Omega Days (Volume 1)

NINETEEN



Alameda



“Move your ass!” Angie braced her elbows on the flat surface of a stone trash can and snapped off rounds, shifting fire right and left. The Galil, an Israeli assault rifle and one of her favorites from the van, kicked out brass as bodies fell, heads blown apart. The grocery store parking lot was quickly filling with the dead, and they were getting closer. Angie pulled the trigger on an empty magazine, ejected it and drew another from a pouch on her vest. The Galil cracked again a moment later.

“Almost done,” shouted Margaret Chu. Ten feet behind Angie, Margaret and Tanya along with two other men were emptying a pair of shopping carts into the open back hatch of a big Ford Excursion.

“We still need the water.” Tanya ran back into the store with one of the men. The other, a lawyer named Elson, retrieved a shotgun from the front seat of the SUV and started firing at corpses shuffling in from the other direction.

Angie dropped another mag and reloaded, stepping away from the trash can and walking several yards into the parking lot where she would have a broader field of fire. She dropped to one knee and the Galil bucked. A man in black jeans. A man in torn khakis. A woman wearing a baseball cap. A guy in mechanic’s coveralls. Almost two weeks of decay had turned their blood stains a rusty color, and blackened their wounds. Whatever swelling decomposition had caused had leaked out of the older ones, leaving skin sagging and gray. Some were fresher kills, bloated and green. When one of her rounds found the torso on the swollen ones, they blew open like bags of wet spinach. The dead didn’t notice, and lurched forward. Flies buzzed in clouds around most of them.

She shot a teenaged girl in pajamas, a fat man wearing only boxers, a woman in a business suit and skirt. Not every round was a successful head shot, but she was patient and adjusted fire, hitting the mark with the next squeeze of the trigger.

Three clips emptied. She inserted another. “We need to go!”

The lawyer’s shotgun was silent, and Angie pivoted on her knee, aiming in his direction. The man was leaning against the hood of the SUV, fumbling fresh shells into the weapon. A pair of corpses ten yards from him broke into a gallop, arms swinging.

Angie sighted.

Trigger squeeze.

A body fell.

A tick of the sights to the right.

Trigger squeeze.

The round punched through the second creature’s throat, and it kept coming. The lawyer saw it, cried out and dropped a handful of shells to the asphalt.

Slow breath.

Trigger squeeze.

The side of its head blew off and it collapsed.

“Calm down and collect your shells, Elson.” She turned back towards the main parking lot. Angie had found the lawyer during one of her solo scouting trips three days ago, hiding in the back of a corner market. She brought him back to the firehouse like a stray, one of many she had collected over the last two weeks, and it turned out the man had a little experience with skeet and clay pigeons. That made him a shooter. Not a particularly skilled one, but at least he had handled shotguns before. She had armed him with a twelve gauge Remington from the van.

“I’m loaded,” he called, reappearing at the hood of the SUV.

“Slow and steady,” she said between her own shots. “Aim and squeeze, keep count of your shells.”

He nodded and fired, blowing a corpse’s leg off at the knee. It immediately started crawling. His next shot was to its head.

“How are we doing, Margaret?”

“They’re still inside.” The woman stood at the open SUV hatch, rubbing her hands and looking back and forth between the parking lot and the entrance to the store. She wasn’t a shooter, but she was relatively fit and willing to go out, so Angie tasked her as a field worker. Everyone had a job. There were others back at the firehouse she didn’t dare allow into the field, like Sophie Turner, who was afraid of everything and didn’t want to go outside, but was great with the kids. An elderly couple, the man afflicted with MS and his wife, who couldn’t be far from an oxygen bottle, sat at windows as lookouts. And there was a rotund, balding man in his fifties named Jerry who wheezed when he climbed the stairs. Angie didn’t know how he had stayed alive the six days it took for him to discover the firehouse as a safe haven, but he did, and with his sense of humor intact. Jerry was a work-at-home programmer by day and an amateur stand-up comic on the weekends, who often apologized to Angie for his lack of useful skills. She had decided he would learn how to strip and clean weapons.

Her Uncle Bud wasn’t allowed to leave either. Someone strong needed to remain behind to keep the firehouse secure, and she also wanted a person she could trust to keep an eye on Maxie.

The rumble of a metal u-boat came from behind her as the other man in their group, an insurance adjustor named Mark Phillips who had joined them only yesterday, emerged from the store with stacked cases of water in gallon jugs. He and Margaret started loading it at once, filling every available space in the back of the Excursion.

“Where’s Tanya?” Angie slapped in a new clip, and collected her empty magazines, shoving them in vest pockets.

The insurance man made a face. “She said she had to get cigarettes for Maxie.”

