Dean said he would.
• • •
If the silence of the CB channels had been the first sign that something had gone wrong, the Skyway was the second. Cars and trucks were stopped along its length, some crumpled together in accidents, all of them silent and still. At one point Dean saw that a fire truck had run off the road and down the embankment, its grille twisted around a pine tree. The emergency vehicle was covered in strapped-down luggage, fuel cans, and sleeping bags, transformed into an evacuation vehicle.
The Suburban idled past a rusting Taurus station wagon with a figure still belted into the front seat. A fat black crow exploded out the open window in a storm of feathers, making Dean jump and jerk the wheel. The decaying corpse in the station wagon’s driver’s seat rolled its head to the left and looked out with a pair of holes where its eyes had been, jaw working soundlessly.
The warm morning air was scented with pine but, like a cheap odor spray, failed to mask the greasy aroma of spoiling flesh underneath. The scent drifted out of the cars and in through his windows, and Dean was soon forced to buzz them up and turn on the air conditioner. It helped, but only a little.
The smell of rot wasn’t only coming from the cars. It wafted off the corpses walking slowly along both the inbound and outbound lanes. Figures dressed in shorts and T-shirts dragged themselves across the pavement, weaving among the stopped cars and trucks. Their graying flesh was marred by rips or pocked with buckshot, eyes milky orbs in slack, gray faces. There were children among the dead, and this made Dean shudder.
His right hand trembled, but he made a tight fist until the tremor went away.
He had seen the corpses, of course, in Sacramento and during the journey to Chico, but he wasn’t used to them yet. He had come across them standing at the fence in the woods, cold fingers gripping the chain link until a thrust with a pointed metal bar pierced their brain and made them fall off. Dean had heard the reports on the CB while it still worked, from old Mac and on other channels, had heard that their numbers were increasing as the plague spun out of control.
Anyone that dies comes back, the voices on the radio had said. Destroy the brain. Bites spread the disease. The big cities are lost; the smaller ones are barely hanging on. The government is working on a cure.
And then nothing.
Dean navigated the black Suburban down the Skyway, nudging the dead aside with the big SUV’s front bumper, not wanting to risk damaging the vehicle while he was out here alone. The inbound lanes held fewer cars and corpses than the outbound, and for a two-mile stretch there was only unobstructed road on his side of the highway. Then he reached the short bridge that crossed Butte Creek, just outside Chico’s outskirts.
It was a woman—had been—and the tatters of a flowered sundress hung in flaps around its neck, split completely up the seams. Now its swollen breasts rested atop an even more swollen belly, bulging arms and bloated legs making it look like a balloon in some hellish Macy’s Parade. Piggish eyes peered out from folds of flesh in its face.
It was green and looked ready to pop.
The creature had somehow dropped into a sitting position and become wedged between the front fender of an abandoned car and the bridge’s guardrail. It slowly kicked its bloated legs and waved its arms, unable to free itself or stand. Dean drove by slowly and carefully, sensing that if he nudged the abandoned car it would squeeze the dead woman. He could only imagine what would happen next.
The bloated green corpse behind him now, he checked in with Ed and Lenore on the CB, telling them what he was seeing, but not about the green woman. He was told to be careful and get back quickly.
Dean’s questions about what had happened to Chico were answered first by the complete absence of moving vehicles on its streets. The city’s fate was next apparent in the form of boarded-over windows, biohazard warnings, and abandoned roadblocks. The sight of a coyote loping alone and in daylight down the Skyway, completely without fear, told him more than a radio broadcast. The occasional wandering corpse seemed almost like a sideshow compared to the boldness of the coyote.
The Suburban passed beneath the Route 99 overpass, where someone had spray-painted END TIMES on the concrete. He continued as the road became Park Avenue, the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds appearing on his right.
He did not see that less than a mile behind him, a column of trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles, followed by a boxy military vehicle, rolled out from Notre Dame Boulevard. They turned onto the Skyway and headed into the canyon.
Dean slowed, unable to take his eyes off the fairgrounds, the place Harris MacDonald had reported was a safe zone for refugees.
