Skye forced herself not to drop the patch back in place, to pretend the left eye was still blind. She kept looking, and spotted movement, just a twitch. An owl on a pine branch, utterly still except for the occasional quick rotation of its head.
That has to be more than a hundred yards away.
The owl gave off a faint, reddish glow in the darkness. Am I smelling it too, at this distance? She caught a new pungency, an animal scent she was able to isolate and attribute not to the owl – it had its own smell – but to another small animal at the base of the owl’s tree.
It’s a raccoon, and it’s sleeping in a little snow burrow.
How can I possibly know that?
“You fall asleep up there?” the master sergeant asked. He had his own unique scent. He was sitting as she was at the other end of the RV’s roof, facing the opposite direction and watching the endless graveyard of snow-covered cars stretching back from the checkpoint. Oscar had to wear his night vision goggles, despite the moonlight.
“I’m awake,” Skye said, her voice cracking.
The other three members of the squad were sleeping in the RV below the sentries, and it would be another hour before Bracco and Rooker climbed up to relieve them. Skye didn’t turn, didn’t want the Ranger to see the look on her face. She also suspected that just as the bizarre new sight had changed her left eye, it would no doubt look different from the outside as well. She wouldn’t know until she had the courage to look in a mirror, and there was no rush to do that.
“I still have some coffee in the thermos if you need it,” Oscar said.
“I’m good.”
They sat in silence for a while, watching the night, and then Skye said, “Your voice sounds better. It’s not as rough.”
“Yeah,” he responded, “and it doesn’t hurt to talk anymore. Did that happen to you?”
Skye looked at the empty, moonlit interstate beyond the roadblock. “My voice came back pretty fast. Yours took longer, I think.”
“You still get the headaches, though.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“I guess that might never go away.”
“Who can say?” Skye said. “None of us will probably live long enough to find out.”
“Little Mary Sunshine,” he grumbled, but Skye thought she caught a little chuckle in there, and she smiled just a bit. “It stands to reason,” Oscar said. “The headaches being permanent, I mean. Your eye never got better, did it?”
Skye stiffened, then dropped the patch back into place to shut out the frightening new vision. “No,” she lied. For a moment she thought about asking the man if he had a family, what had happened to them, for the simple reason that it would be hurtful and make him stop talking about her eye.
You’re a cruel bitch.
She shook her head and said nothing. Oscar didn’t press about her eye. He was an asshole, she thought, but not all the time. There was a long silence then, bursts of wind forcing them to tuck their chins into the collars of their jackets. Eventually it was the master sergeant who broke the silence.
“You’re doing good,” he said quietly.
She felt ashamed. “Thanks,” she managed, and that was the last either spoke until they were relieved. Skye pulled off her left glove and spent the rest of her watch looking at and gently probing the painful black lumps that had appeared at the tips of her thumb and first two fingers. Something as hard as bone was slowly pushing its way up through the skin. Her gray flesh, the weird sense of smell and inhuman vision in her left eye…now this.
What’s happening to me?
She knew the answer, and the word was monster. What she didn’t tell Oscar, and wouldn’t tell any of them until the last possible moment, was that she had changed her mind about needing to always keep moving and not wanting to wait out the winter in one place. Monster. The word came to her again. This was the reason she wouldn’t be continuing on to Reno with the Rangers. For her, no matter what they found there, Truckee would be the end of the line.
“Looks like they didn’t even finish setting up before they were overrun,” Captain Sallinger said. He was standing on the hood of a National Guard Humvee. Around him were the remains of the military roadblock; another Hummer with an M60 machine gun in the turret, and an olive-green deuce-and-a-half, the durable two-and-a-half ton truck that had served the armed forces for close to a century. Its canvas sides were torn, and fluttered in the breeze.
“Probably combat engineers,” Oscar said, standing in the snow near the bumper of Sallinger’s Humvee. “Maybe two squads. Couldn’t have been more than fifteen of them.”
