Angie smiled at her friend. “He’s got a little girl with him. He can’t keep her out in the woods.”
Skye nodded.
“And a place like this is no good,” Angie said. “If he’s on the run, he’d have no place to go if he was discovered. A city has more places to hide, more resources.” She said it with a certainty she didn’t feel. It was all conjecture, and the simple truth was that she just didn’t know. Maybe Dean had looped around and gone up to Paradise. She didn’t think so, couldn’t say why, but it was a possibility. They might be looking for him in the wrong place.
Angie set her own cup down on the table. “I’ll take first watch. You two try to get some sleep; we’ll move at first light.” She picked up her rifle from where it leaned against the chair and moved to a spot at the front of the house, where she could look out a window and see the driveway’s approach. The Polaris side-by-side sat quietly in the moonlight.
Skye took Carney’s hand and led him into the back bedroom. They didn’t speak, and made love quietly. Afterward she rested her head and one hand on his broad chest, listening to his breathing as he slept.
Part of her felt guilty for the intimacy so close to where her friend stood a lonely watch, tormented by fears for a missing family. The other part, and, she admitted, the stronger part, cared only for getting lost in this man’s embrace, in his powerful arms and in those blue eyes that burned into her with such deep emotion.
What is this? Skye wondered. It felt like nothing she had experienced before. The sight of him made her heart beat faster, and even in tense and dangerous moments, his presence reassured her, made her feel safe. Was this love? Or liability? A cynical voice, born during her time alone in Berkeley and Oakland, argued that this relationship with Bill Carnes was a distraction, that allowing herself to love would only lead to heartbreak.
And how did he feel about her? Carney didn’t say much, wasn’t a man to express many feelings, although he had opened up to her about his past, and she knew what kind of courage that had taken. Was she simply something to help pass the time and satisfy his needs? She didn’t think so, and Carney’s eyes said something else.
She sighed against him, listening to the steady thump of his heart, feeling herself begin to drift off. She’d turned a year older, she realized, the random thought coming to her in that fuzzy way things do on the edge of sleep. Her birthday had been in the fall, and she hadn’t thought about it until now. Happy birthday to me.
With this in her head, she slept.
• • •
Skye awoke sometime in the night to find herself alone in the bed, the blankets cold beside her. She pulled on a shirt and padded to the bedroom door, peering out.
Angie was asleep on the sofa, rifle propped nearby. Carney sat in a chair by the front window, his back to the bedroom and his M14 across his knees. He was having a cigarette in the darkness, the window open an inch to let the smoke out.
Skye closed the bedroom door and knocked out two hundred crunches followed by fifty diamond push-ups, trying not to think about the warm bed and her desire to crawl back in. And have company under the covers. When she was finished, she dressed, pulled on her boots and combat gear, and collected her weapons. Then she slipped out to join her man in his watch at the window.
Carney heard her approach, soft as it was, and smiled in the darkness. He would be happy for the company.
He had been thinking about what they had found here. It wasn’t so very different from Oakland, only less populated. Still a place of shattered life and emptiness. Still a realm of the dead. Could Angie’s husband and daughter be alive out here? He didn’t think so and hadn’t believed it during the months Angie had spoken of her family while they recovered aboard the Nimitz. When he climbed onto the helicopter it had only been for Skye, and to support a new friend. Faith in finding a man and a child who had survived all this destruction was a dream, and Carney was not a dreamer.
The pain Angie felt over her child was not lost on the ex-con, however, and he found himself thinking often of his own lost little one, Rhea. The similarity in names didn’t go without notice, either. Lost children; it was something he and Angie shared, two parents unable to save their little girls. Carney had used a baseball bat to focus his rage on the two people who had killed his daughter. Angie’s rage was focused on the world as a whole, and the former inmate knew where that led. Angie would burn herself out and accomplish nothing.
He wanted to believe they were out there, safe and alive.