Angie cursed and put the Galil back to her shoulder, resuming her position at the trash can, picking targets and dropping them. More staggered in from the street, from between nearby buildings and around both corners of the grocery store. A short Hispanic woman. A housewife missing most of her face. A dad still wearing an empty, dark-stained baby carrier on his chest.

The Galil cycled rounds, and they all went down.

A kindergartener with a bowl cut of black hair wearing shorts and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, trudged across the lot, bumping against a shopping cart. Angie put the assault rifle’s sights on her.

Touched the trigger.

Hesitated.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and blew out a breath, then opened them and sighted again. The little one walked with one shoulder slumped lower than the other, small sneakers scraping over the pavement in jerky steps.

Angie touched the trigger again.

And didn’t fire.

She gritted her teeth and shifted to a high school kid in a yellow Polo shirt, putting one through his eye.

There was a long scream from inside the store. Margaret and Mark the insurance guy froze, each holding a case of water. Angie swore again and dropped another corpse, then ran inside. Tanya was running out, a canvas messenger bag hung across her chest and sprayed red. She was crying and had a hand clamped to her other, bloody forearm.

“She bit me! She bit me!”

Angie grabbed her. “Where?”

Tanya shook her head, her breath going in and out much too fast. “Bit me, oh, God, she bit me!”

A moan came from the shadowy interior on the left, and Angie raised her rifle, advancing as the girl ran outside. She followed the blood on the floor, moving quickly but quietly in rubber soled boots, watching the flanks. There was a streak of fresh blood on the service desk counter where Tanya had climbed over, scattered packs of cigarettes on the floor beneath it. A dead girl in a brown smock with a name tag reading BILLY was on the other side, groaning and reaching across.

Angie shot her in the head and went back outside.

The lawyer’s shotgun fired, and the insurance adjustor slammed the back hatch of the Excursion. “We’re loaded.” Margaret was already in one of the rear seats with Tanya, trying to calm the screaming girl and stop the bleeding. Hundreds of the dead pressed in across the parking lot, the kindergartener near the front.

Angie looked at the little girl for a long moment. “Drive,” she ordered, and Mark went to the wheel. “Elson, we’re leaving.” The lawyer fired another shot, missing his target completely, and piled into the back. Angie rode shotgun.

In the third row seat, Tanya was sobbing and wailing, “She bit me!”

The rest of them rode in silence, as rain clouds rolled in from the bay.



Bud Franks was looking for Maxie. He didn’t need him for anything in particular, but he wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. Normally he would have gone straight to the roof, where the man would be stretched out in a lawn chair smoking like a fiend. He was the only one in their group with the habit, and had been politely but firmly told he could not smoke inside. He wouldn’t be up there now, though. Maxie had run out of cigarettes two days ago, and had been sullen and short-tempered ever since.

He wasn’t in the kitchen. The man refused to do much of anything around the firehouse, but he had appointed himself cook, and it turned out he had some skill in that area. Perhaps, Bud thought, that had been his trade before the plague, but after two weeks and even with direct questions, the man had revealed nothing about himself. Margaret and Denny weren’t of any help, either. They had been moving along a sidewalk together and nearly knocked the man down as he came out of a liquor store with his pistol in hand. Maxie had looked them over as if deciding whether to shoot them or ignore them, then sighed and gestured at his Cadillac parked at the curb. “Get on in,” he said. Tanya was already in the passenger seat. That was only fifteen minutes before they showed up at the firehouse. When asked about the older man, Tanya shrugged and said nothing. The total lack of information bothered the cop in Bud. And then there was Maxie’s refusal to do any work outside the kitchen. He wouldn’t even wash dishes or clean his own pots and utensils.

Tanya had taken to him, even though he appeared to be just shy of being old enough to be her grandfather. She cleaned up after him in the kitchen, did his laundry, even made his bed. The rest of their relationship was none of Bud’s business.

The one accommodation Maxie made outside of cooking was to stand watch, but only at night and only up on the roof where he could smoke. He didn’t ask for a rifle or shotgun, and for reasons the ex-deputy couldn’t explain that made him feel a little better. Bad enough the man carried that .32 revolver in his waistband every place he went. Maxie hadn’t said anything to indicate it, didn’t have the tats or the yard walk, but he felt like ex-con to Bud.

While he looked for their mysterious cook, Bud checked the perimeter, finding it secure. They ran the generator sporadically, usually to charge the two-way radios Bud and Angie carried, and to power up the firehouse’s communication system once a day. Cooking was done with a propane stove, and Coleman lanterns provided light at night. They had covered all the windows with blankets to minimize the chance that a corpse walking by might notice movement inside during the day, or the glow of lanterns after dark. The same had been done with the glass front door, and a fat, six foot tall air compressor had been muscled out of the garage bay and shoved against it, then locked in place with canvas straps. If they broke through the glass, it would slow them down a little. The windows in the garage roll-up doors had been painted black except for small peep holes. There wasn’t enough paint to do the rest of the windows, but it was on their shopping list.

