These months spent alone in the tour bus had been the first time since her childhood that she’d slept without a light. Perhaps, she thought, it was because now she knew the monsters were out there, and in some strange way, she’d reconciled her fear with that knowledge.
Pepper let out a groan as she climbed the milk crate once more, then gasped at what she saw. The twin bumps of the California Highway Patrol SUVs were right in front of her. She plunged an arm into the snow wall up to her shoulder.
Her hand struck the hood of an SUV.
“Yes!” She started digging wildly, making a path between the two vehicle parked alongside each other, nose to tail. From there she would be able to access both. Fifteen minutes of scooping, pushing, stomping and wiping brought her between the two Fords and cleared an area in which she could work. The driver’s doors were facing one another, with about five feet of distance between them. Her wiping had exposed the doors right down to the CHP emblems painted on the sides, and she quickly saw why things went bad last summer. The windows were down.
They were talking to each other, and the dead reached in and got them. You heard shots coming from here. Are they still in there? Her heart began to accelerate, and she reached for the screwdriver in her pocket.
A pasty-skinned thing with white eyes and wearing a CHP uniform crashed out of the packed snow in the driver’s seat on the right, thrusting itself out the open window from the chest up, reaching. Pepper screamed and stumbled back as the dead cop’s shoulder belt jerked it back like a dog on a leash.
But another pair of cold hands burst from the snow-packed window behind her, the second cop locking its fingers on her coat collar, nails scraping her forehead as it caught hold of some hair with the other hand. Dead eyes stared, and oily snow dripped from both chomping mouths accompanied by a thick groaning.
Pepper screamed again and dropped, landing on her butt. The cop lost its grip on her coat, and tore out a fistful of her hair, making her shriek. She tried scrambling back down the trench, away from the groping hands, and realized she’d dropped the screwdriver somewhere.
Fiddler exploded from the trench wall not ten feet away.
She had blue and white eyes like the others, was bloodless and pale, her blackened wounds frozen and horrible. The violinist, covered in white from top to bottom from wading through the snow, turned toward the prey. She snarled and snapped her teeth, reaching for the woman on the ground who had reversed direction and was now scuttling back between the vehicles. Fiddler took two lunging strides and closed the distance.
Pepper scrambled backward like a crab, staying low as dead arms reached down from above, and then suddenly she was as far as she could go; her back was now pressed against the point where she’d stopped digging. There was no more trench. She wailed, held her arms up in front of her face and closed her eyes as her former band member lunged in for the kill.
Fiddler gripped the woman by the sides of her head and opened her mouth wide-
-then stopped, only inches away from the bite.
“Yark.” The sound Fiddler made was half croak, almost an unformed word. “Yark, yark.” The zombie’s head twitched, turned to the side, and she released Pepper’s head. Her body began trembling.
Pepper opened her eyes, seeing the dead violinist’s face only six inches away. The reek of mold and death coming from the creature made her want to vomit, but she dared not move. Fiddler made another yark sound and dropped to all fours, turning and crawling away as if her meal wasn’t right there waiting to be killed and devoured. The zombie shook her head slowly, still making that odd noise, her body quivering even as she crawled. Then suddenly she was using her hands to dig into the snow, burrowing under one of the SUVs, her body shimmying into the hole she was creating. Within minutes, Fiddler had completely disappeared beneath one of the CHP vehicles.
Pepper couldn’t put words to what she was seeing, decided it could only be God in some way and resolved that she would pray more. She also decided that if she remained here paralyzed by fear, she would freeze to death. If Fiddler didn’t crawl back out and kill her sooner.
You’ve just been saved. Her Mama’s voice was clear in her head. Waste this chance and you’ll be a fool, as well as eternally damned.