When the fair wasn’t in town, the Silver Dollar was a local speedway, an oval track with spectator stands, all within a high fence. There was no racing now. Instead, the track was crowded with campers and motor homes, cars, trucks, and military six-by-sixes. There were ambulances, fire trucks, and a trio of delivery vans from a local party rental shop. The grassy infield was filled with tents of all shapes: Army field tents, nylon camping tents, canvas Red Cross structures, and white canopies from the party rental trucks, once used for barbecues and weddings, now converted to refugee shelters.
The fence had collapsed in a dozen places. The dead wandered the fairgrounds freely.
Dean’s voice caught only once when he reported the scene to Ed and Lenore, announcing that he was on his way to the MacDonald house. Again, he was told to be careful.
Harris MacDonald and his family lived just north of the fairgrounds, in a quiet neighborhood not far from the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. In fact, the old man could see the plant’s high, stainless steel towers from his front yard. Dean accelerated and left the fairgrounds behind, traveling the final distance in minutes through empty streets.
He saw all he needed to from the curbside. The bricks of the middle-class home were pocked with gunfire, windows smashed and part of the roof torn away as if by a giant’s crowbar. Bulldozer-like tracks scarred the once-pampered lawn, and what remained of the front door stood open.
Harris MacDonald had been crucified in his own yard, his corpse left to rot, the black spot of a bullet hole in his forehead visible even from the street. Dean looked at the house. He knew that searching for surviving family members would be futile, so he reversed direction toward the Skyway and headed back the way he had come.
He had just cleared the 99 overpass again when the CB burst to life with Lenore’s voice. “. . . Dean, Dean . . . oh, God!”
Dean snatched up the handset. “Lenore, come in! Talk to me!”
There was a pause, a brief crackle, and then an open mic. In the background he heard a sound with which he was intimately familiar, the chatter of an automatic weapon. Then he heard his daughter scream.
“Lenore, come in!” he screamed into the radio. “Ed! What’s happening?”
There was no reply.
Dean dropped the hammer on the Suburban and shot up the Skyway into the canyon.
• • •
The chain of events that led to what happened at the Franks ranch would have been difficult to predict, but it almost certainly began with Angie West. Angie had always thought the family bunker—so well stocked with supplies and arms—was a secret. Its existence, however, was revealed two years earlier to the wrong people by her own loose tongue.
It had been at a cocktail-fueled, after-hours get together with several of the producers for Angie’s Armory. When asked about the private lives of people so involved in firearms and combat shooting, Angie had dazzled the producers with tales of the bunker and the stockpile of arms within, winking and saying that her family was ready for anything. One producer suggested the family qualified as preppers, and a segment on the ranch and the bunker would make for captivating television.
No, Angie had said, they weren’t preppers, and the bunker was just between them. Tipsy from wine, the young woman had smiled and held a finger to her lips. By the following morning she had completely forgotten about the conversation.
The producers didn’t. There was discussion in the studio offices all that week, without any of the Frankses or Wests present. Should they push, get Angie to go along with a bunker segment? How much of a sweetener could they offer to get her cooperation? Was the value of bullying her for the segment worth making their star unhappy? In the end, a senior studio executive weighed in and ruled that Angie’s wishes would be respected, and the subject was tabled.
A junior producer had been present for the talks, and he complained to his assistant that Angie West was being unreasonable. Imagine, an underground bunker packed with automatic weapons. Fans would eat it up! The producer’s assistant repeated the conversation to her roommate, who in turn shared it with her cousin, a rabid fan of Angie’s Armory who never missed an episode, a man named Terry Lassiter who worked as an armored-car driver up in Chico.
When the plague hit and that same Terry Lassiter fell in with some dangerous people, the story of the weapons cache was repeated. Plans were set in motion.
• • •
Dean’s Suburban roared back across the bridge over Butte Creek, and he scarcely noticed that the car that had pinned the bloated green zombie was now crushed against the guardrail. He went by too fast to see that the pavement was green and wet, a burst corpse trapped and flopping beneath the car.
