Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road

by John L. Campbell

  With no one to blow the snow off these roofs, most – if not all – would collapse long before the spring melt, destroying their contents or at least making them inaccessible. If she was to stay in Truckee after the squad moved on, she’d have to move fast and scavenge what she could from these stores. That, or be prepared to do some serious shoveling. Snow-blowers would make a lot of noise, attracting unwanted attention. When she finally began her hunt, her one-woman operation to destroy every last drifter in Truckee, she wanted it to be at a time and place of her choosing.

  “Step up,” Cribbs ordered, and for a second Skye didn’t move, not realizing he was talking about the little platform he’d created. The master sergeant looked at her and then said, “Listen, about what the captain said… It’s the painkillers talking.”

  Skye shook her head and mounted the platform. “No it isn’t. He knows what I am.” She was now at waist level with the top of the hotel’s façade. Cribbs stepped up onto his own platform beside her and let her take it all in.

  The top of the Coburn gave a commanding view of the town, at least what could be seen of it through the murky veil of a worsening storm front. Objects beyond five hundred feet began to blur and lose shape, becoming pale shadows. The main street was visible below in each direction, and opposite it was parking, a row of smaller shops and the train tracks beyond. She could see the Amtrak station and the RV where she’d done her sniping down to the right, and out past the tracks the town turned residential, hundreds of snow-covered houses spreading out behind a frozen Truckee River meandering beside the rail line. Visibility was dropping as late afternoon rolled in behind the curtains of snow.

  Cribbs pointed down at the street. The walking dead shuffled along its length, moving between abandoned vehicles, oblivious to the driving snow that was sticking to their flesh and hair, turning their ragged clothing white. Down the cross street that ran from the intersection beside the hotel, out past a short concrete bridge that crossed the river, the gray silhouettes of more moving shapes could be seen. A knot of five or six was headed slowly this way.

  “I think they can smell the smoke from our fire,” Cribbs said, leaning in so she could hear him. “I don’t think they’ll be able to locate the source, but it’s stirring them up and it’s going to draw them into the general area. Those skinnies still pounding at the front door are going to attract attention, too.”

  Skye looked out at the stiff, white figures. Eventually they would find the living prey in their midst. They always did.

  “This is going to be your shooting platform,” the master sergeant said. “We just can’t wait on the weather. I’m planning for tomorrow, no matter what the storm does.”

  “What exactly are you planning?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said a while ago, about why we don’t just stay where we have shelter and supplies, wait out the winter.”

  Skye nodded. “You need to complete the mission. And you’re worried about the captain.”

  “It’s more than that now,” said Cribbs. “We can’t stay because of where we are. I was reading some of the material they have in the lobby about conditions and weather up here. February is the worst. It’s going to completely seal off the pass and immobilize us here in town.” He looked at the gray-white sky, squinting against the wind. “We’d have no room to maneuver, no way out if we had to evacuate. I want us over the pass and into Nevada before February locks us in.”

  “I’ve lost all track of days,” Skye said. “Do you know when February will be?”

  “By my estimates it’s about a week away.”

  Now Skye looked up, watching the low ceiling of clouds push in from the west. Weather didn’t care about estimates. It could decide that February was coming today.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “This is a good spot,” said Cribbs, patting the lip of the façade. “I want you to provide cover fire for what we’re going to do.” He told her that in the morning, Corporal Bracco was going to make a run for the abandoned ambulance just beyond the intersection to get something for the captain’s leg. “I’ll give him cover from the street, and you keep the dead away from him up here.”

  She assessed the street, the ambulance location and the shooting angle. “No problem.”

  “That’s going to be the easy part,” the master sergeant said, turning to point farther east. “I’ve put a lot of thought into how we’re going to get over the pass. That was my first choice.”

