Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road

by John L. Campbell

  A little more than an hour later, the lights of the Nevada Highway Patrol came on behind the Camaro. The muscle car pulled to the gravel shoulder, and after a minute the crunch of boots approached on the driver’s side. Ghoul cranked down the window, letting in cool desert air. A Maglite swept first over the empty back seat, then into a front passenger seat that was occupied only by a weathered backpack, and finally settled on the car’s lone occupant, a Goth punk with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “License and registration.”

  Ghoul handed them over, along with his insurance card. The paperwork was all in order (although the name Ghoul appeared nowhere) and he was unconcerned. He’d been stopped before, and it was actually kind of a rush when he had a special passenger on board. The vintage Camaro was a cop magnet, and he knew a ticket was coming. Cops took one look at him and that was it; no warnings. He suspected it was jealousy over his fine car, a classic thing of beauty that they would never own themselves, forever stuck with some sensible minivan piece of shit for the fat wife and snotty kids.

  “Do you know why I stopped you?”

  Is it because of the girl in the trunk? “Going a little fast, I guess.”

  The highway patrolman nodded. “Stay in your vehicle,” he said, walking back to his car. Ghoul did, lightly drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. There was no sound from the trunk; she was still out from the heavy dose of heroin (and hadn’t she been surprised when the needle suddenly appeared in his hand and sank into her neck.) It didn’t matter. If she came around and made noise, anything the cop noticed, Ghoul would blow him away, shoot him right in the face where the body armor wouldn’t help him. The forty-five with its beautiful, custom grips always rode in a little depression under the driver’s seat, but while the cop was walking back to his car, Ghoul transferred it to just under the left side of his leather jacket, easy to reach, easier to use.

  The girl stayed quiet. The cop told him to slow down, handed over a ticket and let him go. Ghoul was grinning as he threw the cop a wave out the window and pulled carefully back onto the highway, keeping the Camaro right at the posted speed limit.

  “He was so close to you,” Ghoul said now to the girl in the chair. Her eyes were open again, and she’d started crying once more, her shoulders hitching. “Never even suspected. Your rescuer, your white knight…” He snapped his fingers. “Gone for doughnuts without a second look.” He smiled and pointed at her. “Your tax dollars at work.”

  She closed her eyes and cried harder.

  Ghoul’s house, actually a sagging trailer on the outskirts of Carson City, Nevada, was a place so remote that not a single neighboring house could be seen across the desert in any direction. An orange extension cord ran from the trailer to a rusting, corrugated metal shed out back, powering both the circular saw and a single work light hanging from a rafter overhead. He had already told her screaming would do no good, that there was no one around to hear her.

  She screamed anyway.

  They always did.

  Quiet was what the other were now, though, and altered. Even a world-class forensic investigator would be hard-pressed to put together what he would find if anyone ever excavated the ground beneath the big compost heap behind the shed. Plenty of bones, sure, but no skulls, and not so much as a single tooth. Seventeen bodies in there, all road wanderers like this one. He’d never known their names, or if they’d told him, he didn’t remember. Law enforcement in four western states wanted him for the disappearances; they just didn’t know who it was they wanted. That fact never failed to amuse him.

  Ghoul yawned. It was getting late, and there was much to do. He gunned the circular saw, making the girl jump against the duct tape and cry out. He looked at her. No, she was all wrong, her limbs completely out of place. She needed to be properly arranged. Only then would he be able to consummate their relationship.

  He let the blade ping itself to a stop again and nudged her knee with the tip of his boot. When she opened her eyes to look at him, he grinned behind his curtain of black hair. “Now there’s going to be something to scream about,” he said.

  He triggered the saw, blotting out most of the sounds that came next. All but the grinding of metal on bone.

  The black Camaro with Nevada plates wound east through the mountains, its powerful engine pushing it easily up the steady incline as the elevation increased. The sun was fully up now, with Sacramento – and another nameless rest stop – well behind him. He cruised at just under seventy, the beginnings of a beautiful, mid-August day brightening around him.

