Omega Days (Volume 1)

TWENTY-SIX



I-80



They stood side by side, two armed men with binoculars at the guardrail of a highway off-ramp, scanning the scene below. A sprawling travel plaza sat on over an acre of asphalt; twenty pumps under a big canopy on the left, a dozen diesel pumps on the right under a higher canopy for the big rigs. There was a service garage, a car wash, space for RVs and overnight truckers, vast parking lots and a big central building. Signs offered restaurants, a gift shop, restrooms and showers, hot coffee and a visitor’s center. Everything a traveler could need.

The dead meandered among the cars in the lots, in and out of the covered fuel service areas, bumping against the main building’s glass doors. They counted over a hundred of them, scattered across the plaza.

“Do you think they know what they are?” Evan said.

Calvin took a while before answering. “Probably about as much as a potted plant knows itself. That would be a blessing, don’t you think?”

Evan agreed. “I hope they can’t remember what they were. Their lives, the things they knew and dreamed about, what they loved and wanted… What they’ve lost. I hope you’re right.”

“Having a heart in this new world isn’t necessarily an asset, my friend. But I’m glad you still have one. Hold onto it.” They watched for a bit longer. There weren’t any of the hand written NO GAS signs they had seen over the past two days, but that didn’t mean much. With their binoculars they found the concrete slab for the underground fuel tanks. The round, metal covers were off, not a good sign.

“Want to keep looking?”

Calvin shook his head. “The caravan won’t make it much beyond this.” Three miles back, the line of cars, vans and campers carrying Calvin’s family of hippies was stopped and waiting, gas tanks nearly dry. Over the last two days they had followed Interstate 80 south through Vallejo, past the California Maritime Academy and over the Carquinez Bridge. The San Pablo Bay on the right sparkled as if brushed with gold flake, a vast expanse of empty water. They passed through Foxboro Downs and Richmond, and exit after exit found gas stations which had been pumped dry or burned to the ground.

They didn’t dare stray too far from the interstate, for fear of wandering into a heavily infested neighborhood. They did add a tow truck to the column, and it led the way, pushing aside blocking vehicles when it could, dragging them away when it couldn’t. The further south they went, the more time was spent clearing obstacles, and that burned more fuel.

Siphoning became the next option, but it didn’t work out very well. Almost every vehicle sitting in that great outbound graveyard had been run until its tank was dry. Now the caravan was on vapors, their spare fuel cans empty.

“If there is gas down there,” Calvin said, “this will probably be out last opportunity before Oakland.” He waved towards the dead. “Lots of drifters down there, but there’s sure to be more farther south, more than we could hold off.”

They discussed how they would do it, assuming there was fuel. Option one was to pump it out a can at a time and transport it back to the caravan. This way, only a few people would be exposed, but it was a slow process, and extremely dangerous for the pumpers. The other option attracted more attention; roll the entire caravan in at once, keep all the guns together and form a perimeter while the vehicles were fueled, blazing away at anything that moved. More noise, more moving parts that could go wrong, but faster. It occurred to Evan that he had never fully appreciated the simple ease of pulling up to a pump, paying with the swipe of a card and being back on the road in minutes. No one had ever tried to eat him at a Sunoco.

“First let’s see if there’s any fuel,” the younger man said, and they climbed onto the Harley, Calvin with his assault rifle across his chest.

Without anything being spoken, Evan and his motorcycle had been given the role of scout. He could weave in and out of traffic, ranging well ahead of the caravan and spotting danger before they rolled up on it. He was happy to do it. They had taken him in as one of their own, and it felt good to be useful.