But he saw other vehicles on the Skyway that had been crushed, flipped over, or rammed out of the way. Corpses had been run down and torn apart, a few still twitching and trying to rise, and he saw places in the pavement where something heavy with tracks had pivoted and gouged the asphalt. Former staff sergeant Dean West recognized the passage of an armored vehicle when he saw it.
Those same tracks turned off the Skyway and onto the dirt road leading to the Franks ranch.
Trees flashed by, the heavy SUV bouncing and swaying along the dirt road, threatening to slide off the edge. Dean kept the accelerator down, gripping the wheel with both hands and fighting for control. Through the open windows he could hear the ripple of distant gunfire, and then the unmistakable triple boom of an auto-fed heavy weapon.
Suddenly the trees parted and there was the gate, knocked flat now, the metal piping bent and twisted from being driven over by something incredibly heavy. A mud-splattered Jeep was pulled off the road near the gate, a man with a baseball cap and a rifle standing nearby. He jumped at the roaring engine suddenly coming toward him out of the trees.
Dean ticked the wheel and put the right side of the grille into the man at fifty miles per hour. Blood exploded across the hood and windshield, the shattered body momentarily airborne before crumpling to the earth. The Suburban didn’t slow.
There was smoke ahead, and as the SUV crested a rise in the dirt road, Dean saw flames and chaos. Every building was burning. Pickups and motorcycles tore across the lawns, circling like Indians in an old western, riders and passengers firing wildly on the move. Another handful of men took cover behind a bullet-riddled yellow Hummer, firing around the ends or over the hood. An M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle threw turf into the air behind it as it sideswiped and collapsed a burning outbuilding, then pivoted to charge around the rear of the main house.
Dean spotted Ed Franks then, the older man keeping a low silhouette in the open doorway of the bunker, firing an assault rifle in quick bursts. One of the men hiding behind the Hummer grabbed at his throat and fell.
The Suburban chewed up the ground as Dean left the road and tore across the grass, clipping a motorcycle and sending its broken rider spinning through the air. The distinctive cracks of an AK-47 came from his right, and a line of rounds stitched down the Suburban’s side, one of them punching a hole in the fuel can back in the cargo space. The reek of gasoline filled the SUV at once.
At the bunker entrance, Ed Franks was firing, turning slightly, firing, adjusting again. Another man fell behind the Hummer, and the windshield of a moving pickup disintegrated, showered with red, the vehicle slowing instantly. Dean’s Suburban was fifty feet from the bunker’s entrance when the M2’s twenty-five-millimeter chain gun opened up. The bunker’s concrete entrance, its steel door, and Ed Franks vanished behind a storm of high-explosive incendiary rounds. Earth and cement erupted in a cloud, and Dean stomped the brakes, cutting hard left to avoid driving into the heavy weapon’s fire. One shell, however, found the mark and blew away the SUV’s right front tire and fender, wrenching the vehicle hard to the side as metal fragments tore through the engine.
Dean bailed out the driver’s door. There wasn’t time to retrieve the combat shotgun, but he jerked the MAC-10 from its custom holster and ran in a crouch through a cloud of smoke and concrete dust. A figure appeared on his right, a howling man wearing police body armor and carrying a rifle. Dean swept a burst of forty-five-caliber fire across the man’s face and put him down. He fired a second burst at a figure running behind the first, and that man hit the ground, dead or alive Dean couldn’t tell. Then he was at the bunker opening, jumping through and onto the stairs, dragging Ed Franks’s limp body down after him. Bullets chopped at the opening above, and the thunder of the M2’s big diesel drew closer.
Ed was gone, he knew it in an instant. At the bottom of the stairs lay Lenore, facedown, her back peppered with shrapnel from the twenty-five-millimeter, blood pooling on the cement floor. Leah lay beneath the lifeless body, her grandmother’s arms wrapped protectively around her.
Leah was crying.
“Daddy’s here, baby,” Dean said, choking on the words. He shoved the MAC-10 into its holster and pulled his daughter free. Holding her stuffed walrus to her face, Leah began to shriek and kick, and he held her tight, pinning her to his chest. The small body shuddered, and the screaming stopped, but not the tears.