In his heart he knew they weren’t. And yet he would say nothing, would stand by her side until she came to that realization on her own, then try to be there to pick up the pieces. He let out a soft, cynical huff as Skye’s hand trailed across his shoulders. Maybe he was changing.
• • •
They investigated half a dozen more houses along Stilson Canyon Road before ten o’clock, finding only the dead or homes untouched since the outbreak. There was no sign of Dean having come this way, and no more messages like the one in the tunnel. Angie said it didn’t mean anything, and her two companions remained silent on the matter.
By the time they reached the outskirts of Chico, a point where the forest dropped behind and the road became a paved stretch descending out of the hills and into a residential neighborhood, the sun had brought the temperature up to a tolerable forty-two degrees. It was here that they decided to abandon the Polaris Ranger and go ahead on foot. The side-by-side was noisy and would attract too much attention. They parked it among some trees, gathered their gear, and set out. Angie hung the fifty-caliber Barrett and its bandolier of rounds across her back, leaving the hard plastic case behind.
By agreement, Skye walked point, machete in hand. Angie followed with the younger woman’s silenced M4, and Carney walked last with the heavier-caliber M14, constantly checking behind them. They kept to the sidewalk when possible, as there was no way of knowing who or what might be watching, and it made little sense to offer themselves up as better targets walking down the center of the street.
Before leaving the Polaris behind, Carney had checked in with Vlad by way of the two-way Hydra radio, the signal strong and clear. The Russian reported that all was well with Halsey and the ranch, and that he would be standing by.
Up here close to the hills and forest, the houses were larger, the neighborhood affluent. Down many driveways, boats and motor homes were tucked away and covered against the winter weather. But affluence had been no protection against the plague. Garages stood empty, front doors hung open, and lawns were littered with personal items as people fled in a hurry. In a few upper-floor windows of these beautiful homes, pale, rotting faces stared out, hands pawing at the glass.
A small dog skittered across the street in front of them, pursued by the corpse of a woman in cutoff jeans and a tank top, galloping stiff-legged after her prey. When the dead woman saw the three people in the street, she altered course and limped toward Skye.
Skye took the creature out with an overhand swing of the machete, burying the blade in its head up to the bridge of its nose.
Angie looked at the spot between two houses where the little dog—a terrier maybe—had disappeared. That it was still alive was a marvel to her. The small domestic breeds wouldn’t survive long in this dangerous new world, and most had likely died trapped in their homes or devoured by their owners. Those that made it out would have to forage and hunt, and face not only the hungry dead, but other predators thriving in the apocalypse, like coyotes and, eventually, wolves. She silently wished the terrier luck and returned her attention to the street.
Some of the houses they passed were tightly shuttered or boarded up, with black-and-yellow biohazard warnings stapled to their doors. Others had spray-painted messages scrawled across their stucco walls.
GONE TO OROVILLE
JOHN, MEET US AT REFUGEE CENTER
AMY, THE KIDS ARE WITH ME
As they walked, Angie felt a deep sadness settling over her. Had any of these messages b
een seen by their intended readers? She somehow doubted it. Both the writers and those they were trying to contact were probably now rank and file in the legions of the dead.
But not her daughter, and not Dean.
He and Leah were out here somewhere, and she would find them.
As blocks passed, affluence gave way to middle-class and blue-collar neighborhoods. The cars in driveways and along the curb were older, in worse shape than in the better neighborhood, and the houses and lawns were smaller. The spray-painted messages continued, however.
MEET US AT THE HIGH SCHOOL, JACK
MOM, DAD IS DEAD. STAY AWAY FROM HIM
CHRISSIE, I’M BIT. I LOVE YOU
Angie swallowed hard at that last one, then told herself that wasn’t the case with Dean. He wouldn’t let that happen. She wished she could believe it.
Skye used her machete to dispatch a pair of drifters that came at them across a brown lawn on the left. One of them was rustling along in an olive-green biohazard suit, rotting behind the Plexiglas face shield. She had no sooner dropped the pair than Carney called, “On the right.” Skye turned and moved toward a young man in a light-green grocery apron, who was followed by a decaying thing in a tattered state trooper uniform. They were too close together to risk engaging one and not the other up close, so she pulled her silenced automatic and put them down, one bullet each.
