She didn’t. She bared her teeth and somehow made the switch from one rope to another, pulling herself up as the toes of her boots dug into snow and ice, searching for purchase. The wind was the worst, trying to kill her, to sweep her off the rope and into a white hell. Through it all, the master sergeant hurled obscenities and threats down at her, telling her that if she was too tired she should just drop and save everyone the trouble of her worthless existence.
“You’re dead weight anyway!” he screamed against the wind. “Just drop, little girl!”
Skye made a growling noise behind her mask. She was going to bury her tomahawk in his ugly face when she got to the top. “Asshole! Dead man!” she shrieked up at the figure leaning over the edge.
“Bullshit!” he shouted. “You don’t have the strength to climb another foot! Go ahead and fall. I’ll piss on your bones!”
Skye let out an animal wail to match the wind, and hoisted herself another foot up the rope, shoving off with her boots, gripping the rope higher up with her other hand and pulling. “Dead…man…” she growled.
In the end it was Oscar Cribbs who reached out and caught her arm, hauled her up and pulled her swiftly into a bear hug, pinning her close to his chest for warmth and to help her stop shaking. Skye pressed her face against him, breathing in his warm, musky scent, and let him hold her that way until the shaking stopped.
Captain Sallinger allowed them to rest at the top for twenty minutes, but dared wait no longer than that. They needed to keep their blood and muscles moving, and that meant pressing on. Exposed to the wind on the side of the mountain like this, the tracks had been scoured of snow right down to the railroad bed. It meant they didn’t have to plod through the deep stuff, and that was less fatiguing, but the wind sapped their strength just as readily, and they hunched forward as they walked single-file, Sallinger in the lead. As the maps had shown, the tracks descended a long, gentle grade that soon left the mountainside and flattened out into a small valley. The shapes of snow-covered buildings, roads and telephone poles appeared ahead and to both sides.
The squad had arrived at Truckee, California.
TWENTY-TWO
Settled in the second half of the 1800’s, Truckee started out as a railroad and lumber town. Six thousand feet up in the Sierras, it was a place that saw more than two hundred inches of snow annually, making it a natural for its eventual evolution into a winter sports town. The nearby ski resorts of Sugar Bowl, Soda Springs and Boreal Mountain saw a great deal more than that, and Reno being only forty miles away contributed to a lively economy.
Nestled in the pines of a very Republican county, Truckee enjoyed both a small town and an Old West feel while appealing to the progressiveness of ski, snowmobile and snowboarding enthusiasts from around the country and even the world. The area was best known, however, for its gruesome footnote to history. Only a few miles out of town, Interstate-80 ran through Donner Pass, the place where in 1846 more than half of an eighty-seven-member party of settlers perished when they were trapped by blizzards and incredible amounts of snow (the pass averaged four hundred inches per year, but that year it was estimated to have been closer to seven hundred.) The tales of cannibalism during that long winter, recorded in a survivor’s journal, would turn out to be a grim whisper of things to come, more than a century and a half later.
Truckee’s resident population of sixteen thousand normally swelled in the winter months because of the lure of winter activities. This winter, in the post-plague world, the town’s occupants counted for many more than that. Not one of them registered a heartbeat, or drew breath.
But all were hungry.
Following the rail line was one of their better decisions. Other than the odd corpse tripping along the railroad ties or floundering in deep snow beside the tracks (all quickly dispatched with a tomahawk) the squad had the rails to itself. The team members moved silently in single-file, ghosts passing through a world of still houses and pines draped in white. Here in the valley, with the steep, windswept mountainsides now moving away to the right and left, creating a small valley, the snow on the tracks had returned to its normal state of deep and heavy, and Bracco had resumed his place on point to break trail. Other than the shuffle and crunch of the corporal’s boots and the sound of their breathing, nothing disturbed the calm. Rather than give the impression of winter solitude, however, the silence felt more like the inside of a tomb long forgotten.