Getting the dead away from the firehouse was Angie’s job. She had retrieved a silencer from the van, fitted it to a Canadian assault rifle and then gone to the roof, leaning over and clearing them out one at a time, front and back. The bodies were collected and hauled out to the rear parking lot over several days, and only when nothing was around which might see them. Now the only thing which would attract attention was when one of the vehicles rolled in or out, and that was done only after careful watching from the rooftop. Invariably a few would show up anyway, and would have to be cleaned up with the silenced rifle.

Thank goodness for the van, he thought. Without the lethal protection of its contents, they wouldn’t have survived. Additional thanks were due to the fact that Angie and Bud happened to be out filming when it all went bad, and had the van with them. They could just as easily have been in LA at a pre-production or script meeting, unarmed and defenseless.

Bud checked the main room, where Sophie was sitting on the floor with a circle of kids.

“Hi, Bud.” Being around the kids obviously made her happy, and it seemed that taking care of them took her mind off whatever horrors she had seen before reaching the firehouse. They kept her too busy to dwell on whomever she had lost. Sophie didn’t share those details, though she surely had her personal tragedies, like the rest of them, and no one pressed her about it.

“How’s our new arrival?” Bud asked.

Denny, who had come in with Maxie’s group, was the oldest at twelve, but he didn’t seem to mind playing with the smaller kids. Next to him was a ten-year-old Angie collected during a supply raid (Bud couldn’t remember his name) and then there was the two little sisters. Each held a doll, the girls providing voices as the toys engaged in a discussion about hair and clothes. Sophie looked at a three-year-old with blonde hair sitting in the circle and playing with a yellow plastic truck. He made an “rrrrrr” sound as he drove it around his knees and feet. “Ben’s doing just fine.” She rubbed his back. “I think he’s forgotten about what happened.”

“Has he said anything about his family?”

She shook her head. “I still can’t believe he’s alive.”

Neither could Bud. One of their rooftop lookouts had spotted the boy walking down the center of the road outside, carrying a stuffed rabbit with blood on it, whimpering. The noise he was making, his mere presence, was drawing the dead from all angles. The lookout called downstairs to Angie, who was on the second floor. She looked out a window, and then a moment later came pounding down the stairs with a .45 in a shoulder holster, racking a shell into a combat twelve gauge.

She made an animal noise as she bolted out the back door, teeth bared.

The others crowded to the windows and watched as Angie sprinted around the firehouse and straight at the child, sliding to a stop nearly on top of him, pushing him to the ground and then planting a foot on either side of him. The boy curled into a ball and covered his ears as Angie began blasting with the shotgun, turning in a tight circle. When it was empty, she cast it aside and pulled the .45, assumed a shooting stance and went to work, squeezing off steady, measured rounds, still rotating through the points of the clock. When the .45 was dry she ejected the magazine and inserted a new one in a motion so fast and fluid that the firing didn’t seem to stop.

When Bud reached her in the street, she was already on the way back, the boy in her arms as she soothed him. Twenty corpses lay crumpled in a circle behind her, all with head wounds.

“He doesn’t know his mommy or daddy’s name, or at least he can’t remember right now. He hasn’t said anything about what happened to them. He’s eating okay and he gets along well with the other kids.” She smoothed his hair, and Ben tilted his head into the touches. “He has nightmares, though.”

Bud looked at the boy, then at Sophie. “I’m glad you’re here with us.”

She smiled. “Me too.”

Bud went to the garage bays. Angie insisted on leading the raids, and wouldn’t even discuss Bud going in her place, despite his repeated offers. She was good at it, always bringing back plenty of food and vital supplies like camping equipment, fuel, clothing, first aid supplies and batteries, as well as toys for the kids and the occasional paperback or board game to keep the adults occupied. Bud couldn’t claim he would do better, and although it still didn’t feel right, he was mature enough to admit that it was misplaced, masculine pride talking. She was younger, faster, more fit and without question a better marksman. It was the right decision.

The bays held three vehicles, with space for the Excursion which was currently out. The Angie’s Armory van faced towards the front, next to the empty slot. Facing the rear roll-ups was an extended white passenger van with six rows of seats, Bayside Senior Care on the side in blue letters. Parked next to it was Maxie’s Cadillac.

Maxie was in here, the smell of cigarette smoke strong. The man was sitting on the rear bumper of Bud and Angie’s van, legs stretched out, puffing away.

“I thought you were out.”

“I am. Found a stale one in my glove box, though. Lucky for me.”

“You’re supposed to smoke on the roof.”

Maxie ignored him and slapped a hand against one of the van’s rear doors. “Why you keep this rig locked, Mr. Bud?”