“Not enough,” Sallinger said. The fence the engineers had tried to erect across both lanes of traffic had been bent aside in places, pushed flat in others. “About a dozen men…” Sallinger shook his head. “No way.”
“Copy that,” the master sergeant said softly. The Guardsmen would have put up a fight, but the horde would have finished them quickly. How many had come through that fence, he wondered? A thousand? More? It made him shudder to think of those terrified men and women facing a tsunami of the walking dead, knowing their fates were sealed.
Up on the Hummer, Sallinger looked at the sky. It was low and gray, the color of bridge steel. At seven in the morning, with the light only just now coming up, the temperature remained below freezing and there was a smell of snow in the air.
“Let’s move this along, Top.”
“Captain says get it in gear, people,” Oscar shouted.
Bracco and Rooker were searching the two Humvees, Skye investigating the rear of the truck, all of them looking for supplies, and most importantly of all, ammunition. They were dangerously low. In the back of the truck, amid overturned crates and scattered packs, Skye came upon the undead remains of a female National Guardsman. She’d apparently been cornered in here by the dead, and her body had been so savaged and dismembered that little more than shoulders, a trailing spine and a head remained, all of it slumped against one wall. The cold did little to dampen the wet, moldy smell. Still wearing her helmet, the dead girl snarled at Skye and tried to crane her neck forward, snapping her teeth.
Skye carefully unbuckled the helmet’s chin strap, keeping her fingers away from the thing’s teeth (she might be immune, but that didn’t mean bites didn’t hurt or do damage) and lifted it off to expose the head. A single blow from her tomahawk silenced the creature. Then she went to work inspecting packs and boxes.
Although they found nothing in the way of protective clothing (and hadn’t expected to, since the outbreak happened in the summer) and only a handful of MREs, Skye was able to obtain a small flashlight and several magazines of 5.56mm rifle ammunition from the dead girl’s combat harness. Up at the Humvee, Sallinger located a pair of laminated, military-spec maps; one of the larger area from here east to the California-Nevada border, and a closer detail map of Truckee itself. There was no radio, however.
“They were sure to have had one,” Sallinger said to Oscar. “It probably wandered off still strapped to the back of a dead guy.” It didn’t matter; the radio would be just as dead by now, and they hadn’t found any spare batteries. The captain couldn’t help but think of his own radioman back in Chico, cut in half by a whirring fragment of rotor blade from an exploding Black Hawk.
The real find was the ammo, and it was cause for smiles all around.
"Five-point-five-six-millimeter,” yelled Rooker, lifting two green ammo cans from the rear cargo space of one of the Hummers, holding them high. Each can contained five hundred rounds.
“More over here,” Corporal Bracco said, showing everyone another can identical to those Rooker had, along with a belt of linked ammo in a canvas box that could be hung beneath the team’s squad automatic weapon.
“Skye,” Sallinger called to the young woman as she jumped down from the tail of the truck, “anything in the deuce-and-a-half?”
“A dead soldier, what looks like fencing and hardware, and some spools of barbed wire. A few MREs and
some odds and ends from packs, nothing we don’t already have.”
“There’s no ammo for the SCAR,” Oscar said. He handed an M4 and full bandolier to Rooker, then ordered the young soldier to give up his remaining 7.62mm magazines to the sniper. Rooker did as instructed, then left his SCAR and forty-millimeter grenades on the hood of one of the Humvees. The grenade launcher wasn’t effective against the dead, and so carrying the added weight made little sense.
The master sergeant handed another M4 to the young woman, along with additional ammo for the weapon. “When the SCAR runs dry, you can switch over. Can you handle the extra weight?”
Skye slung the rifle. “Hoo-ah, Top.”
The Rangers laughed, and the master sergeant gave her a nod and a wink.
