The Russian grinned. “I assure you, I do not.”
“I’d be obliged if you could help out a bit,” the cowboy said. “Ranch work never seems to be finished, and you’re younger than me. Hell, twenty years younger, looks like. You afraid to chop wood or maybe mend some fences?”
“It is the least I can do to repay your hospitality.”
Halsey shook his hand firmly. “That’s all for tomorrow.” He looked at the sky. “It’s getting late; we best be getting inside. I’ll throw together some supper, and we’ll get you that adult beverage.”
Vlad was about to thank him again, then noticed a hard look drop over the other man’s face. He was at once afraid he had said or done something to offend his host. Then Halsey moved past him, unslinging the smaller of the two rifles. The corpse they had seen earlier was coming around the corner of the barn, jerking toward them and increasing its pace, glaring with unblinking, filmy yellow eyes. It let out a moan.
Halsey put a .22 round through its forehead.
“And of course there’s this chore,” Halsey said, heading for the motionless figure, “and I don’t think it will ever be done.”
• • •
A fire was crackling in the small living room, and Vladimir was seated at the kitchen table while Halsey cleared the plates. The low hum of the generator came through the wall, and the door and all the shuttered windows were bolted tight. A kerosene lantern glowed on the table beside a saucer Halsey had produced to serve as an ashtray for the Russian. Vlad blew smoke at the beamed ceiling.
“You have been here since this all began?” the pilot asked. “Living alone?”
“I’ve been living alone since I got out of the service,” Halsey said from the sink. “Had some lady friends over the years, none who wanted to settle for a beat-up ranch hand. I’m not complaining.”
“It is lonely out here, is it not?”
“I’m used to it. And I’ve got my books.”
Vladimir had already seen a pair of full bookcases, with more paperbacks stacked in piles near them.
“How about you?” Halsey asked. “Any family?” Then he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, that’s probably the wrong thing to say.”
“Not at all,” the Russian said. “I had a family. They were gone before all this.”
The ranch hand returned to the table with a bottle of amber liquid and a pair of glasses, taking a seat. “Well then I’m sorry, but at the same time it seems a blessing.”
Vladimir agreed. That was exactly how he saw it.
Halsey pushed a glass at his guest and twisted the top off the bottle. “I don’t have any vodka. Never acquired the taste. This will have to do.”
“It will be fine. I do not care for vodka either.”
The ranch hand stopped before he could pour. “You’re bullshitting me.”
A homely grin. “Yes, I know, a Russian who does not drink vodka. Unthinkable. So I will also tell you that I am inept at chess, I do not care for snow or opera, and I cannot dance. I am indeed a very poor excuse for a Russian.”
Halsey smiled and poured. “I imagine the boys in your squadron had their fun with you.”
They touched glasses. “Look at me, my friend,” Vladimir said. “People have been having fun with me all my life. But they are all gone now, the friends along with the tormentors.”
The ranch hand lifted his glass. “To those who are gone, good and bad alike.”
They drank throughout the evening, finishing the partial bottle only to have Halsey produce a new one from a kitchen cabinet. Vladimir explained how a serving flight officer from the Russian Federation had managed to be in California when the world ended. His native country had purchased a number of Black Hawks from the United States and had sent Vlad and several others to America to learn to be flight instructors. When the plague hit, and spun quickly out of control, Vladimir had been pressed into service, flying rescue missions out of a California naval air station.
Halsey talked a bit about ranch life and taking care of Carson Pepper’s spread, but he seemed more interested in listening to the Russian. As the liquor warmed his insides and loosened his tongue, Vlad spoke more about his experiences around NAS Lemoore, the large group back in the Bay Area, and the USS Nimitz. He also told Halsey about Sophia and little Ben. The other man smiled and told the pilot he was lucky to have people who cared about him, and that they were safe. Then he explained the map over the fireplace, pointing out places he had explored and looted. The Russian pointed at the small town just to the east.
