Omega Days (Volume 1)

NINE



Berkeley



Taylor nearly pulled Skye off her feet. “Get in the truck!” Gripping her arm, he hauled her to the rear door and shoved her inside. The floor was a carpet of rattling brass casings. In the turret, Hayman finished off the ghouls that had torn their corporal apart, and Simpkins popped open the broad rear hatch of the Humvee before joining Sgt. Postman in dragging the man’s body to the back and lifting it up and in. The two college kids skittered to one side as the limp body was pushed in next to them, and the boy started crying.

Without all of them firing, the streets at all four points of the intersection were rapidly filling with the dead, moving steadily nearer, the group with Skye’s mother the closest, only a dozen yards away. The moaning rose from all directions.

“What the hell, Sarge, he’s dead!” Hayman slapped a new magazine into his rifle.

The sergeant slammed the hatch closed. “No one left behind. Start that sixty up and give us some breathing room.”

Hayman swore and handed his rifle back down to Skye, then began raking 7.23mm across the nearest crowd, his mounted weapon jumping as he tried to steady its aim, searching for heads. Some hit the mark, and bodies dropped. Most slammed harmlessly into cold flesh. Doors slammed as the squad climbed aboard, Sgt. Postman now driving. Skye found herself next to an open window, with Taylor sitting shotgun in front of her.

Damaging the Hummer no longer seemed to matter to Postman. He spun the vehicle hard right and gunned it, heading for First Platoon, smacking the grill into a handful of moving bodies, the big tires thumping over them and cracking bones. Skye searched for her mother, praying she wouldn’t see her. She didn’t.

“Keep up your fire!” the sergeant yelled, and at their windows Taylor and Simpkins snapped off single rounds, cursing wild shots as the vehicle bounced and swayed. Above her, Skye heard the machinegun stop as Hayman shouted, “Reloading!” To her left, Simpkins cried, “Last mag!” and slapped in his final full clip.

“Honey,” Postman said, risking a glance back over his shoulder while the Hummer drove over four shuffling bodies, “I need you to reach back over the seat. That soldier back there has some Velcro pouches with magazines of ammo in them. I need you to get as many as you can, and distribute them between Simpkins and Taylor. Can you do that?”

Skye said she could, and set down Hayman’s rifle, kneeling backwards on the seat and looking into the rear. The boy and girl were useless, holding one another and sobbing. She shook her head. She had just seen her dead mother coming at her in the street, and she wasn’t going to pieces. She leaned over, ripping open pouches attached to a harness the man wore, finding the magazines. She grabbed as many as she could, nudging Pvt. Simpkins’ back and giving him half. She pushed at Taylor’s shoulder and handed him the rest. He gave her a smile and a wink.

The Hummer banged into a stumbling woman in a yellow housecoat, sending her flying to bounce off a telephone pole, and then the sergeant was accelerating. Through the windshield she could see the Army truck now only two blocks away, the street between here and there filled with an obstacle course of abandoned cars and walking corpses. The Hummer’s hood and windshield were streaked with gore.

“Outstanding, honey,” Postman said. “Do it again, look for more magazines, and this time bring his rifle back with you. Be careful, though.”

Skye reached back again. She found three more magazines, and gripped his rifle by the strap, pulling it over the seat. The dead corporal lifted his head and looked at her with milky, yellowing eyes. Then he snapped his head to the left, seeing the college kids, and a second later he was on them, snarling and tearing at flesh. Screams filled the vehicle as Skye jerked back, a jet of arterial blood first streaking across the side of her face and then spraying up across the roof like a red sprinkler.

“Simpkins, deal with that!” the sergeant shouted.

Pvt. Simpkins pulled his weapon in from the window, twisted in the seat and aimed, then froze. He watched his friend push the dead, glassy-eyed boy to the side and scramble after the girl, sinking teeth high into the thigh of one kicking leg.

“Simpkins!”

The private squeezed off three quick rounds, one of them catching the corporal in the back of the head. New blood pumped across the interior of the vehicle as the girl’s torn femoral artery shot it out in long gouts. She sighed and sagged against the wheel well, hands fluttering uselessly at the wound. It was over quickly.

