Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters

by John L. Campbell

  At fifty-six, “Big” Emer Briggs—the nickname a mere result of being the older of two men sharing the same name—was twice his son’s age and half his size. Balding in front, he wore a scraggly gray ponytail in back and a goatee that was almost completely silver—or would have been silver if it weren’t an ivory shade from the nicotine. The man’s eyes were sunken in dark hollows, the skin of his face drawn close to the bone as advanced lung cancer steadily consumed him. He looked worn down, old beyond his years, and extremely ill. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips.

  When those dark eyes flicked up at his son’s approach, though, there was not even a hint of frailty. Within those eyes was a cunning, an intelligence blended with a talent for violence and an even greater talent for evading a long-overdue accounting for his crimes. The tip of the cigarette flared, and the voice that followed was like a hard wind over a gravel road. “You had another one in the playpen last night, didn’t you?”

  Little Emer grinned and nodded.

  The older man clipped off a bud. “Old farts like me go to bed early. Fucking screaming kept me awake.” He shook his head. “You’re a sick one, Junior.”

  His father was the only one who dared call him Junior. “We broke the post office yesterday,” Little Emer said.

  Snip went the shears. “Do you want a medal?”

  A smirk. “I gave them a chance to swear allegiance,” Little Emer said, “but they chose to defy me.”

  “Allegiance? Defy you?” Big Emer looked up. “You still playing at that Roman emperor shit?” The older man had only a slightly higher level of education than his son, but it was enough to know that the younger Briggs had it all muddled. Romans in a Catholic church? Medieval warlords and skull-tipped thrones? What was next, cowboys and pirates?

  The son pulled a stool up to the opposite side of the worktable and shook a cigarette out of his old man’s pack.

  “Get your own fucking smokes,” Big Emer growled, snatching the pack away and lighting a fresh one from the lit butt in his other hand. He was no longer picky about his brands, and there was no shortage of them in the many convenience, grocery, and retail stores. It was just the principle.

  The younger man chuckled and lit his own smoke, waving it back and forth. “I just put six minutes back on your life, old man.”

  “Like I fucking care.” Snip went the shears.

  “And why not a Roman emperor?” Little Emer asked, leaning his elbows on the worktable. “I’ve got the army, the fortress city, hell, I’ve even got a gladiator pit.” He laughed. “And didn’t the Romans crucify their enemies?”

  “Get your history straight,” said the old man. “The Romans crucified criminals.”

  “Wrong. The Roman emperors crucified whoever the fuck they wanted. Friends, rivals, enemies, even family members.”

  Big Emer stared at his son through a haze of smoke. “Gladiator pit,” he muttered. “That abomination you call a playpen.” He pointed the shears. “You’re living a fantasy. God knows how you got the size and not the brains. Fucking imbecile, you and your idiot friends.” He went back to harvesting his buds.

  The warlord regarded his father with eyes as flat and lifeless as a shark’s. These were minor insults and no longer even left a mark. Little Emer wasn’t playing. Yes, he knew he wasn’t a real Roman, and what he had done in Chico was microscopic compared to what his heroes had accomplished. He had discovered them in prison, demanding his cellmates read to him about ancient Rome and specifically its rulers. They were men who took what they wanted, did as they pleased, and made no apologies. Men without remorse. The subject more than fascinated him, and he bore the names of his favorites as tattoos across his broad back.

  There was Maximinus Thrax, who had ruled through fear and conquest, murdering dozens of friends and advisors. Diocletian murdered more than three thousand Christians by crucifixion and beheading and was known as the Caesar who popularized throwing Christians to lions. Nero executed his own mother and blamed the Great Fire of Rome on the Christians, using them as living human torches to light his gardens.

  Little Emer thought he would like to see how that would work.

  Caracalla was the master of repaying an insult. When he heard he had been mocked in a play in Egypt, he sailed his legions to Alexandria, burned the city to the ground, and slaughtered its inhabitants. Twenty thousand died for that little barb. The emperor Commodus ordered that all cripples, hunchbacks, and undesirables in the city be rounded up and placed in the Coliseum, where they were forced to hack one another to death with cleavers.

