Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  “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.”

  TWENTY

  San Francisco

  Getting out was proving to be a slow, dangerous process, and Xavier had begun to doubt whether it could be done at all. The dead multiplied with each passing day as they rooted out survivors, and now they infested not only the streets but buildings as well. The once vibrant city was a graveyard of shattered lives, a wasteland ruled by the dead. They didn’t need to sleep or pause to rest, didn’t get sidetracked searching for clean water or shelter, weren’t forced to wait when one of their number just couldn’t go on any more. They had no need to hide, for they were the predators, relentlessly moving and hunting day and night.

  The group had not seen either a law enforcement or military presence, none of the hoped-for signs of an organized evacuation. There were no more helicopters overhead, and they had only once heard a jet go by, but that was days ago. As for other survivors, there had only been a couple, as fleeting as shadows darting across streets and into doorways. The few who spotted them ran away at once.

  Xavier and Alden moved cautiously through the looted pharmacy, flashlights leading the way. They passed rows of shelves swept onto the floor, their feet shuffling through everything from hairbrushes to headache remedies to packages of adult diapers. The actual drug counter would be at the rear of the store.

  Alden had one of the gangbanger automatics in his rear waistband, and he carried a fireplace poker. Xavier’s Ak-47 was slung, and he gripped a long, heavy crowbar. The handheld weapons were best, they had discovered, especially in close quarters. Several days ago both Xavier and Pulaski used their firearms on a pair of ghouls they came across while looting a clothing store. The shotgun sounded like a cannon, and the AK was like a crack of thunder flowing a close lightning strike. The noise drew the dead from every direction, and the group had been forced to run, narrowly getting out the back door and down an alley.

  “It’s going to be a mess back there,” Alden warned. “I’ll have to pick through it.”

  “Tell me what you need and I’ll help you.”

  Alden did; Coreg, Plavix, Coumadin, Digoxin, Lisinopril. “Don’t worry about milligrams, most of them are standardized and I can break tablets if I have to. I’ll take what I can get.”

  Pulaski complained about the time it would take to do this, but they had put it off for days, and Xavier informed him that Alden’s heart medicine was more important than Pulaski’s damned cigarettes. The priest was worried. Alden was pale most of the time, his breathing had become labored and he tired easily. The school teacher waved it off with a smile, but Xavier knew B.S. when he saw it and stayed close.

  The back of the store was as bad as they expected. The steel gates had been pried open, the counter door kicked in. Cabinets were forced, presumably where the controlled substances had been kept locked away, and Xavier was willing to bet there wasn’t a single tablet of Oxy, Vicadin or Percocet to be found. The world was ending, but people still wanted to get high. The shelves where the medication once stood in ordered rows were empty. The floor, however, was a wall-to-wall jumble of white and brown plastic bottles.

  They started searching.

  Pulaski was up front watching the street, picking through debris and looking for smokes, while Tricia and Snake searched for food and water. He found half a dozen packs buried under the mess on the floor, none of them his brand, and shoved them into his pack. Flashlights deeper in the store showed him where the kids were, and more lights and rattling noises came from the back. He lit a smoke and leaned back against the cash register, watching out through the broken front windows with their mangled security gates, the shotgun cradled in his arms.

  The street was clear for the moment, but that could change quickly. He blew smoke at the ceiling. They were going nowhere, spending entire days to move two blocks, hiding like rabbits afraid to cross the street. The dead were slow and clumsy, but still their little group crept along, jumping at every noise. Rabbits. It was bullshit, they should have
been at the water by now, and they hadn’t even reached the highway or passed the Bay Bridge yet. Pulaski huffed smoke out through his nose and thought about Market Street.

  “There’s no barrier,” Pulaski said. “We can cross here.”

  Xavier shook his head. “We need to wait and watch.”

  Market Street was a wide avenue running through most of the city, and it cross their direction of travel. It had been sealed off from the side street by a high barrier of posts, sandbags and barbed wire. Official notices bearing the hazmat symbol were attached to the barrier, announcing that attempts to leave the quarantine zone would be met with deadly force. The authorities had tried to seal off part of the city, rather than go through the trouble of evacuation.