  Skye looked to where he was pointing. As the Union Pacific line moved past town, the railroad tracks split. The main line continued into the mountains, but it also branched into a fenced area with a couple of long sheds capable of housing an engine. Standing on a rail siding near one of the sheds was the largest locomotive she’d ever seen; a conventional train engine, but at its nose was an enormous circle of steel with a massive fan nested inside.

  “It’s a snow-blower!” she exclaimed.

  Cribbs laughed. “Sure is. I’ll bet they ran that damn thing up and down this entire area and kept the pass clear.”

  “Even in February,” Skye said, marveling at the size of the blower.

  “I’ll bet it kicks up one hell of a show,” said the Ranger.

  “Do you know how to operate something like that?”

  “I’ve had a little experience with heavy equipment, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about trains. Plus it’s pointing west, and that’s the wrong way. Do you know how to turn a train the other direction on its tracks?”

  Skye’s shoulders sagged. “No.”

  “Me neither. We’re not finished yet, though.” He pointed left of the rail yard. “They have to keep the roads clear too, and that’s how we’re going to get out of here.”

  Skye looked to see a cluster of municipal warehouses and sheds near a dome-like sand barn. Parked beside one of these sheds was a yellow vehicle twice the size of the average snowplow, something that looked like a giant tractor with chunky tires taller than a man, and a dump truck-style bed mounted behind the cab to hold sand. Instead of a plow blade however, its entire front was fitted with a wide, rectangular snow-blower filled with curving blades. Like the fireplace in the hotel, it looked high enough for a grown man to walk straight into it.

  The young woman couldn’t help but immediately think of what those blades would do to the dead.

  “I’ll bet that thing does the heavy lifting on the highways around here,” Cribbs said, “and the regular plows handle the clean-up. Now that I can operate, and there’s enough room in the cab and the bed for all of us, plus equipment.”

  Skye saw where he was going, and started estimating the distance. The plow sheds looked to be a thousand feet or more from the hotel. A long shot, but well within range of the SCAR. Visibility would be an issue if the weather didn’t break.

  The Ranger told her that he and Bracco would advance on the sheds while Skye kept the dead off them from the rooftop. The two men would prep the plow, then drive it back and park it right in front of the hotel. “We’ll load up as much food and gear as we can,” he said, “get the captain settled into the cab, and plow our way right over the mountain. Tomorrow’s the day.”

  Skye shook her head. “The range, the wind and visibility…you should do the shooting. I’ll go out with Bracco.”

  “Do you know how to handle a piece of equipment like that?”

  She had to admit that she didn’t.

  “Then you’re the shooter.” He gripped her shoulder. “Listen, I know you’re worried about the responsibility, us being so exposed and depending on you. If I wasn’t confident you could do it, I wouldn’t put you up here.”

  Skye wished she shared his confidence. So much would be riding on her ability to put lead on target. While sniping at a crowd of zombies, a miss just meant you fired again. But protecting men…a miss meant someone died.

  “And just to make it more interesting,” Cribbs said, pointing again, this time to the right of the municipal plow barn,
“there’s that.”

  She saw what he meant at once. The plow sheds were across the street from the fenced rail yard. Inside that fence were several military vehicles and half a dozen white trucks with a red cross on their sides. At least a hundred frost-covered corpses drifted among the vehicles and a cluster of green tents. More stood lined up at the fence, pressing their bodies against it and gripping the links with cold fingers.

  “Looks like a field hospital,” Cribbs said. “I’m assuming that since they’re still inside, the fence must be intact.” He shrugged. “But who knows.”

  “That’s a lot of dead people close to where you’re going,” Skye said. “Tomorrow, huh?”

  Cribbs peered at the storm clouds again. “Yeah. I’m afraid if we wait for it to clear, it’ll be too late. Time has caught up to us.”

  They took a last look at their objectives, and at the thickening dead in the streets below, then returned to the warmth of the hotel to talk to the team.

  The storm arrived just at twilight.

  So did the Hobgoblin pack with its monstrous queen.

