drawing closer.

  “Shit, I dunno. Can’t tell in the dark.”

  Back at the trucks, more flashlights clicked on. Voices rose in alarm at the sight of packs of the undead moving steadily closer.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Braga. “We sure as hell can’t stay here.”

  Titan spoke into a walkie-talkie, demanding that Corrigan respond. There was nothing but silence.

  “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker when we get back,” Titan said.

  “I’ll help you, bro.” Braga turned toward the trucks. “Load up,” he shouted. “We’re going to check that other ranch, then head home tonight.”

  A weak cheer went up.

  Within minutes, the two motorcycles were leading the line of trucks back up the ranch road toward the Skyway. The bikes weaved around stumbling figures and the trucks simply knocked them out of the way.

  • • •

  The undead at the Franks ranch followed the direction the raiders had taken, hundreds strong. This was merely the vanguard, and the main body—what Halsey had dubbed the Stampede—moved through the forest on stiff legs, nearly two thousand corpses pushing through the underbrush, oblivious to the branches that tore at gray flesh or the rocks that skinned bare feet to the bone.

  They were heading for the Skyway too.

  • • •

  The legion of ghouls from Paradise emerged from the tree line and headed toward the distant glow of a light in a cabin window, moving with jerking steps. Their feet dragged crooked trails through the thin snow at first, but soon their mass trampled the ground muddy as they crossed the fields.

  At the front of the horde was a man in pale green hospital scrubs and a white doctor’s coat. In its forties when it died, the thing had long claw marks down the side of its face, and much of its scalp had been stripped down to the skull. Its filmy eyes were nearly the same shade as its scrubs. The boy in swim trunks with snow dusting his shoulders and head was walking beside the decaying doctor, arms limp and swinging at his sides, and they both came to a halt in the same moment. The two corpses tipped their heads back slowly and rotated to face the same direction, then stood motionless.

  Around and behind them, the thousands of corpses from Paradise followed suit.

  • • •

  Not far up the highway, the small column of bikes and trucks was forced to wind its way between abandoned cars and lone, wandering corpses. Up on point, the two bikers came upon a pair of stone pillars on the right topped with carriage lights, straddling a brick driveway, the gate between them standing open.

  Braga used a flashlight to look at his map. �
��This is it. Broken Arrow Ranch.”

  Titan checked his pistol to be sure a round was in the chamber, then shoved it back in his shoulder holster. He was about to say something when the quake hit, dropping the bikes and sending the men scrambling. Behind them, the people in the trucks held on as the Skyway buckled. Pine trees groaned and crashed into the road, and one of the pillars with a carriage lamp shivered and collapsed to one side in a pile of bricks and concrete.

  It was over quickly, lasting only a few minutes.

  Braga and Titan cursed again at their banged-up Harleys and stood them upright.

  “Sick of this shit,” said Braga. “Twice in one day.”

  “Yeah, and that one was stronger,” Titan said, straddling his bike.

  Braga waved to the others, and the column started up the long driveway toward Pepper’s Broken Arrow Ranch.

  • • •

  Halsey was dreaming of the Wild Mouse, a jerking, steel frame roller coaster that came to his hometown with the carnival every summer of his childhood. His mother had worried that it wasn’t built well. “How can it be safe if they take it apart and put it back together every week?” she said. But his father said, “Don’t sugar the boy,” and let him ride. Halsey loved the sudden turns that threw him left and right, was thrilled by the rapid click of the steel tracks and the sudden plunges that sent his stomach up into his chest. He spent the entire ride with his eyes squeezed tight, laughing until tears streamed from the corners.

  The sound of breaking glass was out of place. What was glass doing on a roller coaster? Then it came again and he opened his eyes, startled and unsure of where he was. Not a roller-coaster car, he realized, but in the comfortable armchair in front of his fireplace. A Coleman lantern glowed on the coffee table beside an empty glass and mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Vladimir snored on the nearby couch.

  The chair was shaking. Hell, the whole cabin was shaking. He saw the drink glass vibrate to the edge of the table and fall to join its broken companion—the glass that had shattered and woken him—on the floor. The bottle fell over and broke a second later.