Bud walked to him slowly and folded his arms. “How do you know it’s locked?”

Maxie smiled with the cigarette clamped between his teeth, flashing a bit of gold. “You afraid someone’s gonna steal your guns?”

“It’s safer for everyone this way. There’s kids around.”

The man seemed to consider that for a moment. “Don’t want all that firepower falling into the wrong hands, do we?” He crushed the butt out on the cement.

“That’s absolutely right, Maxie.”

The man flashed a gold-capped grin and stood. “Smart thinking.”

For one crazy moment Bud knew the older man was going to pull the .32 out of his waistband and shoot him right in the chest. Instead he started towards the firehouse door, just as the Excursion’s engine rumbled up into the driveway out front. “Mama’s home.”

“We’ll need help unloading.”

“I’ll send someone out.” Maxie went inside.



Tanya didn’t have much longer and they knew it. She was lying on a bunk upstairs, her arm tightly bandaged, beads of sweat standing out on her face. Her eyelids fluttered and she groaned, rolling her head back and forth, trying to find a cool spot on the pillow. Margaret Chu sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her face with a wet wash cloth, trying to keep her comfortable, while Sophia – wearing heavy rubber gloves and a clear plastic face shield – cleaned vomit off the floor, putting the rags in a red bio bucket.

“You can’t tell me who to see, Nana!” Tanya’s words were slurred. “I love him!”

Margaret pressed the wet cloth to the girl’s forehead and hushed her, but Tanya was beyond noticing.

“Maybe this will pass,” said Larraine, the old woman whose husband had MS. She stood behind Margaret, her lined face revealing that she didn’t believe her own statement.

Angie looked sideways at her uncle. The communication equipment in the small room up front had delivered only static for days straight. Then one afternoon there was a brief transmission, a few garbled sentences where the only words they could make out were “national, “evacuation centers” and “compromised.” It wasn’t encouraging. Later that day another message came through, this one as clear as if the speaker was in the same room, a recorded Emergency Broadcast System announcement. It repeated for nearly an hour before the static took over once more, and there had been nothing since.

The message said the plague was viral, a highly contagious blood borne pathogen transferred through a human bite. Animals appeared to be immune. The symptoms, lasting from one to six hours, resembled flu with periods of dementia, and ended in death one-hundred-percent of the time. The infected were to be isolated in a secure quarantine. Late stage victims (the word zombie wasn’t used) became ambulatory after death, and were extremely aggressive.

Tanya was three hours past her bite.

Angie and Bud stepped into the hallway and spoke quietly. They could hear rain drumming on the roof. “We know where this is going,” her uncle said.

Angie glanced back inside, where the other women were trying to keep Tanya calm and cool as the fever burned her up. “So what do we do with her? Keep her in there?” They both knew that wasn’t an option. She would turn, and then one of the things they were working so hard to keep outside would be inside.

“The radio said isolation.”

“Where? We can’t lock her in a closet.”

“I was thinking about the parking lot,” Bud said.

“Leave her delirious on the hood of a car? She be eaten in minutes.”

“No, inside one of the cars.”

Angie thought about it. That would be better than the roof, which she had been about to suggest. Besides, if they put her up there they would have to deal with her eventually.

Maxie scuffed up the nearby staircase and stopped, looking past them. “How’s my girl doing?”

“She’s dying,” said Angie.

“And nothin’ gonna stop that,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. He went inside, and Angie and her uncle watched him rest a hand on the shoulder of each lady, taking the washcloth from Margaret and sitting down on the edge of the bed. He moved the cloth gently over her face, and began to sing softly to her, something from Motown. The girl’s restlessness subsided, and the women left the room, slipping between Bud and Angie and heading downstairs.

“In a car, on the street, chained in the garage bay, none of it changes what’s going to happen.” Bud ran a hand through his bristly hair. “She’s a danger to us, Ang.”

She knew it. But the alternative…? Sick people were supposed to be cared for, not put down like rabid animals, although that was most assuredly what the girl would become. Logic demanded a hard choice; either put her outside as she was and let the virus run its course, or put her down. But this was a person, someone she knew, who had a smile and a name and ideas, maybe even people left out there who cared about her.

Angie put her hand on Bud’s arm. “What if we-”

A gunshot made them both jump. Maxie stood over the bed, lowering the small pistol. He had wrapped the girl’s head in a towel to cut down on the mess. Angie and Bud could only stare at him as he squatted and began rummaging through Tanya’s messenger bag, pulling out several packs of Salems and slipping them into his pockets. He tested the gun barrel to see if it was cool enough, then shoved it back in his waistband.

Maxie popped a cigarette into his mouth as he eased between them. “I’ll be on the roof. Supper’s at six.”