Omega Days

by John L. Campbell

  And now it was dead.

  Evan focused the binoculars. The hospital ship was teeming with drifters, bodies lurching along catwalks and across decks. Worse still, the peninsula leading to the ship was packed with a swarm of ten to twenty thousand milling corpses stretching back from the wharf in a long tail. They had come here seeking evacuation. They had come here because they were sick, and sick people went to hospitals. Sick people.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. How many were already infected when they arrived, and turned into something else? How many were still here, not just in view but herded into fenced yards and warehouses? They would have torn down the fences by now, forced open the doors. They would be loose.

  Through the binoculars he saw the horde on the peninsula begin to turn and move back in their direction. At that moment a horn sounded to the rear of the convoy, long and urgent. Both Evan and Maya stood up from the Harley and looked back. The dead were emerging from everywhere; buildings, trucks yards, boxcars, coming from behind containers, streaming into the road behind them as the refugees from Comfort closed on the left.

  Evan saw a heavy, blue truck racing ahead of the warehouse swarm, passing the convoy on one side. It looked official, possibly military, and as it roared past he saw the words California Department of Corrections on the side. The engine was knocking like a blacksmith’s hammer as it went by, leaving a cloud of oily blue smoke in its wake. It did not stop, or even slow.

  He looked into Maya’s face. “Hold on!” Then he hit the throttle and chased after the armored truck, the line of hippie vehicle keeping close behind.

  And the dead followed with them.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Oakland

  “This is about to turn to shit,” Carney said, gritting his teeth and clenching the wheel even tighter.

  TC nodded and went into the back, where Carney could hear him loading weapons. A glance in the side mirrors showed him that every millimeter of firepower the truck carried wouldn’t be nearly enough. And now the truck itself was about to fold.

  They had followed the line of cars at a discrete distance, and Carney was encouraged when they turned west towards the water. Maybe they knew something about a boat? It was really his only shot, because the Bearcat was shimmying and knocking fiercely now. He had done some real damage to it saving the girl. Although he said nothing, it was clear TC thought Carney was crazy for doing it, the unspoken words obvious in the younger man’s expression. But he only shrugged and smiled, his faith in his cellmate apparently still intact. It was more faith than Carney had in himself. And that smile bothered him, it went past friendly. TC wanted the girl.

  About the time they passed under the Nimitz Freeway, Carney heard rustling and the tearing sound of Velcro. “What are you doing back there?”

  A pause. “Just making sure she’s not hiding anything.”

  Carney twisted around and looked through the opening into the rear compartment. TC had bound the girl earlier, but now he had removed her rifle and vest of ammo pouches – the Velcro noise he had heard – and was kneeling beside her. Her tank top was pushed up to just below her breasts, and his palm rested on her flat stomach, moving across it slowly.

  He looked up with a crooked grin. “She’s fit, man. Nice abs.”

  “TC, leave her alone.”

  The hand slid higher. “She’s burning up with fever. It ain’t fair, bro. A nice piece of ass like this…who ain’t dead…and she’s infected.” His other hand moved towards her. “I’ll bet as long as I don’t actually touch her with my-”

  Carney slammed on the brakes, throwing TC forward in a heap. He reached down and grabbed the bigger inmate by his long blond hair, wrenching his head up painfully. His voice was soft. “Touch that girl again and I’ll bleed you out.” He gave the hair a yank. “Fast.”

  “Fuck, man!” He grabbed at Carney’s wrist. “That fuckin’ hurts!”

  “I’m not playing, TC.” His voice was soft and even. “You want to stay with me, you listen and do what I tell you.”

  “Yeah, man, yeah!”

  Another painful jerk. “Leave her alone.”

  “I got it!”

  Carney released him and got the Bearcat moving. It was several minutes before TC climbed back into the passenger seat, and when he did he said nothing, just stared out the window. Carney didn’t offer any gentle words to smooth things over this time.

  Now TC was in the back again, loading up, but Carney was confident he wouldn’t go near the girl. His confidence in their relationship was not so strong, and he admitted the question which had been bothering him for some time; how many times could you hit an obedient pit bull before one day it went for your throat? Not too often, but not today, he decided. TC would leave the girl alone for now, not that it would even matter for much longer. She was sick, Carney had trashed their vehicle – their life support – rescuing her, and now it was about to leave them stranded. They were all dead anyway.

  He had quickly caught up to where he could see the convoy again, and stayed back while they cleared an obstacle by a pair of tanks and drove through. Carney gave them a few minutes and followed. They certainly seemed to know where they were going.

  He saw the ship the same time they did, saw the destroyed vehicles and field hospital, and the army of the dead out on a peninsula near the long white vessel. And then the second army showed up, tens of thousands of ghouls spilling out of warehouses and truck yards behind them, pouring into every available inch of street and pressing forward in the rain. He remembered the signs for the infected quarantines. And now here they all were.