“Paradise? It sounds nice.”
Halsey spit tobacco into a mason jar. “Not anymore. Used to be nice enough, I guess, just a little town, nothing special. Had a bit of a rough element there, though, more trailer parks than churches.” He tapped the map. “There’s a bad bunch up there, vagrants and alcoholics and disability cheats, all come together like a pack of wild dogs. I call ’em Paradise Trash. Ran into them a couple months back when I was scavenging, had to put one down. They’ll kill you for your shoes, that bunch. Nothing like the ones that burned out the Franks place, but bad enough.” Halsey dropped into an armchair. Vlad took the couch. “Don’t it figure that so many good folks have died,” Halsey said, “and garbage like that just keeps on surviving? It’s not right.”
“That is a very old story, my friend,” the Russian said, draining his glass and leaning his head back, closing his eyes.
Halsey looked at the fire. “I suppose it is.”
The pilot was snoring minutes later. Halsey watched the flames dance for a while and then faded out to the sound of something scratching at the cabin door. It was a noise with which he had grown comfortable.
SEVEN
January 11—East Chico
Russo and Lassiter looked up at what sounded like a long crackle of distant thunder. A light mist still fell from the pewter sky, but there was no storm. Not one of nature’s, anyway. After a fifteen-second pause it came again, sharp cracks in short succession, the echo rolling over the dead city. They went back to work, continuing south on Forest Avenue, walking side by side down the center of the road. They were glad they weren’t involved in the not-thunder.
Well, at least Russo was. He suspected Lassiter would rather be there than here. Five years older than Russo, Lassiter was a cop wannabe with a severe crew cut—people called them buffs, right?—who for whatever reason had been repeatedly denied entrance into any number of law enforcement agencies and ended up as an armored-car driver. The man wore body armor and a harness of magazines for the AK-47 he carried, and tucked his fatigue pants into the top of his combat boots like he was in the Army.
The younger man would have laughed at him, but he was afraid Lassiter might gun him down in the street.
“We’re getting a little far from the truck,” Russo said.
“Don’t worry about it,” came the reply.
Russo was scruffy and in need of a shave, but good-looking under the stubble. Twenty years old, he wore an L.L.Bean jacket and, underneath that, a black T-shirt with the image of a reaching corpse over the words Zombie Apocalypse? It’s About Time! He had a knit cap and a striped scarf, a large backpack and hiking boots. If not for the shotgun and the pistol on his hip, he would have looked like any other Chico State student, which was what he had been before the world went sideways. He lit a cigarette as he walked.
It earned him a sharp look from Lassiter. “They can smell that.”
The younger man grinned. He had straight teeth, turning an ivory shade despite his youth. Russo had smoked since he was thirteen. “C’mon, with all that racket over there?” He waved in the direction of the not-thunder. “You’re worried smoke is going to attract them? How about the two Happy Meals walking down the middle of the fucking road?”
Lassiter made a sour face. Russo thought that was the right word for most everything about his partner.
The former armored-car driver looked away. “Just remember to keep checking our six.”
Russo raised
an eyebrow. “Our six? Do you mean behind us?”
“You know I do, asshole.”
Of course Russo knew what he meant. In the months they had been paired, he had grown accustomed to the wannabe tough-guy’s mixture of police and military slang. The guy just begged to be made fun of, and even though Russo suspected screwing with the man could be unhealthy, sometimes it was just too hard to resist. The trick was to mock him without actually laughing. Besides, Russo was bored.
“Copy that,” he said, deepening his voice.
Lassiter grunted.
“Roger and ten-four. Wilco. Good copy.”
“Fuck you,” said Lassiter, walking faster to get in front of the other man. Russo snapped a flat-handed, British salute at the man’s back and whispered, “Okey-dokey, kilo-victor.”
They were moving through a commercial district made up of retail stores, chain restaurants, small hotels, and strip malls. In many places windows had been covered with plywood, most of them pasted with yellow and black biohazard warnings. Russo knew the message by heart.
