Wide openings had been left on each side at both Ninth and Tenth Avenues, then protected by gates made out of steel cut from other containers. Riflemen were positioned in the bell tower, and armed men and women patrolled the top of the container wall, picking off the dead that wandered up to thump against the steel.
Then there were the dog runs. The warlord was especially proud of these, mostly because they had been his idea.
At three of the four intersections around the fortress Emer Briggs called Rome, steel cables had been strung across the street. Drifters in collars clipped to the cables by chains formed curtains of the dead, able to shuffle back and forth along the length of steel without straying too far, the rasp of sliding metal clips and dragging feet joined together. Little Emer reasoned that anyone—any living person—who wanted to enter the intersection would be forced to face the dead. He hadn’t encountered any enemies or refugees at his walls, so he assumed it worked.
The Harleys approached via the only road without a dog run, motoring up to a gate that rolled open to greet them and closed as soon as they were inside. Little Emer and his biker brothers drove through a parking lot and backed into a curb beside the church. At the far end of the lot, the M2 Bradley was backing into its own shelter, a high aluminum canopy intended to cover motor homes. A trio of men in Army uniforms emerged from the armored vehicle, threw a wave, and walked into the nearby school.
No one else waved at the bikers, not the handful of people at the gate or on the wall, not the riflemen in the tower, and not the woman trundling a wheelbarrow of human waste from the church out toward the baseball diamond. They all made a point of finding somewhere else to look.
Saint Miguel’s main chapel was warm as the men entered, a fire burning in a large, freestanding iron bowl in the center of the room, smoke climbing into the high, arching beams before drifting out a hole in the stained glass. The pews had been removed, making room for the pallets of goods and supplies lining the walls. A mannequin in a bridal gown stood near a pallet of canned goods, her face painted to look like an overdone prostitute. Muted light from the stained glass combined with the fire to cast deep shadows, and motorcycle boots echoed across the marble floor. Where the altar had been now rested a heavy Gothic chair of intricately carved dark wood, pilfered from the Regents Hall at the university. A pair of human skulls had been wired to the uprights at the top of the chair.
Little Emer climbed three marble steps and dropped into his royal seat. The other bikers settled on the steps as Titan produced a six-pack of warm beer and Red Hen lit a pair of fat joints. Their weapons—a collection of assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns, handguns, and axes—littered the steps around them.
They bullshitted about nothing in particular for almost half an hour before a pair of dirty men in need of shaves walked in, marching the captive from the post office between them. His hands were bound and the blood from his ears had dried. They stood him at the foot of the marble steps and then backed out of the room. The man stared at the big biker in the throne and lifted his chin.
“What’s your name?” the biker leader asked. When he cocked his head, showing the blood running down his neck, Emer laughed and yelled the question.
When he spoke it was in a too-loud voice. “Oliver Fields.”
“What did you do before the plague, Oliver?”
“I was an office manager at a lumberyard.”
Emer looked him over. He was dirty, like most people these days, but he could tell the man had at least made an attempt to take care of himself. He had a solid build. Otherwise, he was a plain-looking man in his thirties.
“Did you have family at the post office?” Emer yelled.
He shook his head.
“What to do with you?” he murmured, making the man squint and lean his head in. He drummed his fingers on the arm of the throne, and then in a loud voice said, “What will it be? Fighting, fetching, or feeding?”
The men on the steps chuckled. Oliver Fields drew back a step.
Briggs spoke loud enough for him to hear through damaged ears. “You’re a big boy, strong. I could give you a weapon and put you on the wall, but I don’t think I want you armed after what happened at the post office. And you passed up your chance to join us.”
Oliver looked at the floor.
“I could put you to work, have you cook and clean and empty the shitters.” Little Emer smiled that beautiful smile. “And then there’s feeding. We could leash you to the dog runs afterward.”
“I vote for feeding,” said Red Hen.
“Me too!” Stark yelled.
The man’s head snapped up, his eyes narrow. “Touch me and I’ll break your necks.”
The bikers exploded with laughter. Braga tossed his shoulder-length hair and made a sharp snapping sound with his teeth.
Little Emer looked past him for a moment and then held up a hand. “Oliver, hold that thought.” He motioned to the two men who had entered the far end of the chapel. Lassiter and Russo approached the throne, rifles slung. Both nodded, almost a bow, as they stopped before the pack of bikers and the big man on the skull-tipped throne.
“You made it back,” said Little Emer. On the steps, Titan shook his head. He had bet that they wouldn’t, and would have to pay up.
“We saw a helicopter,” Lassiter announced. “Not the one you shot down. Another one.” Russo was nodding beside him, and the two men explained where they had been and what they had seen.
Briggs’s good humor slid off his face, replaced by a frown and brooding forehead. He waved the two men out without further conversation. The biker leader looked at his men, who exchanged glances. A second helicopter. What did it mean? Little Emer decided he would have to talk to his daddy.
The warlord looked back at the man standing at the foot of the altar steps, and his eyes hardened. “Break my neck, right?” The corner of his mouth lifted. “Oh, you’re definitely fucked.” He glanced at his men. “Let’s get Oliver started on his new career.”