  Ghoul wore boots and jeans, oily black hair falling limp across his face. He’d already cut the sleeves off his new concert T-shirt so he could show off the morbid tattoos running down the length of his pale arms. On the back of the shirt were two columns of concert date cities, and on the front was the image of a dead alligator lying on its back, a decaying human arm erupting upward out of the belly, clutching a greenish egg. Nine Up The Pipe was emblazoned in gothic script around the image.

  He’d bought the T-shirt and a CD (he didn’t do downloads) while waiting in line outside the venue, but the show hadn’t opened at nine o’clock as scheduled, or even ten. Finally a loudspeaker announced that the show had been canceled, and Nine Up The Pipe would honor tickets for tonight’s performance at some future date. There had been groaning and cursing, the sounds of beer bottles smashing against asphalt, and several fights had broken out. Ghoul had seen some of the combatants in the parking lot, bloody and dazed as they lurched between cars, obviously drunk or stoned and trying to grab at others headed back to their vehicles.

  Ghoul was pissed. He’d been looking forward to losing himself in the thundering metal, churning with a screaming crowd. But a fistfight? No, he had better ways to release his frustration. The rest area provided him with a seventeen-year-old Mexican girl with silky black hair, numerous piercings and lots of cleavage. After she was in the trunk, he’d pulled over at a scenic viewpoint to take a leak, and subsequently must have dozed off in the front seat. He’d awoken only an hour ago, surprised to be seeing a sunrise, and got moving at once. He didn’t like driving in daylight with a special passenger.

  She was quiet back there, which normally wouldn’t have been a surprise considering the heavy dose of heroin he’d used to put her out. But that was last night, hours ago, and she should be making some noise by now. Maybe the dose had been too heavy.

  Ghoul was listening to his new CD, not the radio, and so he missed the increasingly alarming news being broadcast about national chaos, martial law and the dead rising. Instead he bobbed his head, banging his hands on the steering wheel in time with the music and daydreaming about getting his new prize into the shed behind his trailer.

  Brake lights appeared ahead, and both eastbound lanes quickly resolved into twin lines of stopped traffic, with eighteen-wheelers pulled onto the right shoulder in a line farther ahead. The westbound lanes were empty. Ghoul brought the Camaro to a stop behind a white Lincoln with Florida plates. To his left was a minivan with bored kids staring out the window. A highway sign up ahead on the right alternated flashing messages; BE PREPARED TO STOP and CHECKPOINT.

  That second message made his heart accelerate a bit. That couldn’t be for him, could it? He was sure no one had seen the girl get in his car, and he’d been certain no one was around when he shifted her limp body to the trunk. Besides, who put up a checkpoint for some Mexican prostitute? Still that flashing yellow message gave him a chill.

  Ghoul lit a cigarette and tried to relax, took time to evaluate. It could be a DWI checkpoint. This early in the morning? No way. A registration check? Maybe, but that usually involved a couple of cops standing in the road, glancing at the sticker in the window and waving people on. That would be okay, his car was legal, but it also didn’t seem likely. The line would be creeping forward, and this traffic was just sitting still. Amber alert? Escaped inmates? Either of those would involve a trunk search, and that simply wouldn’t do. Unfortunately
there was no place for him to turn around; nothing but guardrails on either side, and backing down an interstate looked exactly like what it was; an attempt to evade an official checkpoint, something guaranteed to draw unwanted attention.

  Be cool.

  An hour passed without movement, and the flashing messages hadn’t changed. A few people had gotten out of their cars, craning their necks to see what was ahead, and a half hour ago a helicopter had flown over, heading into the mountains, but that was it. Strangest of all was that no more cars had stacked up behind him; the interstate in his rearview remained empty.

  Still no noise from the trunk.

  The concert disc had cycled through again, and Ghoul was about to eject it to see if he could get some news on the radio. Maybe it was just a bad accident, and the helicopter seemed to give weight to that argument. The silence in the trunk was bothering him, though, and his slender, pale finger stopped before touching the eject button. Better have a quick look, just a peek. It wasn’t as if anyone was behind him to see what was inside, and the angle was all wrong for the minivan kids to catch a glimpse.