A break in the trees on the left revealed a shopping center a thousand feet away, and the squad came to a halt as everyone stared. Almost half the parking lot was filled with ordered rows of school buses. A few military and Red Cross vehicles were parked near the store fronts, and the rest of the lot was taken over by a collapsed tent city covered in a three-foot-deep white blanket.
One of the buses had EVAC spray-painted on the side in red letters.
“Holy shit,” whispered Rooker.
“They must have tried to use this place as a refugee collection point,” Sallinger said softly. “Probably evacuated from Reno.”
“We’re fucked,” Bracco breathed.
Skye scanned the tent city and buses with her rifle scope, counting silently. There were a few corpses stuck in the snow, standing motionless like the horde back on the interstate, but not many. If the buses and refugee camp were any indication of the increased number of the dead in Truckee (and she was willing to bet this wasn’t the only camp in town) then Bracco was right. The ratio of walking dead to the five humans who had just arrived in town was mind-numbing.
And there’s no turning back.
Skye looked up, saw the storm coming, smelled it on the frigid air. They couldn’t push east, not without rest and snow-clearing equipment, and they couldn’t walk back down the mountain into California’s lowlands. The storm would catch them out in the open, and kill them before nightfall. Truckee was their only hope, and one look at the refugee camp made it clear that here, the dead ruled.
“Slow and quiet as long as you can,” Sallinger told the squad in a low voice. “When you do fire, single shot only, except for the SAW. We’re going to need every bullet.”
They all nodded. No one was eager to see what gunfire in this ghost town would summon.
The captain looked skyward as his young sniper had. The clouds were darkening, a wind that whipped at their clothes driving the temperature down through the twenties. Nearby pines bowed and dropped clouds of powder in drifting veils. The storm was going to hit them hard.
“Our priority is defensible shelter,” Sallinger said, “and we need to find it fast. We’ll work out the rest later.”
The tracks curved toward the center of town, and the captain motioned for Bracco to lead off again. Heads were on swivels as the team followed a path that would take them into the heart of a killing field.
“That’s it right there,” said Sallinger, pointing a gloved hand. He, the master sergeant and Skye were lying prone atop another motor home, this one parked in a crowded lot next to Truckee’s small Amtrak station, a place constructed to look as if it had been around since the time of gold prospectors, gunfighters and settlers. The trio had shimmied on their bellies through the snow to the front end of the vehicle.
Sallinger was pointing to the right. Ahead of them, running crossways to the parking lot, was Donner Pass Road, Old Truckee’s quaint main street. The object of the Ranger leader’s interest was a brick-faced, four story structure – apparently the tallest building in town – about seven hundred feet away along the main street and across an intersection. It was covered in narrow windows, and boasted a covered, board walkway that ran down the front and one side, set with a few iron benches. Very Old West. Block letters on the face of the building proclaimed it to be the COBURN HOTEL.
“The squad will be on security while you work,” Sallinger told Skye and the master sergeant. “Once we’re clear, we’ll move out.” He looked at Skye. “You got this?”
“Why doesn’t Cribbs do the shooting? He’s had the training.”
“Because shooters don’t get better unless they shoot,” the captain said, “and I’m confident you’ll do fine. Now, you got this?”
The young woman nodded and snapped out the bipod of her SCAR sniper variant.
“Good,” Sallinger said, shimmying backward across the roof. “Hit your targets and work fast. This storm isn’t waiting.” As if to punctuate his statement, the wind blew a cloud of snow crystals through the air, forcing them all to duck their heads. As the captain descended the ladder at the rear of the motor home, where he would join Bracco and Rooker in maintaining a secure perimeter, Oscar Cribbs snugged up beside Skye and propped his elbows in the snow, looking through a pair of binoculars.
“Remember to breathe,” he said. “Fix your targets. Easy squeezing.”
Skye nodded.
“When you need to reload, don’t rush it. Smooth motions, we’re in no rush.”
