Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters

by John L. Campbell

  Within minutes he was clear of the neighborhood. Now all he had to do was escape Sacramento and make it the hundred miles to Chico.

  Several blocks away, a gas station went up in a loud WHUMP, a red-and-black plume mushrooming into the clear morning sky. To his right, a police helicopter was hovering low over a parking lot while a SWAT officer hung out one door, firing his rifle. In the street ahead of him, bloody and mangled bodies dragged their feet as they moved in search of prey.

  So many choices. Dean West gritted his teeth and got moving.

  THREE

  January 11—East of Chico

  Halsey awoke to a cold cabin. He had been dreaming about the stables again, but in this dream, the stables were filled with the rich smells of hay and horses, and the mare named Starlight was still in her stall, belly heavy with the foal she would drop soon. It was peaceful, a good dream.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes, waking up and waiting to see if he was hungover, deciding he wasn’t. His face was scratchy, needed a razor, and he wondered—as he did every morning—why he bothered shaving anymore. He would, though, just as he had every day of his fifty years since he was sixteen. A dull ache materialized behind his eyes. Maybe he would need some Advil after all.

  Starlight. It was the horses that had drawn them, perhaps the smell, perhaps the lure of flesh trapped helplessly in their stalls. Halsey had been out when it happened, had returned to the ranch to find the horses slaughtered, Starlight and her colt partially devoured, dead things shuffling around the cabin and outbuildings. He had shot them all down, and then he’d cried, a fifty-year-old man on his knees in the packed dirt, sobbing like a child.

  He didn’t go into the stables anymore.

  Halsey shuffled into the main room of the cabin, wool socks whispering on the hardwood floor. He was tall and slender, with ropy, muscled arms, and his short hair was bristly, the color of iron. He switched on the generator, tucked into a separate locked shed against the outside of the cabin and wired into the house, then set a kettle on the hot plate. He sat at the kitchen table and picked up an Elmore Leonard novel, starting from the page he had folded at the corner, waiting for the whistle.

  The cabin was small, simple, and clean with a bedroom, a bathroom, an eat-in kitchen, and a tiny living room. There had been a flat-screen TV mounted over the fireplace, but Halsey had taken it down and left it out in the weather behind the stables. He had never watched it much anyway. In its place hung a large map of Butte County, covered in circles and notations from a red felt-tip pen. The cabin’s furniture was crafted from heavy wood, sturdy and comfortable, the décor a simple western theme. Like him, a simple, single man steadily moving out of his prime.

  When the coffee was ready he fried up a skillet of canned hash, longing as he often did for eggs and milk. He couldn’t keep the animals that supplied those things, however. Their presence attracted the dead.

  Halsey shaved and washed up with a rag and a basin of water, then dressed in jeans, boots, and a thermal shirt, pulling on a brown Carhartt jacket and an old John Deere cap. He went to the window beside the front door—all of them were covered in sturdy, barred wooden shutters—and slid open a peep slot like he was a doorman at a Prohibition speakeasy.

  A pair of DTs—Halsey’s shortening of Dead Things, since the word zombie just felt like kid’s stuff—was out there, a man shuffling past Halsey’s dusty Ford pickup, a woman in what had once been a suit but was now gray rags standing in place, swaying side to side and staring at the cabin. Halsey peered at her.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “You’ve come a long way, Dolores.”

  That was the problem with living in the sticks. You knew the folks you shot. Dolores was the branch manager at the bank Halsey had used up in Paradise, five or six miles from here. The gray-black skin of her bare feet was filthy and torn. In life she had been a pleasant sort. Halsey had liked her the way a man likes people he meets only once in a while, those who remember that other folks matter just as much as themselves.