Angie continued to search for a message from Dean, something he could leave that only she would understand. Though she didn’t want to, every time they saw movement—drifters on their street or blocks away down a side avenue—she stopped to examine them with binoculars. She was looking for the dead versions of Dean and Leah, and praying she wouldn’t see them.
They came to an intersection with a wine shop on one corner and a run-down ice cream parlor on the other, a seedy place with TONY B. spray-painted across its front window. Snarling came from within the ice cream parlor, and then a pair of shapes tumbled out the door. Weapons snapped up, but it was only a pair of mongrel dogs, fighting over a rotting, severed leg still wearing a Nike on its foot.
PUFFT, PUFFT. Angie put down both dogs with Skye’s M4.
The street continued for another block and ended at the entrance to a trailer park. Twin Pines was stenciled on a rusting metal archway stretching over the drive, with lines of angled trailers marching down both sides of the road beyond. The few cars in sight were beat-up and smeared with rust-colored bloodstains, windshields spiderwebbed with fractures. The trailers rusted on cinder-block foundations, their cheap tin skirts missing panels or dangling on old bolts. Laundry still hung on lines between them, and patchy dirt yards held plastic toys and more than a couple of engine blocks. The scent of death drifted from open trailer doors.
“Let’s move through here quickly,” said Carney from the rear. “This is pretty close quarters, and it doesn’t look like the kind of place your husband would choose as defensible.”
Angie agreed, and they picked up the pace. Skye sheathed her machete in favor of her pistol, and the other two kept rifle stocks to shoulders. They were far enough into the park now to see that the roads were set up like a pair of plus signs, one atop the other, two streets crossing the main avenue. Slow-moving figures on the side streets began to turn toward the trio, and other shapes began to appear from between the trailers. In moments, every dead thing in the trailer park was headed their way.
Fifty yards ahead, Skye saw that their street would lead them through another metal arch, out of the park and back into a neighborhood. She began moving faster, her pistol raised in a two-handed grip. Then Carney’s M14 went off to their rear, shattering the still morning.
“Holy shit!” Carney exclaimed, firing twice more.
Angie and Skye spun to see a woman lumbering past an old Suzuki Samurai vehicle that was so rusted a good wind would blow it to pieces. The woman wore a yellow floral-print housecoat seemingly the size of a ship sail, her bare feet torn to the bone, swollen gray calves as thick as saplings. Her mouse-brown hair hung limp across a wide face, and glassy yellow eyes stared out from behind the strands. She looked to be four hundred pounds plus, and not from the green bloating they had all seen. There was a fresh bullet hole in one cheek, and another two had torn away much of her thick neck.
The woman made a meaty noise in her throat and waddled into the road, chubby fingers clutching at the air in front of her. Carney fired two more rounds, hitting her in neck fat and punching into the same cheek, both without effect. Angie fired as well, clipping off an ear.
“For Christ’s sake, kill her already!” Skye yelled, laughing.
Carney did. He finally put a 7.62-millimeter round between her eyes, blowing a cloud of black and maroon out the back of her head. The woman’s mouth dropped open with a wheeze, and then she fell face-first onto the road with a heavy thud.
“Holy shit,” Carney repeated, letting out a shaky laugh. “She scared the crap out of me.”
Skye was still laughing, even as the trailer park’s dead closed in. “How the hell could you miss a target like that?”
Carney was about to give her a smart comeback when a man in his forties, carrying a long-handled shovel, bolted out of a trailer just ahead of them. He was also carrying a toddler and ran for the far entrance to the trailer park.
“Don’t let him get away!” Angie cried. “We need to talk to him!” She began using the M4 to clear out the drifters that were closing on their little group.