  It hadn’t worked.

  The dead swarmed up and down Market on the other side of the barrier. Even if the group had been able to breach it, the dead would be waiting. The obstacle forced them to the southwest, down two more blocks. Both cross streets were blocked in the same way. Another day lost.

  Sneaking down alleys, ducking into buildings to hold their breath and wait until a single corpse shuffled past, one which Pulaski could easily take out with the fire axe which hung from his pack, stopping so the school teacher could rest… It was bullshit, all of it. Finally they had come to where Van Ness intersected with Market, and here there was no barrier.

  “What do you mean, wait? There’s only a few of them out there.”

  Xavier didn’t even look at the pipe fitter before shaking his head. “We can’t see very well. We don’t know if there’s an army of them just on the other side of those vehicles.”

  They were crouched in the remains of a building, little more than a shell of broken brick walls, something out of a WWII movie. Around and in front of them were the remains of a battlefield. A pair of tanks and half a dozen smaller armored vehicles were scattered in both directions along Market, and the surrounding buildings were shattered by heavy weapons.

  How had they not heard this?

  Burnt civilian vehicles and charred bodies were strewn across the pavement, which glittered with broken glass and shell casings. Most of the area was filmed in black soot left by incendiary weapons. None of it had done a thing to stop the spreading infestation.

  “They’re not bunched together,” Pulaski said, “they’ll be easy to run between. It’s not going to get better than this.”

  “If we’re going to be running, Alden needs to rest first.”

  Pulaski’s face darkened. “Fuck him. He’s been holding us back since this started.”

  Xavier looked at him. “Regardless, that’s how it is.”

  “Oh, that’s how it is?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well I say different. I say we go right now.”

  Xavier made an after you gesture. “But if you bring them down on us, you’ll pay for it.” It just slipped out, and it shocked him. Threatening another man? Was he back on the block in Oakland? He was as much a bully as Pulaski. How could he have ever called himself a priest, or thought God heard his prayers? It sickened him.

  Pulaski’s eyes narrowed. “Be careful, tough guy.” His voice was soft.

  They stared at each other for a moment and then went back to watching the street.

  The pipe fitter thought about making the run across, screw what His Majesty said. And yet he stayed put, angry with the other man, angrier with himself. The truth was that Xavier scared him a little, and not just because of his size and strength. There was something more, a violence just beneath the surface, barely suppressed and straining to be unleashed. He didn’t think the man would try to stop him if he decided to go his own way, but the other truth, the one which filled him with self-loathing, was that Pulaski feared being alone out there.

  He thought about a different tactic, about making a run for one of the armored vehicles. He could lock all the hatches and drive out, rolling over anything that got in his way. He quickly discarded the idea. If it was that easy those vehicles wouldn’t still be here. He’d probably get inside only to learn it was out of fuel. It would turn into his coffin.

  In the end they waited for three hours, and then Xavier nodded and they all scooted quickly across. A few corpses saw them and followed, but by the time they shambled up to the cross street the group was a block away and safely hidden inside a building. The dead lost focus and moved on.

  Crossing Market, however, didn’t mean they were moving any faster, and now this little pharmacy excursion was eating into the last of their daylight. Pulaski crushed his cigarette. Maybe he would just wait until the guy wasn’t looking, and put the shotgun to his head, blow it clean off. The others would fall into line, and he suspected that nice piece of tail Tricia would do anything not to be left alone. The idea made him smile. Whether he decided to kill Xavier or not, he would have to find a way to deal with that uppity spade.

  The priest and the school teacher walked to the front, Alden swallowing a handful of pills with a Vitamin Water. It seemed the looters had little interest in heart medication, and together they had found enough of his meds to last a month or more. Tricia and Snake showed up as well, arms loaded with crackers, Pop Tarts, canned chili, beef jerky and more Vitamin Water. It would do for a while.

  Day after day they kept moving, ever careful, always watching. They killed the dead only when it was unavoidable, and only with hand held weapons. So far they had been lucky; no one had been bitten. One morning the fog was especially heavy, and remained that way throughout the day. They didn’t dare to go out in it – a corpse would be on you in seconds without you ever having seen it coming – so they spent another twenty-four hours hiding upstairs in a small office building.