  The ranch hand strapped on a tooled leather gun belt with .44 rounds pushed through the loops all the way around, a big Colt six-shooter hanging low on the right side, the walnut grips worn smooth and dark. He selected a .22 rifle from the rack beside the bedroom door and headed up a ladder made of wood that was newer than the rest of the cabin. Where the ladder met the roof, he unbolted a stout wooden hatch and kept climbing another eight feet before emerging on a covered platform with waist-high walls all around. It looked a bit like a park ranger’s tower, and rose above the cabin’s peak. From up here he could see all the way around his house, and out among the outbuildings; the stables, the smokehouse, the storage shed, and the garage. There was also a commanding view of the valley. Halsey had built the tower himself and knew it was solid.

  Misting rain was coming out of the gray January sky, and it couldn’t have been more than forty degrees. People forgot that parts of California could actually get cold, especially this close to the Sierra Nevada. In Halsey’s experience, most folks thought California was made up of Los Angeles and San Francisco, somehow squished together. He expected that was the way people thought about New York too, just one big city, an endless Times Square. Not that there were many people left to think about such things, he reasoned. He took a pair of binoculars from a hook and scanned the area, rotating in a slow circle, looking close in, and then farther out during a second turn.

  A short distance from the house was the square of earth he had turned and fenced off in the fall, intending a vegetable garden in the spring, the seeds and tools waiting in the shed nearby. A yellow backhoe was parked beside it, covered in a blue tarp. Two hundred yards beyond was the mass grave he had dug for the DTs, with that very backhoe. To the west and south, the gently rolling hills wore their winter brown and were studded with clusters of small pines.

  Out past the stables was the airstrip, a long, paved stretch with a bright orange wind sock hanging limp in the morning mist. At the far end was a blackened snarl of metal, struts and wings and tails jutting out at all angles from where the small FedEx prop job had literally merged with Carson Pepper’s private jet in a sudden and horrific fireball that Halsey had witnessed. It had been bad. What emerged from the flames had been worse, and Halsey had been forced to deal with it.

  Carson Pepper had been Halsey’s employer for decades, a multimillionaire who had made his fortune in high-end cowboy boots. Halsey had maintained the ranch for him, and their relationship had been more like friends than business. It had hurt to put the man down.

  The cabin and outbuildings, the actual ranch part of Carson Pepper’s Broken Arrow Ranch, rested in a depression in the valley floor, hidden from view by a long ridge that sloped up toward the big house and crested. A dirt road curved up and around the hill to connect the working buildings to the main property, and a service road headed out to the Skyway, allowing Halsey to come and go with horses and equipment without the need to use the big house’s long, brick-paved drive that extended to the highway and ended at gates flanked by stone pillars, each topped with a carriage light.

  From his tower, Halsey could see black skeletal beams marking the remains of the main house’s roof. It had been a spectacular home, with vaulted ceilings and walls of glass, six thousand square feet of luxury boasting seven suites, marble tubs and granite countertops, five fireplaces, a wine cellar, an indoor pool, and a home theater that could accommodate sixteen guests. A palace.

  Halsey had burned it down himself.

  Satisfied that all was clear, Halsey unslung the .22 and sighted on the dead man below. He waited until the DT moved away from his pickup—didn’t want to put a hole in the Ford if he missed—then squeezed off a single round to the side of the man’s head. The DT collapsed, the report of the small-caliber rifle little more than a POP that wouldn’t travel far. The heavier rifles made a sound that carried for miles, so he used them sparingly, mostly for hunting. Or emergencies.

  Dolores, still swaying i
n the yard below, looked up at the shot.

  “Sorry for this,” Halsey said, putting her down with a single round.

  Then it was time for chores.

  • • •

  Halsey got his Polaris Ranger—an oversized quad called a side-by-side with a bench seat and steering wheel instead of motorcycle-style handlebars, a roll cage and a short pickup bed in the back—out of the garage. It looked a bit military, much like a small Jeep, and he liked it for its durability and power. It wasn’t particularly quiet, but it could go where his pickup could not and get him back out in a hurry if the sound drew the wrong kind of attention. Halsey wrapped the two DTs in tarps and used the Ranger to drive them out to the grave, bringing along a bag of lime and giving them a coating that would not only accelerate decomposition but keep away animals and others of their kind.