Up front, the sergeant cursed steadily as the vehicle slalomed up another block, and Hayman’s M60 began chattering again, for what little good it was doing. Both Taylor and Simpkins were firing out their windows again, so Skye set the extra magazines she was holding on the seat beside her, and held both the corporal’s and Hayman’s rifles.

Crystal had come back. Mom had come back. The soldier, the woman in the jogging suit. They bit you and killed you and you came back, you… She jerked forward as grasping hands came at her from the rear, the boy and girl crawling over the seat. The girl grabbed Pvt. Simpkins’ head from behind and bit off his left ear. The boy dragged himself over, took Hayman by the waist and sank his teeth into the soldier’s hip.

Both men shrieked, and Skye screamed for the sergeant to stop. He did, stomping the brakes and throwing them all forward. Hayman dropped from the turret only to have the boy grapple with him, pulling him down and biting his face. The girl had a firm grip on Simpkins, and was working on his neck. The soldier’s arms and legs danced in erratic twitches.

“Out! Out!” Postman and Taylor piled out their doors, and Skye followed, still gripping the rifles. On the left, the sergeant exited so close to a pair of corpses that he had to hit them in the face with his rifle butt just to clear some room to bring it to his shoulder. He shot them both in the head, then looked inside the Hummer at his two men. They were gone.. “Move to First Platoon’s truck!”

Taylor was already jogging that way, rifle held to his shoulder, tracking everywhere his head moved. He squeezed off rounds as the dead stumbled out of doorways, between cars, and emerged further up the street. Skye stayed close behind him, the rifles in her arms like pieces of firewood.

“Keep up with me, Postman!” Taylor yelled.

“I’m at your six,” came the reply, boots thudding behind Skye. The three of them ran like that the last block and a half, both soldiers firing as they went, Postman often walking backwards to drop targets approaching from the rear. By the time they reached the intersection with the truck, there were no more ghouls coming at them, only motionless bodies in the street. When they got there, however, they could only stand and stare.

The olive-green, canvas sides of the truck were splashed with blood. Thousands of shell casings littered the pavement, rifles lay on the ground where they had been dropped, and the still bodies of people in civilian clothes were everywhere. The walking dead, killed a second time. No one else was here, not a single body in uniform, walking or otherwise. Silence blanketed the intersection.

“Where are they?” Taylor whispered.

“Hell if I know.” The sergeant whispered back. The big truck sat in the center of the intersection, and he walked slowly around the front and looked in that direction. There were only abandoned cars, fallen bodies and a building burning in the distance. Nothing moved.

Taylor touched Skye’s shoulder, and she jumped. “Sorry,” he said, smiling. “Will you stay right here and keep watch the way we came? In case some of the ones we shot were only knocked down? They’ll head this way.”

Skye looked. She could see a couple in the street, but they were a good distance away, beyond the last intersection, little more than heads moving behind cars. “Sure.”

Taylor nodded and turned away, then looked back. “What’s your name?”

“Skye Dennison.”

He smiled. “Skye. I like that.” Then he moved off, rounding the back of the truck. The street in that direction looked the same, empty except for a couple of moving figures far off.

“Taylor.”

The soldier answered his sergeant’s summons, coming up to stand beside him on the far side of the truck. Postman pointed up the last street. Two blocks away, a mass of bodies was swarming over another deuce-and-a-half and a pair of Humvees, while more crawled on their hands and knees, tearing at whatever was on the ground beneath them. The dead were a mix of civilians and people in camouflage.

“Overrun,” whispered Taylor.

Postman nodded. “Radio said First Platoon put together a collection point for refugees, remember? What do you bet that’s what they’re feeding on?”

“Which means there’ll be more of them in a few minutes.” He shook his head. “We need some high ground.”

“Copy that,” Postman said. “Let’s gather ammo, look through the truck,” he jerked a thumb at the big vehicle, “and seize one of these rooftops.”