Stark and Braga seized him at once, and the man began to thrash and fight. Red Hen punched the man in the head until he went limp, and then the bikers dragged him out of the chapel.
Little Emer Briggs followed with his hands in his pockets, thinking about helicopters and his father. He sighed, hoping that a little fun with a new captive would improve his mood. It usually did.
NINE
September—Franks Ranch
A dirt road made a rough rectangle around the Franks ranch, passing mostly through high pines on the left and right and a seven-foot fence topped with coiled razor wire fifteen feet off the right side of the road. Ed Franks, driving an old pickup truck, had more than a decade ago contracted with an outfit out of Sacramento that specialized in the design and installation of correctional facility fencing, assuring his fence was taut and strong.
The truck moved slowly, and Dean West was sitting with an arm cocked out the passenger window, sunlight dropping in individual beams on the road ahead through gaps in the pines. It was hot, and he waved at the occasional mosquito, watching the fencing slide by. He was looking for weak points where a tree might have fallen against it, or, God forbid, caused a breach. So far the perimeter looked intact.
Ed Franks was in his sixties, having fathered Angie later in life. He kept his gray hair short, framing a handsome and weathered face with light blue eyes. Ed chewed gum to replace the nicotine urges of a habit given up more than twenty years ago. Most of the time being an older father didn’t bother him. Now, however, when the world had turned upside-down and demanded both strength and stamina, he cursed his advancing years.
“Lenore is going to ask you to do something,” Ed said to his son-in-law.
“Name it,” Dean said, not taking his eyes off the woods.
“You can say no. You should say no. It’s my responsibility.”
The younger man looked over at him. “What’s wrong, Pop?”
Ed Franks stopped the truck and threw it in park, looking out the driver’s-si
de window and sighing. “I told myself I wasn’t going to say anything. Told myself I was going to tell Lenore not to say anything, either.”
Dean just looked out the windshield and waited.
“Getting old is no fun at all,” Ed said, spitting his gum into the trees. “A man has this sense of who he is, what he can do, and that never really goes away. But our bodies have other ideas. They don’t give a damn about who you think you are.”
“Pop, you’re sixty-six. Nowhere near an old man.”
“Ha. Tell that to my back at the end of the day, or my knees in the morning. Tell it to my bladder, getting me up three times a night to take a leak.” Ed flexed his rough, lined hands on the steering wheel. “In my heart I’m still twenty-five,” he said, “but the rest of me is pushing seventy.”
Dean shook his head. “Most men would kill to be as fit as you are, Pop. I’m half your age, and you could still kick my ass.”
Ed Franks laughed. “I do believe I said as much to you at your wedding reception.”
“Yeah, with your brother Bud standing right beside you nodding.”
“Well,” said Ed, “Johnnie Walker was doing most of the talking that night, if I recall.”
Dean laughed and gave his shoulder a shove. “You were a scary old man.”
Ed smiled. “And you’re the best thing that ever happened to my daughter. You’re a good son. And she’ll be coming soon.”
They were quiet for a while, the not-uncomfortable silence that falls when men who care about each other admit it.
The older man finally cleared his throat. “So Lenore is worried about Harris MacDonald and his family.”
Harris was one of Ed Franks’s oldest friends, semiretired as well, who often worked in the gun shop in town. Work wasn’t the right word; hung out and shot the shit with Ed was more accurate, but Ed loved the man like another brother. When it all fell apart, they had kept in touch with a CB radio, Harris MacDonald refusing the invitation to bring his family out to the ranch, telling Ed he was hunkered down at home with plenty of supplies and weapons. Harris had kept them updated on happenings in Chico for the first couple of weeks, and then suddenly there was nothing, not a single word on the radio, and no response to calls. It was three weeks now since the outbreak.
“Lenore wants him here, dragged if necessary,” Ed said. “When I told her I’d go, she crossed her arms and looked at me the way she does.”
Dean nodded. He had been on the receiving end of those crossed arms before.
“She told me right to my face that I was too damned old,” Ed said, “that it’s work for a younger man.”
“She’s right, Pop.”
“Goddammit, I know she’s right, and I know it’s pride that’s got me so mad about it.” Ed unwrapped another piece of gum and chewed it angrily. “Lenore keeps saying it’s only ten miles from here to town. I tell her that’s a dangerous ten miles, and you’ve got Leah to worry about, not some old fart in Chico. After what you two went through to get here . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked at his lap. “It’s not right to ask,” Ed said, then looked up and into his son-in-law’s face. “But I guess I’m asking.”
• • •
On the trip to Chico, Dean had seen it all coming rapidly apart. County workers had been erecting roadside signs that warned of contagion, and sheriff’s deputies were telling people not to attempt entering the little towns north of Sacramento. National Guard roadblocks forced him onto side roads or to turn around completely, causing him to backtrack to find another way north. He had seen parties of men in hunter orange patrolling the roadsides and seen the dead as well on those same roads. They were the worst, shuffling corpses that had once been people with lives and hopes, now predatory cannibals gnashing and thumping at vehicles as they went past, taking down those foolish enough to be out on foot. Dean had seen plenty of that too.