  He spent an hour splitting wood and carrying it inside, and then did his laundry in an oval-shaped stainless steel trough set beneath a hand pump, once a watering hole for the ranch’s horses. An old-fashioned washboard that had once hung on the cabin wall as western décor was now back in service, and he scrubbed with powdered detergent before hanging his wet clothes on a drying rack inside the cabin. His usual outdoor clotheslines were pointless in this weather. The house had a septic tank, so he had avoided having to build an outhouse, which pleased him beyond description. He could just imagine sitting in a little wooden hut with his pants around his knees when a hungry DT came calling. More time was spent in the smokehouse preparing the last batch of venison he had brought in, and then he did some minor maintenance on the generator before topping off its tank.

  His chores finished, Halsey loaded the side-by-side with hunting gear, a lever-action Winchester .30-.30 and a scoped .30-06. He also added some empty bags in the event he came across anything worth scrounging, a five-gallon fuel container, and a pair of canteens. His .22 went into the rifle rack at the back of the roll cage.

  His days were routine, and he went at even the small tasks with discipline and structure, always the same. Unplanned is undone, his daddy used to say.

  Inside, he packed a small lunch and made sure the cabin was buttoned up tight, triple-checking to see that the generator was shut down and locking the door before he left. The Ranger grumbled away minutes later, headed down a dirt quad trail that snaked into the hills to the west.

  Halsey could have gone out to the Skyway, the four-lane road running through the valley that connected the ten miles between Chico and Paradise. There were certainly deer out there, but there were other things as well, dangerous things, and not all of them dead. The trails were better.

  This trail cut through the hills and pine on a meandering route, crossing several streams and fire roads. The Ranger motored past three different houses, all summer homes for people from Southern California, all checked off in red on the map over his fireplace. Halsey had already scavenged anything of value. Someone in one of the houses had been a reader, and the ranch hand had scored an entire bookcase of popular paperbacks. Reading was, and had always been, Halsey’s favorite leisure activity. Now the houses just stood as vacant reminders of the people who had once thought of them as escapes from the pressures of their everyday lives.

  After an hour of driving—he saw not a single DT, though he knew they were out there—Halsey came to a particular stand of pines and shut the Ranger down, shouldering his pack, the .22, and the scoped .30-06. He walked into the trees for a bit and checked on the salt lick he had set on the pine needles. There were tracks and fresh spoor, so he retreated twenty yards until he found his lawn chair leaning against a tree. He settled down to wait, the heavier rifle across his knees, a nice sight line on the salt lick.

  It was quiet. It had always been quiet here, of course, but now there was no rumble of jets in the sky, no distant hum of cars on the Skyway or a lonely trucker’s horn. The sky still misted rain, and it dripped on him through the pine needles, but he didn’t mind. Hunting was part of his work, and work needed doing, regardless of Mother Nature’s mood. Halsey had time.

  • • •

  An hour passed, the only sound the brushing of pines against one another as a breeze passed through and the drip of moisture from the mist. There was no crunch of needles signaling a cautious doe approaching the salt lick. There might be nothing today, but that was how it often went. Halsey ate his lunch: a foil packet of tuna mix, some chips, and a bottle of iced tea. He missed bread, missed having a real sandwich, and reminded himself to look for a bread maker the next time he was searching houses.

  A distant BOOM carried over the hills and through the trees. Halsey slung his rifle and walked out of the pines, looking west. It took a couple of minutes but he spotted a finger of black smoke rising above the hilltops into the gray sky. He estimated south Chico.

  Halsey collected his gear and walked back to the Ranger.

  • • •

  By the time Halsey settled into an observation point, the wreckage was no longer smoking. He had left the side-by-side on the other side of the ridge and walked the last hundred yards up a deer path, picking a spot near several trees where he could put his back to the hillside, therefore presenting no silhouette, and have a good view of the south end of Chico spreading out before him.