  Boredom led to talking. Snake’s father was in prison somewhere in Arizona, and his mother was a junkie the courts had ruled unfit to take care of a little boy. He had been shuttling around the foster care system since he was five, and by age twelve had become quite adept at looking out for himself. He spoke casually about it all, and reminded Xavier of the hardened kids from his parish. Tricia was a high school drop-out moving through a series of part time, low paying jobs. She didn’t talk about her family. Pulaski, leaning against a wall away from the group and smoking in the darkness, grumbled that he didn’t want to play this game.

  Alden ignored him and looked at the others. “How about, ‘Where were you when the world ended?’” There were shrugs. “I was getting coffee,” he said. “I was on my way to work. It happened so fast they didn’t have time to close the schools, and didn’t warn the staff.” He smiled. “I was at Starbucks.”

  “You mean Four-bucks,” said Tricia.

  Alden laughed. “Depends on what you order, I guess. What about you?”

  “A bus stop,” the girl said. “It never showed up. Then there were car accidents up the street, some shooting… People started running. I ran too.”

  Snake was rolling a baseball bat up and down his outstretched legs. He let go and made a gesture of two thumbs wiggling back and forth. “Playing Xbox. I was skipping school at a friend’s house. His mom was at work.” He nodded at Xavier. “I can handle one of those guns, you know. Probably better than him.” He pointed at Alden.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Xavier.

  “What happened to your friend?”

  Snake looked at Tricia and shrugged. “He took off, said he was going to look for his mom. He probably got eaten.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “It’s true. He’s probably out there now, bumping into walls. What, you think it’s not going to happen to you, too?” The kid laughed. “We’re all going to end up like them.”

  They were quiet for a while, and then Alden looked at Pulaski. The man shook his head. “What about you, Xavier?” Alden asked.

  The bigger man was sitting with his knees drawn up, arms draped over them. He looked straight ahead and didn’t speak for a while, then softly said, “I was at the rectory.” The word didn’t register with the two kid
s, but Alden nodded slowly, as if he had somehow suspected this. Xavier looked down, unsure about why he had said it, already regretting the words.

  Over at the wall, Pulaski’s voice: “You’re shitting me. You’re a priest?”

  “I was. Not anymore.”

  Pulaski snorted a laugh. “Some priest, threatening me like he’s a bad-ass or something. And knows how to handle an AK. They teach you that at the Vatican, Father?”

  Xavier didn’t answer. There were things Barney Pulaski didn’t need to know about his life, like the fact that in order to keep him off the streets, his grandmother had gotten him involved in an Oakland boxing club. It was something for which he showed natural talent, a skill which made him strong and provided a measure of protection in a tough neighborhood. It also attracted attention. When he was seventeen, a gangbanger named LaRay Johns decided to see how tough the big Church kid was, and started pushing him around outside a convenience store. Xavier shoved him back, hard enough to make the gangbanger stumble and land on his ass. LaRay, humiliated and enraged, pulled a butterfly knife and backed Xavier into a doorway, carving the line down his face which he wore to this day. Xavier had come out of the doorway with a roar, his face hanging in bloody flaps, and with his fists alone beat LaRay Johns so badly that the gangbanger’s neck snapped and a broken rib was later discovered sticking through his heart.

  Pulaski didn’t need to know that the courts had determined that it had been a case of self-defense, and cleared young Xavier Church of criminal charges. Still, the court found it necessary to give him an outlet for his dangerous ability, and encouraged him to enlist in the Marines. The Corps took him, and after boot camp and basic infantry training, decided Xavier needed to box for the Marine Corps, both within his branch and in intra-service competition. He was good, and they made him better, teaching him control. There was talk about Olympic competition, perhaps even getting him ranked. Marines, however, regardless of their assignment, were riflemen first, and went where they were told. In 1992, PFC Church found himself in Mogadishu, Somalia, where everyone, regardless of age or gender, was a potential threat. It was where he learned the workings of the AK-47, the preferred weapon of the opposition.