Leah needed two potty stops, spent time playing with Wawas, sang some songs, demanded animal crackers once, and had grown crabby another time before finally dropping off to sleep in the car seat. Dean hadn’t been able to keep her from seeing the dead beyond the Suburban’s windows—there were so many of them, and it seemed more every hour—and she had begun calling them Icky Men.
Once they got beyond Sacramento, there had been only one real scare, and it was during the second potty break, just south of Oroville. Dean had pulled to the shoulder and set Leah’s potty chair up close to the Suburban, standing a few feet away with the combat shotgun in his arms while his daughter did her business. They both saw the creature at the same time.
“Icky Man,” Leah said, pointing at a teenager stumbling out of the trees and onto the shoulder thirty feet away. The boy’s skin was ashy, his lips a dark purple, and he was missing an arm. The teenager lurched toward them at once.
“All done, honey?” Dean said, moving slightly to put himself fully between his daughter and the corpse, bringing the shotgun up slowly. He did not want to squeeze off a round this close to his daughter. The sound from his handheld howitzer would traumatize her. “Ready to go?”
“Gotta poop,” she said.
Dean took a sharp breath and sighted on the teenager. “Are you sure?”
Leah was humming. The corpse was close enough for Dean to hear it grunting, sneakers scraping at the pebbles on the shoulder. He wasn’t going to have a choice, and his trigger finger tensed.
“No, all done,” said Leah, changing her mind and hopping off the little seat, pulling up her tights. Dean immediately slung the shotgun and swept her into the car seat, hands moving fast to click her harness belts closed.
“Potty,” Leah said, pointing at the ground outside. Then she pointed past him. “Icky Man.”
Dean spun, slamming the Suburban’s rear door closed with one hip, his right hand falling to the butt of the forty-caliber and clearing leather in a single, fluid motion, bringing the pistol up. He touched the barrel to the lunging thing’s brow and blew its brains out the back of its head.
A moment later he was in the driver’s seat, starting the engine. From the backseat Leah said, “Did you shoot the boom-boom?”
“I sure did, honey. Was it too loud?” He had hoped the single shot had been somewhat muffled through the glass.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Dean dropped the gearshift into drive.
“Daddy, potty chair!”
He braked, sighed, and got out.
• • •
Now, sitting on this quiet dirt road beside his father-in-law, Dean smiled at the Potty Zombie episode, not at what he had done, but at the resilience of children. There had been no more incidents after that, and he had gotten them to Chico safely. Though the world was falling down, here on the ranch they were untouched. But now Ed Franks wanted him to go back out there to look for a family friend who might or might not still be alive.
“I’ll go this afternoon,” Dean said.
Ed shook his head. “Tomorrow morning will be just fine. I want to finish checking this fence. I’m . . .” He choked for a second. “Thank you.”
Dean smiled and patted the old man’s knee. “Don’t worry, Pop. If old Mac is out there, I’ll bring him back.”
• • •
When Dean stepped onto the porch in the morning, Leah was sitting with her grandmother, playing with a stack of plastic blocks, her stuffed walrus within easy reach. She had settled in well at the ranch, and its remote location had been a blessing. The dead made it as far as the fence in the woods and remained there until Dean or Ed came by to clear them off. Leah had seen none of it.
Their only visitor had been Halsey, the caretaker over at the Pepper place and one of Ed’s friends, who had come by once to check on them. Ed had long ago given him the code to the heavy Maglock-secured gate on the ranch road. Lenore tried to insist Halsey come bunk with them, but he had politely refused. He was a man who looked after himself, and Dean liked him.
Sitting on the floor of the porch with her granddaughter, Lenore Franks loo
ked up at Dean and smiled, her eyes showing gratitude and worry. Even at sixty she was a striking woman. Ed Franks pulled the Suburban around front and loaded it with a spare fuel can and a couple of plastic jugs of water, placing Dean’s combat shotgun in its dashboard mount.
Thank you, Lenore mouthed, and Dean gave her a smile and a kiss on the forehead. Then he picked Leah up and gave her a loud kiss on the cheek and a hug.
“Daddy!” Leah yelled, squirming and laughing. “You’re scratchy.”
Dean ran a hand across his whiskers and smiled. “Daddy has to go out for a little while,” he said, setting her back down next to her blocks. “Be good for Grandma and Pop-Pop. I’ll be back soon.”
“’Kay, Daddy.” She grabbed Wawas and used the stuffed animal to knock down a stack of blocks.
At the Suburban, Ed said, “Keep the radio on channel eight, and stay in touch. If Mac’s not at home, he might be at the Silver Dollar.”
From Harris MacDonald’s frequent updates they had learned that the authorities in Chico had been unsuccessful in containing the steady spread of the walking dead and had set up a safe refugee camp at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds. MacDonald said there was a National Guard presence in Chico, and together with the police department they had managed to at least keep that area secured, confident things would turn around quickly.
But that was a week ago, and there had been only silence since.
After Dean climbed in, Ed Franks slammed the driver’s door and leaned on the window. “If it’s too bad . . . if you can’t . . .” He shook his head angrily. “Just come back to us, no matter what you find.”
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 9