The squad took the time to load every magazine they had from the newly found ammunition cache, then distributed the weight of the remaining loose ammo among themselves. Oscar had the SAW and belted ammunition hanging around his neck, Rooker, Bracco and Captain Sallinger carried M4s. Everyone had a full pack, and no one complained about the added weight. For soldiers in combat, spare ammo is a blessing too soon exhausted.
The captain nodded at his team, then turned them east up the snowy interstate, Corporal Bracco plowing ahead on point.
Sallinger glassed the road ahead with his binoculars. “Well…” he let the word drag on, then finished with, “…shit.”
“You said it,” Skye nodded, standing beside him and looking through the telescopic sight of her battle rifle. The weapon made a sharp cough, kicking against her shoulder, and two hundred yards downrange a freak’s head popped. The SCAR coughed twice more, and another pair of corpses was suddenly headless. None of the bodies fell. They couldn’t.
“Can’t even tell the difference,” Oscar said, standing to Skye’s left.
She lowered the rifle. He was right. Her three pathetic kills hadn’t altered the scene before them one bit. Sallinger crunched around to stand beside his master sergeant, and the two of them started going over one of the laminated maps, tracing gloved fingers across the surface and talking softly.
“Hey,” said Rooker, “they’re just standing there. I’ll bet even the corporal could make a head shot or two.”
“Fuck yourself, redneck.”
“Good idea,” the young Ranger said, “your mama did.”
“That’s right, you country boys know all about fucking mothers. I guess that would make you a…”
“Stallion,” Rooker finished with a smile. “That’s what she said. Your mama, I mean…”
Skye tuned it out, and the officer and senior NCO seemed not to notice at all. She’d been hearing this sort of banter ever since she’d joined the squad, and although in the old world, such insults between men would have led to fistfights or worse, among soldiers it was as natural as breathing in and out. She wasn’t included in the banter. As crude as these men could be, they were well-mannered when it came to the lady in their presence.
She looked through her scope once more at the bizarre and chilling sight. The squad was standing at the top of a gentle rise in the highway before it dipped and then climbed again to curve out of sight. Both the east and west-bound lanes, and the pine-studded area in between them, were covered by the same, even field of deep white they’d been seeing since entering the mountains. The difference here was the dead. They were hip deep in the snow, arms limp at their sides, spread over the entire area from one side to the other, and as far back as she could see. The three she’d picked off had simply flopped over at the waist, still stuck in the snow.
Skye looked at the awe-inspiring sight and suddenly thought of a bag of poppy seeds that had been scattered across a white bed sheet.
There had to be thousands of them, she thought. They were severely decomposed, their gender no longer identifiable, and many wore little white caps of snow. Other than an occasional twitch or gentle swaying, they didn’t move, simply remained in place.
They’ve been standing there for months, and the snow just piled up around them. Did they eat everyone they could find, start wandering and just lost focus? She wouldn’t be surprised. She’d seen the dead do the most incomprehensible things. Skye didn’t wonder where they’d all come from. It had to be Truckee.
According to Sallinger, they were only about a mile away from the high mountain town. It was, he said, just around the next bend. They were so close now, only to be stopped by a wall of the walking dead. Walking, hell! They aren’t even moving. The corpses appeared to have gone dormant.
“We should just gun ‘em all down while they’re standing there,” Rooker said. Skye liked the idea of destroying them one after another, craving the rush of exterminating so many of the creatures that had ended her world. Although Rooker’s idea was seductive, she knew it wasn’t practical. Corporal Bracco voiced her unspoken thought.
“We don’t have the ammo,” he said.
Rooker snorted. “We just found the mother-load. There’s more than enough.”
The big corporal made a disgusted face. “Good thinking, trailer park. We burn out all our ammo here so we can roll into town on empty.”
Rooker muttered that the town would be empty since the entire population seemed to be out here.
Don’t count on it, Skye thought.
Rooker panned across the motionless horde with his rifle sight. “There’s a lot of gaps, plenty of space between ‘em. We could zig-zag our way through.”