Taylor began ejecting magazines from rifles he found on the ground, shoving them into a shoulder bag. Sgt. Postman moved around to where Skye was still standing watch. “Hey, Taylor’s girlfriend, you’ve been doing good.”

She blushed. “It’s Skye.”

“Okay, Skye, we’re going to need your help, and we need to move fast. We’ve got a whole mess of tangos…”

“Tangos?”

“Targets…T for tango, bad guys. There’s a bunch of them a couple blocks that direction, and we want to be gone before they decide to come this way.” He asked her to climb into the truck and throw down anything which looked like it was medically related, and anything marked MRE.

“Meal-Ready-to-Eat,” he said, then left to rummage through the cab of the truck. Skye set the rifles on the ground and climbed up into the cargo area of the big truck. Right away she found a heavy, green plastic box with a red cross on it. The sergeant said to throw things down, but she didn’t think that would be a good idea with this, and spent several minutes figuring out how to drop the tail gate. Then she climbed out and lifted the box down, carefully setting it on the street.

She went back up inside and resumed her search, and a couple minutes later Postman joined her. He had a new, olive-green bag hung across his chest now. “There,” he said, pointing to a stack of cardboard boxes. “Toss those out.”

Skye saw they were indeed stamped MRE. “It won’t hurt them?”

The sergeant picked up a pair of heavy, rectangular metal containers stenciled 5.56mm, and shook his head. “Nope. The damage comes after you eat them.”

Soon they had a small pile at the back of the truck. Taylor rejoined them, his shoulders heavy with belts of Velcro pouches, a pair of rifles on his back, and a long, padded case. He unzipped the case and showed the contents to Postman. To Skye it looked like a science fiction hunting rifle with what looked like a long, black can at the end of the barrel. Postman nodded. From the back of the truck the sergeant produced three camouflaged backpacks. He hung one on Skye’s back, and began packing it with individual MREs from the cardboard boxes. Each looked like a brown, plastic bundle about the size of a paperback.

“That’s food?” Skye raised an eyebrow.

The soldiers both shrugged. “So they tell us,” said Taylor. He and Postman stuffed medical supplies and more MREs into their own packs, then unsnapped their body armor and let it fall to the pavement.

Taylor saw Skye’s question before she asked it. “They’re not shooting at us. It’s unnecessary weight.”

Skye nodded, nearly staggering under the weight of her own pack and one rifle. Then she looked at these men, especially at Taylor, close to her own age. They were carrying extra rifles, ammo pouches, helmets, even metal cans of what she figured were extra bullets, and both bore it easily, without complaint. Skye decided she was going to have to toughen up.

“High ground,” said Postman, nodding at Taylor, and the younger man led off, motioning for Skye to follow. He took them down the street left of where the undead civilians and soldiers were swarming, his rifle pointed ahead and sweeping from left to right and back again as he advanced. Skye stayed close, paying attention to the way he moved, how he placed his feet, how he handled his weapon. When Taylor and the sergeant spoke, she listened to their brief, clear was of communicating, picking up on what had at first sounded like slang, but to them was a language unto itself; Tango meant target. Directions were expressed in terms of the face of a clock, “your six” meaning behind you. Letters were expressed in words, Alpha for A, Bravo for B and so on. They spoke in meters and klicks, kilometers, and it made her wish she had paid more attention to learning the metric system, beyond knowing the size of a two liter bottle of soda.

It didn’t take Taylor long to find what he wanted. Without warning he angled from the center of the street and headed to the sidewalk. A Starbucks with some metal chairs and umbrella tables outside occupied the ground floor of a building next to a flower shop, and between them was a door with a frosted glass window, the street address stenciled on it in gold numbers. Taylor moved to the door, found it unlocked, and led them inside.

They were in a small foyer with black and white tile on the floor, facing another door with a frosted glass window. One wall held a row of built-in mailboxes with name labels stuck to each. The interior door was probably the kind which had to be opened by someone in an apartment above by pressing a buzzer, but the power was out and the door opened easily. Taylor led them up a stairway into a hallway lined with doors, a battery powered emergency light showing that it was empty. Stairs on the left led upwards, and the soldier climbed, moving on the toes of his boots, rifle aimed high as he crept up the steps.