  Ghoul stepped out and walked to the trunk, giving an exaggerated stretch and yawn, swinging his arms. He keyed open the lid, and the stink of feces and vomit came out in a thick wave, making him wince. It was hard to tell when she’d died; maybe only in the last few minutes? Maybe longer? Greenish puke covered her face, chin and neck, clumps of the stuff was matted in her silky black hair, and her eyes were a milky gray.

  He’d seen death often enough to know that it was here in his trunk. Overdose. Too much H. Shit, there goes the fun. And now he would have to back down the interstate, at least far enough to get out of the line of sight from the stopped traffic, so he could dump the body. He couldn’t very well drop her here on the road.

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know it?” he told the corpse.

  The dead girl sat up, grabbed his hair in two fists and jerked him close. Her teeth sank into the side of his pale neck and Ghoul screamed, pushing her away and stumbling back, feeling the flesh tear. A jet of hot blood sprayed across the dead girl’s face, and she growled, climbing out of the Camaro’s trunk as Ghoul staggered away, clutching at the wound. Arterial spray shot a red pattern across the side window of the muscle car, followed by another, pumping out between his fingers. Ghoul made a gurgling sound and stumbled toward the open driver’s door, collapsing onto the seat.

  A moment later he screamed again as the girl found one of his legs sticking out the doorway and bit into his calf. Blood jetted from his neck up across the Camaro’s upholstered roof, the spray less powerful now. Ghoul kicked, tried to shake her off, but the girl hung on, gripping his leg in both hands and chewing through the denim.

  There was movement and sound behind her now, the faces of screaming children pressed against the minivan’s windows.

  Ghoul’s vision was graying at the edges, becoming a steadily constricting tunnel. He was suddenly cold, having trouble making sense of all the red hitting the leather seats and dashboard. It hurt so much, and she wouldn’t let go! His right hand was growing numb as it groped under the driver’s seat, fingers searching until they found the smooth, customized grip of his .45 automatic. It came up and he fired at point-blank range, blowing a cavern in the Mexican girl’s forehead. She collapsed at once, sliding off his torn leg, and Ghoul sagged back onto the seat. There was no more dramatic spray of red, only a warm, slowing wetness at his throat, the only warm place he could still feel. He shuddered, his sight reduced to a long tunnel the size of a half dollar, like the view he’d had as a little boy playing pirate and looking through an empty paper towel tube. The .45 slipped from his hand and fell to the floorboards. A child’s screaming came from a long way off, and then there was only darkness.

  When Ghoul opened his eyes a few minutes later, he was an entirely new breed of killer, drawn to the sounds and movement of the frantic shapes in the minivan. The sliding side door of that vehicle was unlocked, he figured it out, and went in teeth first. Soon, Ghoul and the family from the minivan were pulling an elderly couple from the white Lincoln with Florida plates, and these two quickly joined in the slaughter. Ghoul and the others began working their way up the stopped line of cars, their numbers growing with every conquest. By the time the horde reached the distant checkpoint, it was an unstoppable force.

  When the food in the immediate area was gone, Ghoul wandered and became lost in the woods. He’d been alone when yet another change overtook him only this week, and awoke to a new consciousness, a predator unlike anything he’d been before. Hobgoblin.

  And he was still changing.

  Ghoul sat in the snow with his back against a tree, legs sprawled out before him. His eyelids were heavy and fluttering, and occasionally he would let out a growl and his head twitched. He wasn’t asleep – his kind didn’t do that, didn’t need that – but it was similar, his brain bursting with electrical flashes that translated into images, thoughts and sounds, as well as dreams of another existence.

  The other Hobgoblins, Cross and Snapper, squatted a short distance away, watching the dreaming creature with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety. They didn’t like this, didn’t like him, and they wanted to run. Ghoul was acting strange, behaving as if he might shriek and explode off the ground, clawing and biting in a rage. And small, hard-looking black bumps had appeared at the tips of his fingers and on the flesh of his scalp where it was visible beneath the long black hair. They didn’t have anything like that. It was disturbing.

