Omega Days (Volume 1)

THIRTY-SIX



Oakland



It wasn’t open water. It was a steel ramp leading down to a rusting maintenance barge with a small deck crane and a tiny wheelhouse. A battered work truck, which might once have been white but was now so pitted and weathered that it looked brown, sat on the flat, narrow deck loaded with welding equipment.

There wasn’t enough room on the barge for both the work truck and the Bearcat. Carney slammed the armored vehicle’s grill into the rear bumper and hit the gas, throwing the old truck forward and pushing it off the far end. It nosed over and sank immediately, and Carney stomped the brakes to keep from following it to the bottom of the harbor, tires sliding on the wet deck. He stopped two feet from the edge.

Evan raced down the ramp and skidded to a stop behind the armored truck, jumping off with Maya and running back towards the pier.

“Down here! Down here!” He waved his arms. A half dozen adults herded a collection of frightened children down the ramp, and Maya knelt on the deck, opening her arms and smiling. The children went straight to the young woman they knew so well, huddling close and hunching against the rain. Among the adults was Faith with her younger children. “Calvin’s up there,” she said. Rifle fire came from the pier.

Evan unslung his shotgun just as a big hand gripped his arm. He turned to look into the lean, carved face of an older man with a gray crew-cut, wearing full, black body armor and carrying a rifle. His eyes were an unsympathetic shade of blue.

“Don’t go up there,” Carney said. More rifle fire. Evan stared at him a moment and then pulled away, running back up the ramp.

TC appeared beside his cellmate. “Company, huh?” He hefted his shotgun. “We gonna let ‘em stay, or should I clear the decks?”

“What, kill the kids?” Carney gave him a fierce look, and TC simply shrugged and gave him that smile he had recently come to dislike.

“Just asking. What are we gonna do?”

Carney walked past the knot of children, who were clustering around the kneeling girl while the adults watched the pier, flinching with every crack of a rifle. The older con went up the ramp and stood at the top.

The shooting was constant now, and the wall of corpses had reached the last vehicle in line, flowing around it and pouring down both sides of the pier. The people from the cars and vans were backing away, firing as they retreated. Carney saw one man, the tow truck driver he recognized from earlier, stop and look down as he fed fresh shells into a rifle. One of the dead got close and galloped at him, tackling the man and bearing him to the ground, biting at his face. The screams caused the others to break. They stopped shooting and ran back towards the head of the column.

“No!” Evan shouted as they passed him. “Keep firing! Keep them back as long as you can!”

No one listened, but Calvin appeared beside him and grabbed his arm. “You found a boat?”

“A barge. I don’t know if-”

“Get them on it and get it moving. Don’t wait for me.” Calvin slung his assault rifle, gripped the grenade hanging around his neck and gave it a sharp tug, breaking the leather thong. He pulled the pin and threw it far out into the horde, then started running at the advancing dead before it went off. When it did, the explosion was muffled by tightly packed bodies. A few bits and pieces went flying, and one body cartwheeled through the air, but the mass didn’t slow.

“Calvin, no!”

Thunder rumbled overhead. “Don’t wait for me!” he shouted, not looking back. Evan cursed and ran back to the ramp, passing the man with the crew-cut, his boots thudding down the metal planking. Maya’s eyes were wide and frightened, but he passed her by and ran for the little wheelhouse set to one side of the barge at the back end.

TC watched him go by, then climbed into the Bearcat through the rear doors. He paused to see if anyone was watching, and then closed them behind him. Inside, the rain made a drumming sound on the truck’s metal roof. He crouched beside Skye’s bound form, looking her over. Her eyelids fluttered and she was muttering behind her gag, tossing her head, covered in sweat. The inmate pulled her tank top up over her sports bra and ran a hand down her body. Her skin was slick and hot to the touch, but she was so very firm. He felt a stirring between his legs.