AVOID CONTACT—REPORT ALL EXPOSURE
The street had its share of abandoned cars and overturned bicycles, but not as many as there would be in the major cities, Russo thought. He tried to imagine what it would have been like in the bigger cities like New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, millions of people packed into what would quickly amount to killing jars. He thought about Chicago right about now, a frigid January wind coming in off Lake Michigan, snow on the ground, and frost-covered corpses moving slowly through those urban canyons. Russo shook off a chill.
The two men walked around a Chico Municipal dump truck that had been painted black, now sitting cockeyed in the road. They peered up and in at the stacks of body bags arranged in rows in the bed. One was moving.
Just beyond the truck, in the parking lot of a multiscreen movie theater, they saw a trio of wild dogs harrying a corpse in a hospital gown, lunging in and nipping, darting out when the zombie turned as another leaped in to bite at its gray legs. The dogs would eventually win, Russo knew, but they were just as likely to be a meal themselves tomorrow if they ran into a pack of skinnies.
That was Lassiter’s word for them. He said it was what the Army had called them. To Russo, it sounded a little racist.
“We’re too far from the truck,” Russo repeated. “We should go back for it.”
“That truck was a piece of shit. I’m looking for a new truck,” Lassiter said.
The younger man shook his head. “Uh-uh, that’s not what we were told to do.”
Lassiter stopped and looked back at his partner. “Then walk back to the truck. But I have the keys, and I’m going this way.” He continued in the direction he had been heading.
This was stupid. Lassiter’s confidence was nothing but ignorant bravado. If they ran into a sizable pack or got cornered, they would be dead meat on foot. “No one said anything about a new truck. You’re going to get us both in trouble.”
“You’re going to get us in trouble, boo-fucking-hoo,” Lassiter called back in a falsetto. “Why don’t you man up?” He kept walking.
Russo watched him go, looked around at the deserted stores and parking lots, then hurried after his partner. “You’re a dick,” he muttered.
Lassiter ignored him.
As they continued down Forest, they came upon a man hanging from some overhead power lines, his body dangling ten feet in the air. The man snarled and snapped at them from above, twisting in the air, and the two men in the street stopped to stare. The corpse wore the green flight suit and patches of an Air Force pilot, and he was hanging from his own parachute lines, the shroud tangled in the wires above.
“This fits with what we saw at the edge of Bidwell Park,” said Lassiter. Months ago, during one of their many scouting runs, they had encountered the wreckage of a fighter jet that had plowed into the trees near the west end of the giant park.
Russo took out his pocket camcorder and filmed the snarling pilot.
“That’s sick,” said Lassiter. “No one is ever going to see your stupid movie.”
The younger man ignored him. Before the plague he had been a film student at Chico State, about to begin his junior year. What the other man said might be true, no one would ever see his work, but that wasn’t stopping Russo from putting together a kick-ass documentary. He already had several sketch pads of notes and storyboard drawings, but the film footage was the real prize. His only difficulty had been keeping his camcorder powered. There were several generators back where he, Lassiter, and the others lived, and scavenging crews went out regularly to collect fuel from Chico’s many gas stations and abandoned cars. The toughest part—the most frightening part—was sneaking his camcorder battery in for charging. It certainly wouldn’t be seen as a priority, and he was more than a little worried about what would happen if he was caught. Not enough to keep him from doing it, however.
The documentary was a priority for him. For after the plague. There had to be an after, right? This was history, happening all around him, and future generations would want it chronicled.
A rattle of chain link on their right got their attention. A dead teenage boy had his fingers hooked in the fence of a car rental lot, staring and moaning at them. This was why they should have the truck, Russo thought. It started with one, and then more came to the sound, and soon they were running for their lives instead of just driving away. Sometimes the truck’s engine attracted more attention than two men walking, but in addition to scouting—their destination wasn’t far now—they were supposed to scavenge as they went, and they needed the cargo space. Russo had his own opinion about the intelligence of sending out only two-man teams, but he wasn’t about to argue with the one who sent them. The not-thunder was a perfect example of why.