Pepper Davis hadn’t always been the nicest or most charitable person, but she was no fool. And right now her single emotion was pissed. She’d be damned if she’d gone through all this just to roll over and die out here, and got off her ass. She crawled beneath the still-reaching arms, keeping an eye on the opening where Fiddler had disappeared, hands searching the snow. A few minutes later she crawled back out from under the arms and stood, the long-handled screwdriver gripped tightly in one fist.
Without a word she stepped right into the reaching arms of the cop on the left, and as it grabbed her and pulled her in, she drove the screwdriver into its eye, again up to the handle. The corpse was still sagging limply out of the open window as Pepper pulled free of its twice-dead hands, turned and executed the second cop in the same manner.
The sun was running out on her, and Fiddler was close. No time to screw around. Pepper pulled open the driver’s doors, unsnapped seatbelts and hauled both corpses out, dumping them in the snow. Then she cleared away the drifts on the seats and floorboards, and went to work.
The sun was behind the mountains, the trench filled with purple shadows as Pepper struggled back down the way she had come, her breath pluming in the frigid air, her skin stinging from the cold where it wasn’t covered. Over the top of the snow wall she could see the silhouette of her tour bus drawing steadily closer. Even with the trench cleared and open before her, Pepper wasn’t moving much faster than she had when she’d been digging it in the opposite direction. This time, instead of fighting snow, she was fighting weight.
Slung across her back was a bulging, black nylon duffel bag with CHP stenciled on one side in yellow letters, DOMBROWSKI stenciled on the other. Beside it hung a pump shotgun, and a second shotgun hung against her chest from a strap slung over her neck. Both her hands were full – a pair of oversized black gym bags - and she’d tied a length of canvas tow strap around her waist. Connected to it, dragging through the snow about six feet behind her was another bulging black duffel with CONNER stenciled on it.
The weight was tremendous.
The country star bore it with a grin.
Pepper Davis, human sled dog.
She was almost to the L-shaped turn in the trench when the left side of the snow wall ahead of her abruptly crumbled away. The snarling form of little Sunny, covered in white, scrambled out and into the trench. She immediately rose to a crouch and faced Pepper, hair plastered to her face, blackened teeth snapping.
Pepper didn’t scream or run. She dropped the loads in each hand and gripped the shotgun hanging around her neck. She worked the pump. Sunny galloped at her.
The BOOM and concussion of the weapon made snow tumble down the trench walls. A dazzling instant of muzzle flash illuminated a hateful, contorted face above a yellow Smiley shirt.
Sunny’s head disintegrated in a yellow and maroon cloud.
Pepper picked up her load and crunched over the little girl’s remains, making the turn and climbing into the darkness of the tour bus. A quick search with a CHP Maglite and a shotgun verified that she was alone. Pepper shut the door behind her.
One of the items in her bags was a short, flat pry-bar. She used it to crack open the hatch, then cleared snow off the solar panels. She’d have to shudder through one more night and wait for the panels to charge the generator, but soon there would be heat. And tomorrow, while the bus was warming up, she’d use the small, folding shovel she’d found in the back of one of the SUVs to go digging for her stolen backpack and the rest of the scattered food. The shotguns would be waiting for anything foolish enough to get between her and her next meal.
Morning couldn’t come fast enough. Pepper drifted off to sleep in one of the recliners, a Remington twelve-gauge cradled in her arms, and a vague
smile on her face.
Back at the CHP vehicles, Fiddler half-slept in darkness, snug in the close, cold womb of her snow burrow. She was curled into a fetal position, her body spasming and jerking, flesh crawling as mutating genes multiplied through her body at phenomenal speed, and ripples of red and black synapses fired in her brain.
The change had come.
TWENTY
Ghoul was in a rage.
Forced to fall back to the concealment of the trees as the sun came up, fearing the open distance and their prey’s weapons, the pack had watched as the humans slipped away from the train and out of sight. They might have moved ahead and ambushed the dwindling collection of man-meat, but there had been no pursuit. Now the sun had come and gone, and the Hobgoblins had still not moved from their position.