  Run, yes, go far from this creature they had come to fear. They wouldn’t, though. Red had gone away and made it clear through snarls and gestures that they were all to remain until she returned (Ghoul hadn’t been like this when she left) and they would not defy her.

  Instead they crouched and watched and waited. Things would be better when Red returned.

  THIRTEEN

  Skye awoke to the warmth and smells of sleeping men packed in close together, her body wedged snugly against Corporal Bracco’s mass. The man was like a big bear, groaning and shifting as he woke up, and Skye allowed herself to enjoy the last few moments of his heat as the Rangers stirred and then began crawling out of the dome tent.

  She was expecting to wince at sunlight as she emerged from the nylon flap, but a sky the color of brushed iron hung low overhead, and it was still snowing. Another six inches had fallen in the night, creating a white cap on the tent and deepening the surface of the highway. The temperature had fallen as well, and she shivered as she stood, pulling on her gloves and ski mask, slinging the SCAR over one shoulder. PFC Moore and Master Sergeant Cribbs were standing a short distance away. Theirs had been the final watch of the night.

  As the soldiers moaned about the cold and complained about how the deep snow was going to impact the day’s march, Skye stomped ten feet away from the tent and squatted, her bare bottom hovering only inches above the cold surface. She was long past any modesty or embarrassment over peeing in front of others, even men, and as she relieved herself she watched the captain speaking with Cribbs, the two of them looking at a map. Then everyone gathered around the officer.

  “You’ve got ten minutes to eat something and pack up the tent,” Sallinger said. He looked at the sky. “There’s no telling how long before it lets up, so we need to make good time today.”

  “Sir,” said Specialist Burke, “how far is it to Truckee?”

  “According to the last mile marker,” said the captain, “we’ve got about thirty miles ahead of us.”

  There were more moans at that.

  The officer grinned at his men. “You got something better to do?”

  “Yes they do,” growled Cribbs, “like packing up that tent. Now you have five minutes, ladies.”

  The Rangers gave a half-hearted Hoo-ah and set to work, Skye helping to break down and pack away the nylon tent that only minutes ago had been a cocoon of warmth. Sallinger and Cribbs moved off in different directions, making a wide circle of the site and loo
king for signs that they’d had unseen visitors in the night. There were none, the Hobgoblin’s tracks now concealed beneath half a foot of new snow.

  When they set out, PFC Rooker led off on point, followed by Burke with his SAW and PFC Moore. Sallinger stayed in the center with Skye behind him, followed by Cribbs and Corporal Bracco bringing up the rear. Drag they called that position. Within an hour of moving out, Sallinger informed the team that, as predicted, the last of the battery life in the radios was gone. From now on they would communicate verbally or with hand signals. To Skye, this announcement carried a feeling of finality, and left no doubt that they were truly isolated and alone here in the mountains.

  Except she knew they weren’t alone. They had the dead for company, and although the empty, windswept highway was clear at the moment, it wouldn’t remain that way. It wasn’t the drifters, or skinnies as the soldiers called them, that bothered her, not the ones she could see, anyway. It was those hidden beneath the surface that would only be discovered when one of them sank its teeth into a calf or the back of a knee. Her immunity would protect her from the fever that came with a bite, but not so for the Rangers. Skye was reminded yet again that she was walking with dead men.

  The snow was up to mid-thigh as the line of figures trudged up the center of the eastbound lanes, the highway forever rising on a gentle incline as it climbed higher into the mountains. With the snow still falling, the temperature had dropped into the twenties, a stiff wind pushing at their backs and sides, strong enough to blow clouds of white off the nearby pines and cause dervishes of crystals to skirl through the air.

  No one spoke as they walked, each of them lost in their thoughts and concentrating on putting one leg in front of the other, the deepening snow resisting every step, and cloaks of white collecting on their shoulders, heads and packs. Skye hunched into her collar, shivering, as Sallinger dropped back until he was walking beside her. Like the others, his face was hidden behind a black and white wool skull.