  ALPHA FEMALE

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Pepper was dreaming of lions.

  She stood in a forest of stunted trees with slender, twisting trunks and broad dark leaves, dirt paths wandering in and out of them in every direction. Lions had made those paths, the wide pads of their feet packing the earth down tightly. Pepper was barefoot, dressed in a full-length, sleeveless and sequined gown she’d worn in one of her videos. In one hand she gripped her phone, but it wasn’t working.

  The lions were hunting her.

  She hadn’t actually seen or even heard them, but they were out there. She stood on one of the dirt paths, afraid to move in any direction, aware that death was waiting. The forest was silent.

  Loud thumping from behind startled her and she spun, knowing she would see one of the big predators racing in for the kill, heavy feet slamming on the path.

  Pepper awoke with her heart rapidly pounding as she stared into the absolute blackness of the tour bus bedroom. There was no big cat leaping to kill her, only the night outside her window and a winter storm making the bus shake.

  Except it wasn’t the storm.

  Noises came through the ceiling above, thumping and a metallic creak. Something was on the roof. Pepper froze, clutching the blankets to her chin, looking upward in the darkness.

  More thumping. Something moving around.

  A distant part of her brain screamed, Flashlight! Shotgun! But it was overwhelmed by a primal terror that paralyzed her and kept her in the bed like a child afraid of the dark.

  The sounds of breaking glass finally broke her paralysis and she scrambled out of bed, finding the Maglite in the dark, switching it on and locating the shotgun. She noticed that the bus was still warm, and she couldn’t see her breath in its light as she could every morning, waking to the cold because she’d set the generator’s timer to shut the unit down in the night.

  It’s still running. The hum and vibration coming through the floor confirmed it. Had she forgotten to set the timer?

  More breaking glass from above, followed by the squealing of metal under pressure. Still disoriented from her abrupt awakening, she was slow to put it together. Breaking glass? There’s no window on the roof.

  The hum and vibration under her feet hiccupped as the generator chugged and caught. Pepper froze. Chug-hum… Chug-hum…

  Oh God.

  Chug-hum… Chug-chug…chug… And then it stopped, along with the vibration.

  The former country star hurried through the bus, aiming her flashlight and reaching the panel near the driver’s compartment. It was dark. No power. The flashlight beam found the gauge that showed how much juice the solar panels had stored in the batteries. The needle was resting all the way to the left, flat-lined in the red.

  Empty. I left it on, I left it on and now I’m dead, no power, I left it on.

  Above her, a vent that only moments ago had been pushing out heat was now silent, rapidly cooling air now trickling through the grille. The SCREE of twisting metal and the muffled sound of more breaking glass made her jerk the flashlight back to the hall toward the rear of the bus, and suddenly her heart went cold as she realized what she was hearing.

  The solar panels.

  Something was destroying them.

  “No!” Pepper screamed, running back to the bedroom. She dropped the flashlight, racked a shell into the shotgun’s chamber and fired up at the noise. The blast hurt her ears as it punched a fist-sized hole through the fiberglass and sheet metal. The racket of ripping steel and shattering glass didn’t stop. Pepper pumped the slide and fired again, this time to the right.

  Another painful BOOM, another hole.

  The sounds of destruction moved left.

  “No, no, no!” she shouted, ejecting a smoking shell and firing left. A shrieking that was not the wind answered her from outside.

  Pepper stood in the shadows thrown by the dropped flashlight, a fresh shell in the chamber and her finger on the trigger, slowly moving the weapon’s muzzle across the ceiling. The small space burned with the sharp tang of gunpowder, but it was quickly blown away by the rush of frigid air coming in through the new holes in the ceiling.

  She listened, heard nothing but the wind now.

  The dead couldn’t have gotten up on top of the bus, weren’t smart enough to destroy the solar panels. This was something else.

  What?

  She shuddered, and not from the cold, although the heat once held in the bus was quickly being sucked out.