He believed, however, that they were chasing a dream with this hospital ship. Calvin’s wife Faith said it was waiting at the Oakland Middle Harbor, once part of a naval supply base back in the forties, and since converted to commercial operations. Evan couldn’t say the ship existed. What he did know was that every mile south brought them closer to destruction. The numbers of the dead were multiplying, as were the attacks, corpses stumbling out from between cars and trucks, coming in at night, drawn by smell or sight or God knew what. Rifles and shotguns sounded with regularity now, and last night they had lost a young man named Otter while he was standing watch, a boy barely eighteen overwhelmed by three drifters in the dark. And that was just the highway on the outskirts of the city. Oakland would be a nightmare.

He couldn’t and didn’t voice any of this, but he suspected Calvin knew it in his heart. Evan had every reason to leave, and would have said his goodbyes by now except for the one reason he had to stay. Maya.

The Harley rumbled down the off-ramp, around a Greyhound bus and into the intersection serving the travel plaza. Calvin bailed off with his assault rifle and hid between a bush and a large, green electrical box on the corner. Evan took off at once, gunning the hog past the service center, between the pumps, shouting and getting their attention.

The dead moved towards him from every angle. He stopped to let them get closer.

As they neared, he throttled twenty yards ahead and stopped again, watching as they slowly merged into a crowd. With starts and stops, always aware of what was ahead and to the sides, he moved through the parking areas and towards the road that intersected the plaza and ran under the interstate.

Evan looked back and saw Calvin sprinting across the now empty pump area. He gunned the Harley ahead once more, out into the road, and the shuffling mob followed, moaning as a single entity. They were rotten and darkening, skin drawing taut across their features, giving them a more ghastly appearance. Soiled and torn clothing hung on thinning bodies, and even at a distance they gave off a putrid stench.

He stopped in the lot of a tire center across from the travel plaza, watching them trip over the curb as they swarmed into the road, and caught movement out of the corner of his right eye. A black kid in a basketball jersey, his jeans baggy to begin with and now pooled around his feet, forcing him to shuffle, came at him from behind a nearby stack of tires. He was too close. Evan pulled a black and silver automatic from a shoulder holster and fired.

The first bullet punched through the boy’s shoulder. The next hit him in the center of the chest. Evan swore and closed one eye. The third round hit the kid in the face, and he went down.

Need more practice, he thought, tucking the piece away. It was a 9mm Sig Saur, perfectly balanced and seemingly made to fit his hand. Calvin had given it to him, along with the holster and a box of rounds, after finishing Evan’s hand written book of road stories. The older man pronounced it literature, and called Evan a true poet.

“Keep it,” Evan said. “My gift.”

“No way. You need to finish it.”

“It is finished. The world I was writing about is finished too. It just doesn’t seem to matter much, considering how things are now.”

Calvin shook his head. “You’re wrong. It matters even more because of what’s happened. It speaks of a time when life was more than death and constant fear.” He held the book out to Evan.

“I’m starting a new book about all this. Maya gave me a journal and some pens, said I needed to write about this new world. She said the universe demanded it.”

Calvin scowled, but the corners of his eyes crinkled with mirth. “Evan, you don’t buy into that New Age hippie crap.”

Evan blushed. “It sounds more convincing when Maya says it.”

“Mmm-hmm,” her father nodded, still frowning but eyes twinkling.

“Anyway, I’m onto my next project.” He pushed the book back to the older man. “Please, keep that.”

Calvin hugged him, even kissed him on the cheek, holding Evan’s book to his chest and nodding. “This is a true gift.” A while later he presented the pistol, apologizing and stressing that it was not any kind of trade for Evan’s words, that he just wanted the writer to have a sidearm for when things got close. Evan had never cared much about handguns, but the Sig was a thing of beauty, and it felt reassuring hanging under his armpit.

And here was another reason why. A fat kid in his early teens with one arm and half his face missing blundered around the same stack of tires and galloped towards him, fat rolls bouncing in a tight t-shirt. The Sig came out again, and this time Evan hit the mark with the first bullet, blowing the top of the fat kid’s head off.

Time to move.