“But the captain-”
“Forget what he said, and forget about the storm. There’s only your sight picture, the rifle, and the sound of my voice.” Cribbs was speaking in a tone so low and level that it was almost a rumble. “Take a minute to get a feel for your target area.” His breath went out in a slow, soothing whoosh, and he growled, “Then we’ll fuck some shit up.”
Skye exhaled a long breath as well, and panned her rifle scope along Truckee’s main street. A steady wind had carved snowy sculptures along its length; deep drifts in some places (at least ten feet high along the fronts of the stores), scouring down to blacktop in others, rolls and ridges of white, wavelike dunes. Long-abandoned cars were parked in angled spaces along its length, and she saw that like the hotel, many of the stores were fronted by a raised and covered plank sidewalk. Gaslight-style streetlights completed the illusion of stepping back in time. Signs and shingles advertised ski and snowboard retailers, pubs and restaurants, gift shops and clothing stores. She saw a few galleries and a boutique coffee house, a real estate outfit advertising summer rentals, more saloons and a tiny bank with bars on its windows that looked more decorative than anything else. Again, the Old West illusion was maintained, except for the modern ATM set in the bank’s front wall and facing the plank sidewalk. She saw at least a dozen U.S. and California flags hanging frozen from the fronts of buildings, rocking stiffly in the breeze.
The dead were here.
Some could be seen as little more than silhouettes behind windows, and others were buried in drifts with only their heads exposed, jaws working slowly. There were more in the street, bloodless and blue-skinned, dressed in gray rags and staring with colorless eyes. They drifted mindlessly up and down the pavement, in and out of open doors, wandered around a garbage truck, an ambulance parked at an angle in the center of the far intersection, and bumped along the side of a white U.S. Mail truck that had run up onto a fire hydrant and become wedged. Through the scope, Skye saw a single, rust-colored palm print on the side of the truck, and for a moment she could picture the madness and terror that must have overtaken Truckee on that terrible final day. She quickly pushed the thought away. It was time to go to work.
The wind gusted and filled the air with swirls of white, and she steadied the rifle, bracing it tightly against one shoulder and judging how much correction would be needed to counter the wind. “Ready,” she breathed.
“Tango,” said Oscar, “five hundred feet, garbage truck.”
Skye shifted, found the target with her scope. A bald man in a restaurant apron. She squeezed and the battle rifle coughed, a sound immediately blotted out by the wind, she noted with satisfaction. The bullet took off the top of the bald man’s head, and he crumpled.
“Tango, right five feet.”
The SCAR ticked right, crosshairs settling on a middle-aged woman. Cough. The woman fell.
“Tango, right five more, tail of the garbage truck.”
Cough. A teenager in a tank top fell.
“Tango, left ten yards, four hundred feet, sidewalk.” Cough. “Tango two hundred fifty, left of the mailbox, dressed like a soldier.” Cough. “Tango, six hundred feet far right, fat lady.” Cough.
Skye hit what she aimed at, but not with every bullet. Because of the wind, some targets required correction and a second shot, but then they were down. None needed a third. Oscar spotted and called out a calm, steady cadence of target location and range, and Skye obeyed, ticking the rifle left and right, elevating and depressing. When she started to hurry, Oscar’s voice was there, telling her to slow down and breathe, never rising above that comforting grumble. She found that she was having no trouble hearing him over the wind.
“Reloading,” she murmured, matching his tone, ejecting a spent magazine and inserting another twenty rounds of seven-point-six-two.
“Tango, seven hundred feet, hotel sidewalk. There’s a cluster of three.”
The SCAR spoke three times, and three skinnies went down to head shots.
“Tango, three hundred feet, kid with a bicycle helmet.”
Cough.
“Snowbank, five hundred feet left, five or six heads poking out.”
Eight bullets left the snowbank stained black and green.