Another hallway, another stairway. Taylor led them quickly up. On the next landing they heard something snarling down the hallway, and both soldiers moved in next to each other, rifles pointed. Skye tensed, waiting for the crack of their weapons, but whatever it was must have been inside one of the apartments. Nothing moved in front of them.

Skye stared down the gloomy hall as something banged hard against wood. She was almost certain she saw a door rattle in its frame not far away, and didn’t notice Taylor ghosting past her. Sgt. Postman gave her a gentle nudge and gestured at the younger soldier, who was climbing the next flight of steps. Skye followed.

The top of these stairs ended in a metal door with a simple crash bar, and opened onto a flat tar roof with a two foot high wall running all around the edge. The buildings to their left and right were one story lower, and at the back of the roof the top of a fire escape ladder curled over the little wall and dropped into an alley below.

“Secure that door,” Postman said, and Taylor looked it over for a moment before producing a folding tool from one pocket. Skye recognized it as a Leatherman, a multi-purpose tool just like the one she had gotten her dad for Christmas a couple years ago. Taylor turned it into pliers, wedged it into the seam low on the door where it met the metal frame, and then used his helmet as a hammer to drive it in tight. He next produced a small, curved metal box with folding legs and set it about six feet from the door, wrapping a wire around the doorknob and running it back to the box, where he carefully twisted it down onto a connector.

“Skye, come here.”

She joined him, and Taylor pointed at the little box. “That’s a claymore mine. It will go off if the door is opened, and kill anything in its path. Please keep away from it.”

Skye said she would.

They shed their packs and extra weapons in the shade of an air conditioning unit, then walked to the wall overlooking the street out front, taking a seat on the edge and looking down. A handful of corpses were shuffling among the cars, some dragging crooked feet, others with necks craned forward as if walking were an effort. A few were in uniform. Columns of smoke rose in all directions beyond the surrounding rooftops, and distant sirens wailed. Ghostly, sporadic gunfire echoed in the distance. From here they could see part of the bay, and San Francisco beyond, hazy at this distance. Heavy smoke rose there too, and the tiny shapes of aircraft floated above it.

“The radio is in the Hummer,” said Postman.

Taylor nodded. “And it’s gonna stay there. Too far.”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

Skye pulled out her cell phone to check for a signal. Still nothing, and her battery level was down to half. The screen saver was a close up of her and Crystal, faces mushed against each other and laughing hysterically. Her eyes began to burn.

“Someone’s going to come looking for the platoon,” said Taylor. He squinted back towards the intersection with the deuce-and-a-half in it. A pair of corpses in uniform wandered past the truck.

“Maybe,” said Postman. He looked at Skye. “How are you doing?”

She shrugged. “I’m scared.” Her lip trembled. “I miss…” And then the tears came. Taylor reached for her but she pulled away, running across the roof to the air conditioner unit, dropping to the other side of it with her back against the metal, not wanting them to see her. She gripped her cell phone in both hands and cried, head down, shoulders shaking with the sobs. It all poured in at once, her family, her life, the world. She let it come, burying her cries in an arm, not wanting to wail, powerless to stop it, and the anguish carried her away like a riptide.

An hour later the tears were gone, leaving her hollow and drained. She couldn’t remember being this tired, wanted simply to drop onto her side and let the black nothingness of sleep take it all away. She didn’t. She feared the dreams which might come.

A boot scraped at the tar roof beside her, and she lifted her head to see Taylor crouching there, arms resting on his knees. She must be something to see, she thought. It had been an ugly, snotty cry. The young man didn’t look at her with disgust or contempt, and he wasn’t giving her the fake pity face people used at funerals when they didn’t really care about the deceased. It was a matter-of-fact face.

“You okay?”

She wiped an arm across her nose and rubbed her palms into her eyes before she shrugged. “I guess.”

“Good. There’s not enough of us.” He touched her elbow and guided her until she stood. “The sergeant says it’s time to turn you into a shooter.”