He throttled the Harley and moved out into the intersection, making sure the horde followed; not too close, but not so far away that some might lose interest and wander back to the service plaza. He saw Calvin running back towards the green utility box, so he roared over to meet him. Calvin hopped on the back, and Evan took them back up onto the highway.

“We’re in business,” Calvin yelled over the wind.



The raid worked. Evan went in first on the Harley while the caravan waited at the top of the ramp, the hippies watching through binoculars. He used the same tactic, drawing the dead together and leading them away, much further this time, up a road he hadn’t scouted, which made him a little nervous. Behind him Calvin took the caravan in fast, the vehicles lining up two by two at the underground tanks, using a pair of hand pumps to fill each one before the next two pulled up. Every gun was trained outwards, watching for the dead. Finally the spare cans were topped off and loaded back onto bumpers and roof racks.

Evan ran into trouble at an intersection half a mile away, the horde from the travel plaza closing in from behind, and more of the dead staggering out from between buildings and houses. He sat straddling his bike and fired every round from the Sig, and then emptied the shotgun. With something of a path cleared, he tucked low and rocketed between reaching arms. Fingernails scraped his jacket and tore open the sleeping bag on his handlebars, but he got through.

Back at the plaza, they all heard the distant gunfire. Calvin and Faith saw the way their daughter clutched her hands to her chest as she stared off in its direction. Maya climbed the aluminum ladder at the back of a camper and stood on the roof watching and waiting, climbing down only when the shape of a lone man on a motorcycle appeared on the road. She was smiling, and Calvin and Faith glanced at each other, smiling too.

The caravan fueled up without losing a single member, and without firing a shot. After that, Maya rode behind Evan on the Harley.



She was born both deaf and mute, something which surprised Evan, who thought she was only quiet. He didn’t even realize it until later that first night in camp, when he saw Maya signing with her mother. She was also very adept at reading lips.

The attraction was immediate for both of them, and coming together was as natural as breathing. There was no drama with some jealous would-be suitor or ex-boyfriend, and the other members of the Family reacted with smiles, as if it was supposed to happen. Maya started teaching Evan how to sign, used her hands to turn his face towards her when he was speaking, and communicated back by writing on a legal pad. Evan thought her handwriting was more beautiful than any angel’s, and wanted nothing more than to drown in those sapphire eyes.

At night they talked and scribbled for hours, asking each other about their lives, where they had been, what they had seen, what they wanted. Evan wanted to see Bermuda, Maya wanted to go to Paris. It didn’t matter that they never would. They speculated about whether the government might have a secret lab someplace, where scientists were even now working on a cure. Maya’s Uncle Dane butted into the conversation and announced that it was precisely one of those secret government labs which had unleashed a plague of the walking dead in the first place, and they waited until he walked away before laughing. Maya urged Evan to write every day. Sometimes she brought him coffee and would sit beside him, watching in fascination as his pen raced across the pages.

One evening, Evan passed by Calvin and Faith’s VW van and overheard them arguing inside.

“Her place is with us, Cal. I don’t want to discuss this.”

“Well, we need to discuss this. He can get her out of here, get her someplace safe.”

“No.”

“Honey-”

“No, Calvin. I’m not letting Maya ride off so that we never see her again.”

“He’ll protect her. He’s a good man, Faith.”

“Our family needs to stay together.”

A disgusted snort. “Isn’t it enough that we’re taking the other kids into this nightmare? And it’s going to be bad, worse than any of us imagine. There’s going to be thousands of them…Christ, maybe millions. And for what? A fantasy. A ship that isn’t there.”

“It’s there! Goddamn you Cal, that ship will be there if we just keep moving!”

A long pause, and then his voice, softer. “Please, Faith, let him take her out of here. Let at least one of our children live.”

“That ship will be there,” she repeated.

Evan felt dirty for listening in, and did not share what he had heard with Maya. He thought about what Calvin said, though, and considered doing it on his own, just taking Maya away, making a life together. But he didn’t. He stayed.