The creature whose head hung askew and had a fractured rib poking out through an open wound (both injuries courtesy of the Alpha) shrieked and tore at tree bark with fingernails and teeth, hammering the trunk with fists before running in small, spastic circles, howling. The others watched the display with discomfort, squatting in the snow and alternating glances between the tattooed Hobgoblin’s tantrum and their pack leader, who lay curled in a shivering fetal position not far away.
She had been that way since daybreak.
Was she dying, they wondered? Again?
The muscles beneath her taut, crimson skin seemed to ripple, her legs jerking like a dreaming dog, and she made fitful grunting noises, her eyelids fluttering. The pack caught a new, unpleasant scent coming from her that added to their agitation.
Ghoul stopped circling, threw back his head and screeched at the evening sky. Half-remembered images of torture, butchery and suffering flashed through his brain, making him gnash his teeth and clench his fists. He should be up to his neck in blood by now, waiting until the weak band of humans drew close to the tree-line and then pouncing, rushing into their midst before they could employ their weapons, tearing them apart. Instead the prey was now a day away, and Ghoul was here, impotent and looking at this…this… (bitch, he remembered) lying curled up in the snow.
He glared at Red. Weak. Vulnerable. He was the Alpha, the changes in his muscled, tattooed body proved it. When he’d been lost in a similar dream state, his mind had become sharper, his physical form growing. The dark bumps across his scalp, down his back and at the tip of each finger were further demonstration of his differences. Even his scent had changed, and he knew the others could detect it. Not as strong as the female’s, and the dark bumps had developed no further after their initial appearance, but that didn’t matter.
He was the Alpha.
She had to be destroyed to remove all question.
Ghoul stalked through the snow toward the quivering figure, his lips skinning back from black teeth. He reached, but suddenly Cross was there, her small body between them, lowered on flexed knees and arms held wide. A soft growl came from her savaged throat. With her face peeled away as it was, she revealed no expression in that mass of meat and muscle, but the eyes that bulged within it all locked on him and burned with primal intensity.
The much larger male reacted to this challenge at once, striking the side of her head with a vicious, open-handed blow. The child Hobgoblin rocked to the side, but not before quick little hands caught Ghoul’s wrist, her jaws coming in fast. There was a crunch of bone, a violent head shake, and when Cross hit the ground she had Ghoul’s middle finger clenched in her teeth, ripped from the socket.
Ghoul stared at his hand, at the missing digit. There was no pain of course, but a rapid series of images and sensations flashed through his brain, wonder and hesitation among them. Cross let the finger fall from her mouth and scrambled back between Ghoul and her leader’s helpless body, lowering into a crouch once again and growling.
The dead serial killer snapped. He was the Alpha. The Alpha! He would rip her horrid little head right off her neck. Ghoul tensed to spring, but then stopped as his head came up with a jerk. Snapper and Cross looked up too, and then as one, the trio turned to face south.
A new scent on the wind.
They drew it in deeply, all thought of confrontation evaporating. In its place came a rising fury, and teeth began to gnash. In an instant the Hobgoblins were plunging through the snow, quickly vanishing into the trees, their leader forgotten and alone in the forest.
Curled up in her half-sleep, Red was deep in a state that would have been considered REM in a human brain, but was something else entirely in this creature that was dead in so many ways, yet not in so many others. A kaleidoscope of images, sensations and new instincts assaulted her as she shuddered, her body seized in the grip of genetic change run amok.
The speed of her cellular growth and the resulting transformation was something so mathematically improbable that it had been undreamt-of by science, a confluence of conditions and elements that would have been dismissed as impossible by any theorist even capable of such imagination. Yet the singular truth to existence was that what can be, no matter how unlikely, will be. Given enough time, planets will line up, lottery numbers hit, and lightning strikes the same place twice.
It was her time now.
The sound of cracking bone, groaning joints and splitting skin filled the air about the prone figure. Red’s pores began exuding a musk so powerful that it stained the snow around her an oily, reddish-brown.