  Stupid! Why did I do that?

  As she waited for the sounds to return, she half expected Scott to respond to her question with some gloomy, sarcastic comment. He wouldn’t, though. She knew he was gone. Scott Davis was five years dead, lying in his grave in Arlington. She’d watched as he was laid to rest with military honors, wept with her mother as Taps was played and flinched when the honor guard fired their rifles in tribute.

  Pepper was alone.

  Not anymore. She continued sweeping the muzzle back and forth across the ceiling. Whatever it was, had she hit it?

  A sudden crash from the hallway made her scream and jump, and she accidentally triggered another blast, blowing a hole in the bedroom closet door and almost dropping the shotgun. She let out a shriek of fear and frustration and pumped another shell as the crash came again. She picked up the flashlight and put the beam in the hall.

  Fragments of white fiberglass were scattered on the carpet, and snow swirled down from above. She raised the light to see the square roof hatch, a ragged hole broken out of one corner. Suddenly a piece of metal, one of the steel struts that held the solar panels in place, punched violently through the hatch, splintering away more fiberglass. She jumped again but didn’t fire this time. Instead she scooted under the hole and into the main part of the bus, cutting her bare feet on shards of plastic, holding the shotgun one-handed and training it upward as she gripped the Maglite in her other hand.

  It used a piece of metal like a tool. She’d never seen the dead do that.

  A pair of slender, red hands curled around the broken lip of the hatch from above and tore the remains free of its frame.

  Pepper dropped the light and fired a blast at the opening, the muzzle flash blinding her. An inhuman scream came from the night outside, followed by more thumping as something retreated toward the rear of the bus.

  Once celebrated worldwide, now hunted and alone, Pepper stood in the stark light and shadow of her tour bus, aiming a shotgun she wasn’t sure even contained any more shells, waiting for the thing on the roof. Twists of snowflakes blew in through the open hatch, as the bus cooled.

  You’re going to freeze to death. This time the voice was Pepper’s own.

  She stayed that way until the first glow of daylight began to appear behind the storm.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “You picked a shitty day for this, Top,” Skye said, running a gloved finger around the fro
nt optic of the SCAR’s scope, clearing it of wet snow.

  “Sure did,” the master sergeant yelled back. He was all the way to her left at the corner, as far from her as the roof would allow, the next building in line two floors below, the slanted roof of the covered sidewalk in front of the hotel another story below that. The Ranger had tied off one end of his nylon rope to some pipes on the Coburn’s flat rooftop, and now he was straddling the lip of the façade, the rope gripped in gloved hands and wound halfway around his waist.

  “You gonna talk, or are you gonna shoot?”

  “I’m gonna shoot.” Skye stood on her overturned steel mesh basket, elbows resting on the façade, aiming the battle rifle. Her enlarged, taloned hand in its bulky snowmobile mitten cupped the front grip, the hold feeling awkward, but there was nothing wrong with her right hand. It curled around the pistol grip, index finger slipping up against the trigger like a familiar lover.

  The suppressor at the end of the barrel huffed, recoil kicking her shoulder, and a snow-covered corpse a hundred feet down Main Street toppled over, missing half its head. She felt the wind pushing the barrel slightly right, and made a small correction. She’d have to account for that when aiming.

  Dressed in her insulated white Columbia coat, Skye was wearing the hood now, drawstrings pulling it into a tight oval against her face. The skull image of her ski mask peered out from that opening, giving her the appearance of a winter horror.

  The rifle kicked and huffed again, and a frosted, sexless thing sagged into the street.

  She paused, thought for a moment, then unslung the M4 assault rifle from her back, swapping positions with the heavier sniper weapon. “Switching out,” she called to the master sergeant. He simply nodded, understanding that his sniper had decided to conserve the heavier, longer-range ammunition of the SCAR for later, once he and Bracco were farther from the hotel. It was her call to make.