“Daddy’s here,” Dean kept repeating, hurrying through the bunker to the sleeping chamber. The four of them had been spending their nights down here, buttoned up against the darkness. Daytime had seemed safe enough, so they used the house when it was light, able to see anything approaching before it got there. They had been expecting the dead, and Dean cursed himself for being a fool. Ed Franks must have seen the bandits coming and quickly hustled his wife and granddaughter down to the bunker before making his stand.
Dean grabbed the bright orange go-bag from the spot on the floor where he had dropped it three weeks ago and threw the nylon strap over his neck. He checked the bunker’s main chamber before emerging, saw that it was clear, and hustled for the armory door, holding Leah close.
Voices behind him, the scrape of boots on the stairs, and then the clatter of something metallic hitting the floor. There was a whoosh and a hiss as smoke began filling the main chamber.
No time for the armory. Dean slipped into the rear chamber and found the exit hatch, snatching a can of black spray paint off the top of the generator before crawling through the opening, Leah under one arm. Using his fingertips, he pulled the hatch as far closed as he could, then turned and began a fast crawl through the darkness, keeping his head low. The go-bag dragged behind him, and Leah fussed and cried under his other arm, calling for her mommy.
“Hush, baby, we’re okay,” Dean whispered. “We’ll see Mommy soon.”
The distance felt endless in the absolute dark, and despite his best efforts Dean cracked the top of his head twice on the low tunnel ceiling. He felt that at any moment, dead hands would reach for him out of the black ahead, or the hatch behind would open and the tunnel would be sprayed with gunfire. He crawled faster.
Then he banged his head against metal once more, cursing until he realized he had crawled right into the hatch at the far end of the tunnel. He turned the wheel and broke the rubber seal with a soft hiss, pushing outward as daylight fell on them. Leah let out a soft sigh between her sobs.
Quiet woods waited just beyond the tunnel opening, green and fragrant, whirring with insects and dappled with sun and shadow. Dean scanned the trees as long as he dared, then shook the can of spray paint. “Daddy has to leave Mommy a note,” he told his daughter, then scrawle
d a single word on the tunnel wall. He knew—hoped—Angie would know what he meant. If she ever saw it.
LEWIS
Dean scooped Leah into his arms and ran into the forest. Behind him, the Franks ranch burned.
TEN
January 11—East of Chico
A single candle rested on the coffee table, the little house’s curtains drawn to prevent the light from being seen outside. Skye and Carney sat together on a sofa, and Angie was perched on the edge of an armchair across from them.
“Dean enlisted the day after 9/11,” Angie said. “That was long before we met.” She was staring into the candle’s steady yellow flame. “He did three tours in Iraq by the time he was twenty-five, and then they sent him to Fort Lewis, Washington.”
Skye sat close to Carney, warm against his muscled body. The former inmate’s arm was draped around her shoulder.
“That was where the Army trained him to be an urban warfare instructor,” Angie said. “Dean always said he was glad to have the chance to teach what he had learned. He said urban warfare wasn’t like regular Army.”
They were drinking instant coffee, the remains of their meal on the nearby kitchen table. Outside the temperature had dipped below freezing, and they had been fortunate to find this little house—someone’s summer place—down a short gravel drive off Stilson Canyon Road. Searching half a dozen similar places between here and the ranch had uncovered no signs of Dean’s passage, and no other survivors. They had found only drifters, which Skye quickly put down with her silenced M4.
Carney sipped coffee from a mug bearing a football team logo. “Is that related to what he left on the tunnel wall? Lewis?”
Angie nodded. “The urban warfare center at Fort Lewis. I think he was letting me know he was going into the city instead of the wilderness.”
“Why would he go there?” Skye asked. “That’s probably where the raiders came from, and there would be a lot more drifters.” She gestured with her coffee mug, chipped with a faded purple flower on one side. “Why not a place like this? Or even stay out in the woods? With his training, he could make it.”
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 10