Bracco put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and shook his head. “That’s death waiting out there, bro. Do you remember when we were on leave that time in San Diego, and went into that pet shop?”
“Yeah, I wanted to see those huge scorpions.”
Bracco nodded. “And remember the big fish tank at the back of the store? It was filled with piranhas.”
Rooker grinned. “Yeah, but they weren’t for sale. Just display.”
“And I dared you to poke your finger into the water on top? Remember what happened?”
Rooker was quiet for a moment, then looked at his big friend. “The second my finger went in, they all turned to it at the same time, no matter where they were in the tank, and started swimming for it.”
“Right.”
Rooker swallowed and looked back out at the frozen horde.
Skye looked too. It was a deadly deception. The dead were scattered and widely spaced now, but that would change. The hum of a suppressed, subsonic bullet passing among them hadn’t been enough stimulus, but the entry into their midst of warm-blooded prey would certainly arouse them from their dreaming and put them in motion. Anyone trying to pass through that – plodding through waist-deep snow and growing more fatigued with every step – would quickly find the entire horde moving in from every direction. They would be slow, easy targets, but they would all be coming, and they would not slow or tire. The circle would steadily constrict as the dead pushed through the snow and over fallen bodies, closing relentlessly. It would all end when the ammo ran out and the teeth came in.
The young woman shuddered and tucked her chin into her jacket.
Rooker and Bracco looked over to their leaders. Top and the captain would know what to do. None of them were particularly excited with what Sallinger had to say when he gathered them together.
“We’re leaving the highway,” the captain announced. He turned and pointed to the left, across the westbound lanes, then up a bit. “The Union Pacific line is right up there on that elevation.”
Everyone looked to see an unnaturally straight line cutting horizontally across the snowy mountainside.
“I make it to be about a hundred yards above the interstate. From here it slopes downward and cuts right through the center of Truckee.” He gestured at Skye’s field of poppy seeds. “That is not an option. The tracks will keep us away from the horde and take us right into town.” Sallinger saw their expressions and grinned. “Yeah, the climb is going to suck. Time to Ranger-up.”
The hoo-ahs he received were less than enthusiastic.
By the time Skye stepped over the steel rail and onto the flat bed of the tracks, she was frozen and mind-numb, her muscles like jelly and her body unable to stop shaking. Every bit of her, including her pack and weapons, was crusted in white, and she knew she would never be warm again.
The single-file journey across the wide area of pines between the east and west-bound lanes (the snow was deeper here, the trees blocking some of the wind and preventing the top layers from blowing away) followed by the trek to the base of the mountain had been exhausting. It was nothing compared to the climb that followed.
Master Sergeant Cribbs had gone up first, free-climbing a vertical face of rock and ice, weapons and gear across his back. He stopped at the midway point, hammered in a piton and attached a length of sturdy nylon rope, then sent the rest arcing out to land at the bottom. Then he started climbing again as the wind lashed at him, the blowing snow sometimes completely obscuring his shape as he crawled up the side of the mountain.
Skye stood at the bottom shaking, watching and praying he wouldn’t fall. Cribbs had gone up without a single command from his officer, without complaint, to do a job that could easily hurl him onto the rocks below without warning.
Ranger, Skye thought with new respect.
He’d made it to the top and tied off the second rope, anchoring it to a steel track and letting the rest quickly unravel to dangle next to where the first length ended. Two fifty-yard lengths, almost exactly a hundred yards vertical as Sallinger had estimated.
The men went up one at a time, Sallinger waiting until last. Skye went up ahead of him, a climb that would quickly turn into a blur of screaming muscles, slipping boots, biting wind and never-ending impacts of knee, elbows, chest and cheeks against frigid, unforgiving rock. She was certain the face beneath her death’s head ski mask would be swollen and bruised like a prize fighter’s, but of more concern was resisting the urge to simply let go, give her failing muscles the relief they were demanding and just…let…go…
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 22