“Maybe you’d infect me like Carney said,” he whispered. “Maybe you won’t.” His hand paused just beneath her left breast, and he licked his lips. He could feel her heart hammering in there. “Maybe,” he said, his other hand moving to his belt buckle, “we’ll just have a little party, and then I’ll cut your throat and throw you overboard, tell them you started to turn, that there was nothing I could do. Who would know?” His eyes gleamed, and he smiled. “Yeah, that works. You’re gonna die anyway, right?” His hand moved across her skin. “Let’s have a party.”

Outside, Evan yanked open the wheelhouse door and stared at the greasy controls. They looked simple enough. Years ago he had driven a friend’s boat while waterskiing on a Virginia lake. How much different could this be? He searched for keys, didn’t see any. His eyes roamed the small control board, seeing the empty ignition, and what looked like the steering wheel from a 1970’s Buick. Keys. Keys, Goddammit!

There they were, attached to an orange flotation key ring, hanging from a small hook screwed into the plywood ceiling. He stabbed the key into the ignition and turned. It cranked slowly, and he wondered if the engine for that same 70’s Buick was what powered this heap. It died. He tried again, and it made a huh-huh-huh-huh sound before coughing out again.

A heavy rifle up at the pier let out a string of quick shots.

He spotted a knob which reminded him of something from an old lawnmower engine, a choke. He pulled it out and turned the key once more.

Huh-huh-huh…

The small diesel caught, and black smoke belched from a rusting pipe mounted outside the wheelhouse. Evan examined the simple forward-backwards control and the throttle stick. He stuck his head out of the wheelhouse. “Untie us from the dock!”

Faith and another adult nodded and ran to the ropes tethering the barge to the pier. Hippies with rifles and pistols ran down the ramp, crowding onto the tight, narrow deck.

Up on the pier, Carney watched the man run at the dead. Stupid way to commit suicide, he thought. A*shole. He heard the barge’s engine start, and started to sling his rifle, turning away. Just before he did, however, he saw the older hippie stop at a VW bus a mere twenty feet from the head of the oncoming horde, yank open the side doors and lean in.

A pair of corpses stumbled towards him.

The man emerged a moment later with a red and white metal cooler in his arms, a car charger cord dangling from one end. He started back, just as one of the corpses caught him by the shoulder.

Calvin jerked away, and another clutched at the back of his arm. He pulled, but the first grabbed the back of his leather vest, hauling him close. The crack of a rifle and the hum of a supersonic bullet passing his ear came at almost the same instant, and one of the ghouls fell in a bloody spray. The man in black armor with the crew-cut shifted a bit and fired again. Another close hum, and the corpse gripping his vest went down. Calvin ran, the horde close behind, and he reached the ramp in seconds as the man kept firing past him.

“Big risk for beer,” Carney said.

“My kid’s insulin,” Calvin gasped, his heart racing. “But I could sure use a cold one.”

They went down the ramp together as the wall of corpses swallowed up one car after the next, a wave of hungry, mindless flesh swarming like angry ants.

Free of its bonds, the barge slid away from the pier. The old diesel chugging, Evan eased the vessel backwards, and the metal ramp fell into the oily water. The swarm arrived moments later, and without hesitating stumbled right off the wharf and into the water by the hundreds, like monstrous lemmings. They kept coming, kept walking off the edge, and soon the water was filled with bobbing heads. They quickly sank.

Evan continued backing away as Maya joined him in the wheelhouse, hugging him from behind and pressing her head against his wet shirt. He watched the dead, thousands more arriving and crowding onto the wharf, many still falling off into the water, arms outstretched even as their prey drew farther and farther away. He looked right, past the end of the pier towards a stretch of land on the far side of the channel. The rain and the deepening afternoon cast everything in charcoal tones, and the sky was darkening, promising a more severe storm. He patted Maya’s hand, and she came around to look at his face.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

She did. Out there in the rain, past the channel, a helicopter with a tiny, winking light on its tail was slowly settling onto that far stretch of land.

Evan shifted the drive forward and turned the wheel. “That’s where we’re going.”