Not since new species arose from the primordial stew had such a radical example of mutation existed (most were singular oddities that quickly died off) and never something as refined and deadly as the thing now growing in the high elevations of California’s mountains. On rare occasions, such aberrations showed up in the male gender, but that was the true anomaly, something that would show early symptoms of change and then stutter to a halt, failing to take root. This mutation, like most in nature, was anchored in the female chromosomes. The mere existence of a Hobgoblin was almost a statistical impossibility, and what was happening to Red was even rarer still.
For a fleeting moment, memories came to her of a pretty, red-haired young woman once called Anne Marie O’Donnell, accompanied by scenes of children gathered around her in a…a…Sunday school…and emotions like love and compassion that didn’t make any sense to the creature. Just as quickly, all this vanished like frost on a window when exposed to the sun, blurring and then running in silent rivulets, forever swept away. They were replaced by a heightened predatory instinct and a strange self-awareness, the undeniable knowledge that she was special, and had a purpose. With that came the understanding of why she had followed these humans into the mountains, resisting the urge to range off and hunt easier prey.
It was the female, a potential rival.
She must be destroyed.
Red lay in the snow, shaking and growling, still in the early stages of a transformation that would create a being more dangerous than any life form the world had ever seen.
A harbinger of human extinction.
There was screaming, the sporadic crack of gunfire and a nearby police siren that wouldn’t stop wailing. People were running in every direction, pursued by the reanimated dead, many of them being cornered and pulled down to thrash beneath ripping hands and teeth. Blood ran in streams across the pavement, and most of those savaged bodies began slowly climbing to their feet.
A dented yellow, thirty-year-old International Scout with wood paneling along the sides gunned its way through the mayhem, swerving at first to avoid the staggering shapes in the road, and then not bothering, bodies banging off the grille and leaving red streaks across the hood. Several people ran yelling toward the Scout, and it braked so they could scramble inside; a couple of women and a teenager. Then it was accelerating as behind it the stutter of automatic gunfire was followed by men screaming.
Grotesque faces pressed at the old SUV’s windows, fists hammering at the metal and smashing spider web fractures in the glass. The dead churned around the vehicle, threatening to swamp it, and the driver hit the gas, thumping up and over bodi
es, one getting jammed in a wheel well, forcing the SUV to slow and lose steering.
The rear window exploded in a spray of glass, ghastly shapes with gnawed limbs crawling inside. One of the new passengers, a young woman in an Army uniform, knelt backward on the rear seat and blasted away with a nine-millimeter handgun, the explosions deafening everyone in the vehicle. The dead fell away from the broken window, and the driver hauled at the steering wheel, flooring the gas pedal. The move ground the wedged corpse out of the wheel well, sent the Scout careening into a parked car and then it was bouncing off, straightening, accelerating up the street and clipping more lurching bodies, sending them spinning.
Somehow the fists were still thumping against the metal.
Thump-thump-thump, demanding to be let it. Thump-thump…
The man awoke with a start, seeing the teenager standing near the fireplace, knocking snow from a split piece of wood – thump, thump - before dropping it into the iron basket beside the fireplace tools. Snowy boot prints were tracked across the rug.
The teenager, a boy of about fifteen, glanced over at the man who was sitting in a chair facing the hearth, a deer rifle leaning nearby. “I’m going to check the snares,” the boy said. “Sorry I woke you.” The expression on his face said that he clearly wasn’t.
The man watched the boy leave. Kid needs a haircut. He rubbed at his eyes and yawned, then scratched at his beard. He’d always been clean-shaven, but times had changed. He still wasn’t used to the itch.
The smell of something cooking came from the kitchen, and he glanced over his shoulder to see one of the women who’d jumped into the Scout – a schoolteacher – stirring something in a large pot. She rarely spoke, but had screaming nightmares so frequently that she often woke the whole house.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 20