Skye lost herself in the shooting. She didn’t notice the cold or the wind cutting through her clothing, didn’t feel her muscles and joints stiffening as the dropping temperatures chilled the motor home’s roof. Neither did she feel the maddening bloodlust she’d so often felt before, the killing rage that overtook her when the dead presented a seemingly endless field of opportunity, as it had in that Oakland church steeple. This was different, a cold bubble of serenity, a silence broken only by the gentle voice of her spotter, the suppressed bark of the muzzle, and the metallic click of the magazine and chamber cycling. She was in the Zone, an elusive place known to all professional shooters, a state of being that was eagerly sought-after by those who worked at this deadly trade. The Zone was their Holy Grail, and when a sniper found it, nothing that crossed their sight picture – moving, partially concealed or trying to shoot back – stood a chance of surviving.
“Tango.” Cough. “Tango.” Cough.
Time slipped away, a meaningless thing. There was only the voice, the sight picture, the movement of her hands on the rifle.
CLICK. The magazine was dry. “Reloading,” she said.
“No, you’re done.”
“There’s more…”
The master sergeant rested a hand on her shoulder. “Too far away to matter, so conserve your remaining ammo. We’re done here.”
Skye looked up from her scope, over the top of her rifle. Truckee’s main street for a thousand feet in both directions, and as far up the intersecting street as the angle would allow, was motionless, littered with the fallen dead.
“Time to go,” Cribbs said, and together they started back toward the ladder through a carpet of spent shell casings.
The squad raced across the wind-scoured pavement, zig-zagging around snowy berms and drifts, moving quickly up the block toward the hotel. They knew that despite Skye’s sniping, the area was far from unoccupied, and there was no way to completely avoid being spotted by the dead. The hope was that by the time corpses that had seen them and started to move from behind their windows or up the street, the team would be under cover.
“I don’t want to waste Skye’s work,” Sallinger had said before leading them away from the train station parking lot. “No shooting unless absolutely necessary. Close quarter battle only.”
Tomahawks cleared belts and pack loops.
Now as they ran past the back end of the garbage truck, boots thumping and gear rattling, they passed through a cloud of decay so heavy it felt damp against their skin; the reek of rotting human flesh. Skye glanced into the rear of the truck as they moved by, seeing that the crushing mechanism was down. The interior steel walls were clotted with frozen gore and fragments of bone, and a few slender, blue-white arms reached helplessly from underneath the crusher. Muffled groaning came from within.
A desperate attempt at disposal, she
thought, turning away and running after the Ranger in front of her, trying not to retch. Those arms…it was a sight she’d never forget.
Add it to the list.
They passed the ambulance and the mail truck with its bloody hand print, vaulting over bodies lying where they’d fallen when Skye’s bullets found them, spotting more slow-moving figures farther along the town’s main boulevard and up the intersection, shadows in the blowing snow. And then they were up on the covered plank sidewalk outside the Coburn Hotel. Just like the other buildings they had seen, high drifts had formed against the two walls facing the streets, burying the windows of the first floor.
There was a gap, however, a place where the drifts had been trampled flat by many shuffling feet. The front doors to the hotel stood open like a black mouth, the floor of the doorway marred by sliding, snowy footprints.
“Flashlights,” Sallinger ordered, then started in.
Master Sergeant Cribbs elbowed him aside. “I got this one, sir.” He led with his light and his tomahawk, and the squad followed him into the darkness.
TWENTY-THREE
The dead were on them at once.
Shadowy figures galloped at them out of the gloom, filling the air with their moaning; men and women, snarling children, all of them ripe with decay and gnashing blackened teeth. The squad met them with tomahawks swinging, flashlight beams jumping crazily about the hotel lobby. The sounds of thumping boots and sliding feet competed with grunts and the cracking of bone. Stringers of gore and dark fluid were slung back from the hatchets, streaking across furniture and hardwood planking and Native American woven rugs. Bodies hit the floor and there was more snarling, this time from the men and one woman fighting in the dark.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 23