  Carney had followed these people into a death trap.

  He gassed the Bearcat down the open lane to the left of the convoy, passing vans and SUVs and sedans, rooftops loaded with gear and spare fuel cans tied to bumpers. All manner of surprised faces stared out at him as he rocketed by; families, children, people with bandanas and beards and long hair. Carney barely noticed as he passed the motorcycle leading them. He didn’t know where he was going, just following a road which wasn’t filled with the dead, heading south and trying to get some distance. To the right, the water of the big, semicircular harbor was only a dozen yards off the road as it ran close to the shore, lapping at the jumbles of rock and concrete slabs which formed a manmade barrier.

  Ahead he could see another split coming up as the road ended at a ‘T’ with water beyond, more industrial park to the left, and another stretch of land sticking out into the water on the right; another wharf, this one lined with freighters tied up lengthwise against it. A dead end.

  In the mirror, the column of vehicles was hurrying to keep up.

  Carney reached the ‘T’ and stopped, the Bearcat shuddering. He slipped into neutral and feathered the gas to keep it from stalling. To the left, the road ran into a maze of warehouses, abandoned trucks and rail lines with box cars lined up on them. Even as he watched, corpses stumbled into the street, only a few at first, and then crowds of hundreds swelling to thousands.

  He dropped the gear and cranked the wheel to the right, up the dead end wharf. Maybe they could make it up onto one of those freighters, lift the gangplank so nothing could reach them, deal with whatever they found on board. If he found a haven like that, would he let these other people in? More bodies potentially meant more firepower, but more mouths to feed, more trouble. He clenched his teeth. Think about it later.

  The Bearcat bumped over cracked cement and railroad tracks, passing more rows of containers and a big black crane, weaving between a pair of forklifts. Four freighters were tied up along the short pier. Someone had spray-painted tall, yellow biohazard symbols on the rusty hull of each ship, and then used some kind of tractor or bulldozer to tear down their gangplanks. Piles of twisted tubing and metal stairways were crumpled on the wharf at each vessel, and a minute later the Bearcat steered around the heavy Caterpillar which had cut off access to the ships.

  He reached the end of the pier. They were out of ships.

  The rumb
le of a motorcycle came up behind them seconds later, and then the row of cars and vans came to a stop in a line. TC popped the roof hatch and went up with binoculars and a shotgun.

  “They’re coming, man. Nothing but zombies as far as I can see. We’re fucked, bro.”

  Carney pounded the steering wheel, and then tensed as the Bearcat’s engine hiccupped and shook. It rattled, wheezed, but then settled back into a ragged rhythm. He checked his mirrors, saw people getting out of vehicles, herding children forward while adults with firearms moved to the rear. Pistols and shotguns, mostly. It was going to be a slaughter.

  He looked to the right, out at the water in front of the prow of an aged freighter with Korean lettering on the side. Carney turned the wheel hard to the right, aimed the Bearcat for that space, and hit the gas. The armored truck left the pier.

  Evan’s Harley followed a few seconds later.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Airborne

  It was a matter of mathematics now. The two General Electric 701c turboshaft engines put out 1,890 horsepower each, pushing the Blackhawk along at one-hundred-seventy mph. When he left Lemoore, the three-hundred-sixty gallon internal tank was at fifty-percent, giving him a maximum range of one-hundred-eighty miles, including his emergency reserve. At this speed, with the G.E.s giving him three-quarters of a mile for every gallon consumed and a twenty knot crosswind coming in from the west, he had a little over an hour left in the air.

  Vladimir kept the aircraft at a one thousand foot altitude, so when the fuel ran out he wouldn’t have far to fall. The manuals called it a forced autorotation landing. Helicopter pilots called it crashing.

  He knew the tank farms at San Jose’s airport had burned, so he didn’t bother going there. Instead he flew further north, heading for San Francisco. The world passed beneath him like a stage empty of actors, occupied only by props and silent backgrounds, a theater devoid of life. He spoke to the empty cockpit, taking on both sides of the conversation.

  “God, it is Vladimir.”

  “So now you speak to me. Where have you been?”

  “I would ask the same question of you, God. Have you seen what has become of your world, your children?”

  “Of course, Vladimir. Now what is it you wanted?”

  “I need a full tank of fuel, and I need to take a piss.”

  “Oh, Vladimirovich, ever the comedian. But the joke is on you, comrade. No fuel. But piss, we have plenty. Here it comes.”

  The Blackhawk flew into the rain, fat drops scattering across the windscreen, blown quickly away by the rush of air and rotor blades. The cockpit’s weather radar showed a green mass covering the entire Bay Area, though at one-thousand feet the outside world simply looked gray and dark. Patches of distant lightning promised turbulence.

  “That is not what I had in mind.” Vlad followed 101 north, the dead city of San Mateo passing to his left, the highway below a ribbon of vehicles frozen in place.