“I got him,” Skye called, sprinting after the man, with Carney chasing close behind. Skye was only a few yards away when the man dropped the toddler, screamed, and swung the shovel at Skye’s face. Startled by the attack, she didn’t react in time. The blade connected with flesh in a flat, dull thud, but it was Carney who took the blow across his shoulder as he leaped between the two of them and went immediately to his knees. Skye saw the look of surprise on the man’s face just before she broke his nose with a furious punch, laying him out flat. The toddler was screeching as she kicked the shovel away and crouched beside Carney. Angie ran up and leveled her rifle muzzle at the shovel man’s bloody face.
The man paid no attention to the rifle and crawled to the child, a boy of two, calling, “Drew, Drew, it’s okay.” He pulled the child to his chest and looked at Angie, crying and hugging the boy tightly, tears mixing with blood.
“Please,” he begged, “don’t take my little boy.”
ELEVEN
January 12—Saint Miguel
The grow was located in a long, narrow greenhouse behind the Saint Miguel School. A flatbed work truck loaded with coils of irrigation hose and bags of potting soil sat outside. From within the greenhouse, muted by glass walls, flowed a harmonious blend of guitars, an early Eagles tune.
The January sky was overcast and drizzling again, raindrops chasing one another down the sloped greenhouse roof. Little Emer Briggs followed a sidewalk between the church and the school, rain streaming down his closely shaved head and muscled neck, pattering against his leather biker’s jacket. A large-frame automatic rode on one hip, an eighteen-inch hunting knife on the other, and an Uzi dangled from a strap on his shoulder. The chains on his motorcycle boots jangled with every step.
Little Emer saw the man sitting in a lawn chair out in the rain beside the greenhouse door, oblivious to the weather, smoking a joint in a cupped hand to keep it dry. He was thin and muscled, in his late forties, wearing a loose button-up shirt, baggy pants, and dark sunglasses. He wore a .45 in a shoulder holster. Little Emer had known Andrew Wahrman since he was a boy, and the man never seemed to change, never aged, and never—in Emer’s memory—took off those damned sunglasses. Wahrman was his daddy’s grower and had been for decades.
“What’s up, pothead?” Little Emer said, stopping and towering over the slender, older man.
Wahrman smiled without showing teeth and looked up, raindrops dancing on his sunglasses. “Quality control testing,” Wahrman said, offering the joint.
Little Emer took a hit and handed it b
ack, blowing the smoke out through his nose. “New crop?” the biker leader asked.
“Nah, just simple herb.”
The biker looked at the man sitting so relaxed in the rain. Andrew Wahrman rarely left his grow. Not so long ago he had worked acres at a time in the California back country, living out of tents and trailers, tending his plants and stringing trip wires for Claymore mines to keep out thieves and federal drug agents. Despite a lengthy list of arrests, Wahrman had managed to do only county or light state time, and he had never rolled on anyone, not distributors or benefactors, not even mules. His cultivation skill was legendary.
There was another legend about the man, one that belied his easygoing, pothead appearance. It was said that once upon a time he caught a DEA agent in his grow up near the Oregon border, shot him in the head, then chopped him up and buried him in the soil beneath his plants. That particular crop had been packaged and marketed under the name Fed Food.
“Your daddy’s in the back,” Wahrman said, staring at his own toes as he wiggled them in his sandals, taking another hit. Little Emer went inside.
The interior of the greenhouse felt almost as damp as the morning outside, the humidity from the warm plants steaming up the glass. It was pleasant and fragrant in here, and Emer palmed rainwater off his face as he made his way down the space between long tables of soil. The crop at this end of the building was young, the plants only a few inches high. They grew progressively taller the farther back one went, transitioning from tables to pots and then to large buckets on the floor, some towering more than seven feet high and reinforced with long wooden stakes.
The Eagles were singing about Winslow, Arizona, but it wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out the metallic clipping noises coming from behind a high wall of dark green cannabis. Emer found his father perched on a stool at a worktable, clipping heavy buds off a stalk and placing them in a plastic bin.
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 11