A dead woman in only bra and panties, her many bite wounds turned black and green, joined the teenager at the chain link. Russo caught up with his partner and tucked his camcorder away. He had plenty of footage of corpses shaking fences.
They passed a Burger King with abandoned cars still lined up at the drive-through, windows smeared red. At a spa in a strip mall, someone had bagged a zombie—Russo refused to think of them as skinnies—with a shot to the head. A woman in a white terry cloth robe was slumped beneath a rusty splatter on the wall of the spa above her head, another motionless corpse lying half in and half out of the front doors, also in a robe, wearing one slipper. At the neighboring dentist’s office, an old man still wearing a blue paper bib thudded against the inside of the glass door, cloudy eyes staring out at them.
Russo shook the empty satchel hanging over one shoulder. “We don’t have shit to show for this run, man. We’re not going to come back with anything if we keep walking past places.”
Lassiter jerked his head. “You want to see if the dentist has some shit? Maybe some Oxy samples?”
The film student looked at the old man behind the streaked glass. Somewhere in there would be the dentist, an assistant or two, other patients . . . “No,” he said.
Lassiter laughed. “Didn’t think so. Besides, we’re about to score, big time.”
Russo had an opinion about that too, but he kept it to himself.
They came upon a minivan sticking out of the front window of a dry cleaner, its sides covered in long, dark streaks. A small Asian woman was pinned beneath one of the rear tires, arms reaching and fingers clawing endlessly at the asphalt, the flesh worn away to chipped bone. Russo stopped to film it, and this time Lassiter didn’t give him a hard time, only stood and stared. After a minute, Russo put the recorder away again and they moved on. Neither even considered putting the thing out of its misery.
The two men took a right onto Notre Dame Boulevard, passing first a bridal shop with a smashed and empty display window, a fluttering white veil caught on a shard of glass. Russo stopped and pointed.
“They’ve been here!” Color came into his face. “I’ve seen that bride mannequin, and so have you.”
Lassiter shrugged
.
“Look,” Russo insisted, “they’ve already been here!” He pointed toward the parking lot of a Raley’s supermarket. The grocery store had been looted, debris scattered across the lot. Parked on the lot closest to them was a Greyhound bus with the word EVACUATION stenciled on both sides in white, the interior windows streaked with gore and the slap marks of bloody hands. Off to the right a flatbed Army tractor-trailer was parked with the rear ramp down, the flatbed empty. It was big enough to have carried a bulldozer.
“Why would they send us down here if they’d already checked it out?” Russo demanded, his voice rising in volume. “Are they trying to get us killed?” He was close to shouting now.
Lassiter suddenly grabbed the younger man by his scarf and yanked him close, lifting him onto his toes. The armored-car driver was stronger than he appeared. “No, you are, dickhead. You’re fucking yelling.”
Russo blinked and looked around. Corpses that had been drifting aimlessly through the lot or in and out of the grocery store were all facing their direction now, and moving as one.
“Good job, dick,” Lassiter snarled. “I should fucking feed you to them.” He gave Russo a shake and pushed him away, the other man stumbling backward. Lassiter turned and started to jog away from him.
Russo stared at the dead, at his partner’s back, and choked down a sob. Why did the world have to go and shit on him like this? He missed his friends, missed the Internet and Facebook, missed regular showers and being able to just switch on a light when you walked into a room. Food that didn’t come from a can, being able to speak your mind and not risk getting shot for it, coming and going as he pleased without getting fucking eaten! Now he did sob, a brief, semisuppressed gurgle of a noise. Lassiter was a first-rate bag of shit, but now he was getting farther away, and being alone out here was worse than all the rest. Russo had to run to catch up with him. The armored-car driver didn’t say anything when the younger man reached him, only smirked.
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 7