  San Francisco International appeared in the gloom ahead, an open expanse of green crossed with paved strips, its terminals, hangars and tower without lights, acres of cars in parking lots stretching outward from the buildings. Aircraft of all sizes, most of them commercial, stood in lines on runways and approaches. There was wreckage, too, and for a moment Vlad envisioned the horror of the walking dead attacking passengers on airborne jets, biting and feeding upon people safely buckled into their seats. He saw their numbers steadily expanding as they worked their way forward, defenseless passengers unable to escape. They would force the cockpit door, come stumbling in upon the pilots, and the plane would go down-

  -as that one had, now nothing more than a burnt tail jutting out of the space where SF International’s fuel tanks had been. There were other wrecks as well, some on the field, some which had crashed into and burned down the terminal. Vlad circled slowly, looking for a fuel truck. He found none.

  The Blackhawk’s fuel gauge floated one tick above the red zone.

  Vladimir put the airport behind him and headed north towards the city, checking his navigation coordinates and keeping to the bay side coastline. Homes and businesses slid beneath him, and ahead the tall, darkened buildings of San Francisco resembled a cemetery in the rain. He banked right, out over the bay, and headed east.

  His alternate landing and refueling sites listed San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland International, Oakland’s Coast Guard Island, and Travis Air Force Base to the northeast. He knew from the briefings that Travis had been overrun, but it didn’t really matter. He didn’t have the fuel to reach it. He’d be able to check Oakland, and that would be that.

  The bay was a sheet of slate, cold and unfriendly, waiting to swallow the helicopter. He passed over an oil tanker, adrift and without lights, and several minutes later saw a pair of dark shapes surface side by side, plumes of water vapor erupting from their spouts before mighty tails appeared and propelled them back under.

  Even in the rain, Vladimir could see that Oakland International was a total loss. The Blackhawk crossed over from water to land and he simply flew straight across. There was no need to circle the blackened airport. It looked like a war zone.

  A red warning light began to glow on his console, accompanied by a low electronic tone. He was into his reserves, only minutes left now. Vladimir descended, banked left and headed up the channel between Oakland and Alameda. His navigation indicated that Coast Guard Island was directly ahead.

  “God, it is Vladimir.”

  “You again. What do you want now?”

  “A fuel truck and a safe place to land.”

  “Sorry, fresh out of both. How about some piss?”

  Coast Guard Island sat alone in the channel, accessed by a single bridge as the only way in and out, and was shaped roughly like a kidney. A wharf ran along its left side, and the majority of the island was covered in large, flat buildings, tree-lined roads, parking lots and parade grounds, but no airfield. A helicopter pad sat at the bottom tip, and Vlad slowed and dropped, hovering at a hundred feet while he took it all in.

  The red light was now flashing, and the tone turned to a steady beep as the fuel needle sank into the red.

  There were no choppers on the pad, but no wreckage either. The base didn’t have a tank farm; fuel would be delivered to aircraft with tanker trucks. None were in view, but a brick building stood to one side of the pad, four garage doors set in its face. The fuel trucks might be in there. Or they might not.

  Again, it didn’t matter. The area below was awash with the dead. Vlad could tell by their numbers that Coast Guard Island, like Lemoore, had been used as a refugee collection point. But it had fallen too, and now served to pack a high number of the creatures in a very small area.

  There were seven rounds left in Vladimir’s automatic. He wouldn’t make it to any fuel trucks, wouldn’t be able to safely take the time required to fill his tanks. He’d never make it out of the cockpit. He climbed and put the island behind him, moving north again.

  “Thanks for the piss.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Now the warning light was flashing like a strobe, and had been joined by half a dozen others, his cockpit lighting up like a Broadway show as urgent buzzers screamed that his turbines were running on vapors. NAS Alameda, the abandoned naval facility occupying the northern half of the island, was ahead and to his left. There would be no hope of fuel or anything else, but at least it had clear, wide open spaces. As the Blackhawk descended and crossed its fence line, old barracks, administrative buildings and hangars blurring by, Vlad experienced a small measure of relief to see that there weren’t any corpses wandering across the airfield.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Groundhog-7’s wheels touched down on the center of a runway where weeds were growing up through cracks in the cement, so long untended that the sun had bleached away the tall, painted numbers indicating the runway designation. Vlad shut it all off, and sat listening to the turbines winding down, the blades slowing overhead. Then he unbuckled and walked hunched
over, back past his gunner’s body. Once his boots hit the concrete, he had a long, satisfying piss.

  The rain continued unabated. Seven bullets, a pint of water in a plastic bottle, and a granola bar in the chest pocket of his flight suit. He lit a cigarette and cupped it in one hand, shielding it from the wind as he sat down in the open doorway, next to the empty machinegun.

  He blew smoke into the rain. “Thanks again, God.” And this time he meant it.

  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.