The caravan looted on the move. Any time the tow truck stopped to deal with a blockage, people with empty backpacks, pry bars and hand weapons would fall on the trucks and cars around them like jackals, searching for food and water, camping gear if they could find it, and the rare firearm. It was a system which seemed to work, but it was dangerous. Sometimes there were drifters still in the cars, or lurking in the shadowy corridors between them. One time Maya was moving with a scavenging group when a drifter lunged from beneath a station wagon, catching hold of her foot and biting into her ankle.

Its teeth didn’t get through the thick leather of her hiking boot.

The others quickly caved its head in with crowbars and pipes, and after that, Calvin insisted she not go anywhere Evan couldn’t see her. Evan was more shaken up than Maya, and he took her by the shoulders and practically yelled her father’s instruction. Maya giggled silently and nodded, then hugged him close.

For Evan Tucker, it ceased to be a great romantic adventure just outside of El Cerrito. He and Maya were motoring slowly through abandoned cars, scouting the obstacles which the tow truck would have to handle, the caravan a mile to their rear. They stopped for a few minutes, and after a careful look around to ensure there was no immediate threat, grinned at each other and started kissing, hands exploring one another, both of them wishing they had a room, a bed, something other than the seat of a Harley.

The cry came from the right, and Evan froze. Maya felt the sudden change in him and pulled back, searching his face.

It was an infant’s cry.

Ahead of them was a tangle of vehicles all facing north on the southbound lanes, those who had tried to take advantage of the less crowded side of the highway rather than sit in stopped traffic. A white uniform service truck sat on top of a yellow Smart Car, crushing it like a beer can, and behind that a beige Lincoln Navigator had apparently swerved to avoid hitting them and went up onto a guardrail, where it became stuck. The cries were coming from there.

Evan and Maya approached slowly. Both the driver and passenger doors hung open, and as they got close there was a buzz of flies and the reek of rotting flesh. The front seats were empty, the smooth, caramel leather sticky with splashes of old blood. Flies landed there, buzzed off and landed again. A woman’s shoe was on the floorboards of the passenger side next to a pink, overturned diaper bag with a bottle of spoiled formula poking out of it. The rear passenger window was broken, fragments glittering on the road. The cry came again from inside, high and plaintive, a squeaking wail. Then there was the sound of a rattle.

Maya shook her head as Evan moved forward, but he paid no attention, stepping up and looking inside. The infant seat was secured in the center, a plastic mobile of little rattles, mirrors and a stuffed crocodile mounted above it. The infant screeched again, and a little hand batted at the mobile, making one of the rattles spin.

“Oh my God,” Evan whispered, yanking open the rear door and scrambling in before Maya could stop him. How could a baby still be alive after this long?

It wasn’t.

Eight months old and wearing pink pajamas covered in dried, blackened gore, the little girl had a sizeable bite of meat and fabric missing from her left shoulder. Her skin was gray and covered in dark blotches, and once-brown eyes were filmy and pale. Locked in with a five point restraint harness, the infant saw Evan and let out a tiny screech, clumsy hands grabbing and tangling with the mobile.

Evan stared at her, and she screeched again like a tiny, wounded animal. Starving, he thought. Locked in there forever and starving.

He climbed back out and turned to Maya, signing the word “baby.” She hugged him fiercely, and he buried his face in her hair and cried. This is the world, he thought, back there thrashing in a car seat. Eventually he pulled away and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, unable to look up. One of Maya’s hands gently lifted his chin so he could see her. She held his face in both hands for a moment, and then touched the butt of the pistol in his shoulder holster. She nodded and turned away.

Evan stood near the Navigator’s door for a long time, the 9mm in his hand, looking up at a brilliant, blue September sky where mountains of white clouds drifted by at a stately, unhurried pace. Then he looked at the silent, metal graveyard all around them, and back at the thing struggling in the car seat.

This is the world.

Maya didn’t jump when the pistol went off.