  Through his binoculars he could see what was left of the chopper and instantly recognized it as a Black Hawk. Anyone who had ever turned on the news knew what they looked like, but Halsey had seen plenty of them in person. Like many young men in America, he had served a single four-year tour in the Army, almost thirty years ago now. It had been a time when the United States hadn’t really been involved in anything more than small brushfire actions around the world, and in any event, Halsey hadn’t been a grunt. He was trained as a heavy equipment operator. He had never been in combat, and other than during basic training, he had only fired a rifle during mandatory, annual qualifications. He’d spent his entire four-year hitch driving bulldozers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

  But he recognized a Black Hawk, and if anyone had walked away from that one it would have been a miracle. He saw no one in uniform around the downed aircraft, but a number of DTs were approaching it from different angles. As he watched, one of them, a woman, wriggled into the cockpit through the smashed windscreen. Another one joined her minutes later.

  He looked for what might have brought it down, seeing nothing but the empty southern end of the city, its streets populated only with the walking dead. Maybe it had been mechanical failure.

  A hollow, thumping noise caused him to put his binoculars on the south. A dark shape appeared from behind a hill and moved slowly over the Black Hawk’s wreckage.

  “I’ll be damned,” Halsey said.

  It left the downed bird behind and came straight toward him, moving slowly as it followed the highway that would lead to Paradise. In moments it was gone, its sound echoing among the hills.

  Halsey ran for the path that would take him to the side-by-side. He would have to cut across to the Skyway. Driving the main road wasn’t his first choice, but if he had any hope of catching up, or at least seeing where it went, he would have to risk it.

  The ranch hand’s boots pounded the earth as he ran faster than he had in twenty years.

  FOUR

  January 11—South Chico

  Vladimir Yurish banked right and angled the Black Hawk over what Angie West declared was the south end of Chico, California. He had cautioned her that landmarks looked different from the air, and sitting to his right in her cockpit seat, Angie had quickly agreed. Now she was navigating from a road map, opened across her knees.

  “We’re looking for the Skyway,” she said into her radio headset, peering out and down through the windows. “It’s a good-sized highway running east into the hills.” Vladimir acknowledged and slowed the bird so she could get her bearings. He held at a constant three hundred feet.

  Another voice spoke over the intercom. “We’ve got wreckage down there,” Skye Dennison called. “Looks like another Blac
k Hawk.” Skye was dressed in black fatigues and combat gear, a knit cap pulled down over her freshly shaved head. She was clipped into the safety harness near the starboard M240 door gun, leaning out through the opening, and the rush of wind and the beating of blades threatened to drown her out.

  Vladimir strained to look down through the port windows, but the angle was off, preventing him from seeing the fuselage. He could clearly see the debris field, however, twisted metal scattered across blackened earth. Something had gone down.

  “Survivors?” the pilot asked.

  A pause. “No,” said Skye, “looks like only drifters.”

  Angie could see better out her side. “It looks burned. Hard to say how old it is.”

  Vlad nodded. It could have crashed months ago or mere hours. They burned fast, and the smoke would have cleared quickly. He followed the course Angie called, lining the bird up with a four-lane strip of road leading into the eastern hills. The Russian left the wreckage behind.

  Back in the troop compartment, Bill “Carney” Carnes was clipped into his own harness at the left door. He watched the burned and broken bird fade behind them, then looked out at Chico. From up here it was large and spread out, though it was really just a small Northern California city nudged up against the base of the mountains on one side, an expanse of rich farmland stretching out on the other. The center of town appeared to be a grid of tree-lined streets, whereas the south end looked more commercial. There were big parking lots for retailers and small industry, sprawling apartment complexes, and residential areas with curving streets.

  No cars moved along the avenues, but he could make out the small shapes of people. What had been people. Now they were just lifeless, dangerous, rotten shells.