  These were the men he admired, for their audacity, for their strength and willingness to live as they pleased without regard for the outraged cries of others. But great as they were, none inspired Little Emer as much as the Roman emperor Caligula. Here was a man who proclaimed himself a god, and who murdered anyone who had ever wronged him in life, or even disagreed with him. He made his favorite horse a high priest, had sex with his sisters on banquet tables crowded with guests, murdered entire families for a perceived slight, and publicly cannibalized the testicles of live enemies who had personally wronged him. His crowning move, in Little Emer’s opinion, came at the Circus Maximus. When the dungeons had been emptied of criminals and none were left for Caligula’s favorite event, the lions, he ordered his soldiers to force the first five rows of spectators down onto the sand, where they were promptly devoured for the emperor’s amusement.

  Little Emer pictured feeding his father to lions. Then he shrugged and said, “Everyone needs a little fun.”

  “You need to think about being smart instead of having fun,” the old man said, jabbing the shears through the cigarette smoke. “Like the way you burn through fuel, especially with that goddamned tank running all over the place. Do you even know how much diesel you have stored up? Or how much is left in Chico? Smarten up.”

  “I am smart,” the biker leader said, but the confidence was running out of his voice.

  A snort. “Right. Spell cat, dumbass. I’ll give you a hint, it doesn’t start with T.”

  Little Emer flinched at that. His dyslexia was a very sensitive spot, and an easy target his father knew well. Big Emer alone could bring it up without fear of maiming or death. Others hadn’t been so fortunate.

  “No one asked you, cancer cluster.”

  Big Emer began to laugh, and it immediately turned into a savage, back-breaking coughing spasm. Bloody spittle hit the cement floor around the older man’s stool, and a full minute passed before the coughing tapered off to a rattle. Big Emer steadied himself with a hand on the table as he wiped a rag at his mouth and nose. It came away bright red.

  “That’s the best you can do?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  Little Emer didn’t respond, only sat and smoked his cigarette, staring at the old man in front of him. There had been a time when his father’s mere presence in a room loosened his bladder, a time when Daddy’s hand brought pain and humiliation that only abated when one felony conviction or another made him the state’s problem for a while. Little Emer had grown up swearing he would kill his daddy one day, but that day had never seemed to come, even when the old man was weak and sitting defenseless right in front of him.

  The elder Briggs lit another cigarette and squinted at his son with runny eyes. They held a look that whispered, Any time you think you’re man enough, little boy. Little Emer Briggs, a rock-hard biker lord who had put twelve people in the ground before the plague, felt his father looking into him and had to stiffen to keep from trembling. When he was a child, his father’s presence had sometimes caused him to urinate without warning, a fact that still made him burn with shame.

  The old man gave him a knowing smile of yellow teeth and returned to his clipping.

  “I need to talk to you,” Little Emer said in a small voice, angry at becoming that little boy who said the wrong thing and was backhanded across the kitchen for it.

  “We’re talking,” said his father.

  “Some of the b
oys,” Little Emer said, and then his voice cracked. He started again. “You heard we shot down a helicopter yesterday.”

  The old man nodded. “I heard that nutcase Corrigan and his fucking tank shot one down. I don’t know about we.”

  “Right. He shot it down on the south end of town. He said he was rolling through the area and saw it coming in.”

  “Anyone check to see who or what was inside?”

  Little Emer nodded at his daddy. “Yeah, as soon as the fires were out. Corrigan said it looked like a pilot and a door gunner, could have been a woman. Both were in uniform. The dead started coming in not long after, so everyone split.”

  “And this helicopter,” Big Emer said, inspecting a particularly heavy bud and placing it gently in the plastic bin, “what was it doing?”

  “Landing,” said the biker. “It looked like it was landing.”

  The older man snorted. “So naturally your stupid buddies blew the shit out of it.”

  “I . . . We didn’t . . .” Little Emer flushed as he fumbled. “They might have found us.”

  Big Emer pointed the shears again. “What, they might have discovered your pathetic little empire and ruined all the fun?”

  The biker’s face reddened further as he furiously crushed out his cigarette, his hand shaking just enough to earn one of those yellow grins from his old man. “They might have compromised us,” Little Emer finished.

  His father’s eyebrows rose. “Ooh, a fifty-cent word. Care to spell that, Junior? I’ll spot you the C.”

  “Fuck you!” Little Emer shouted, standing up fast and knocking over his stool, his large hands turning into fists. “It was my decision.”

  Big Emer shrugged and snipped a bud. “And now it’s over,” he said, his voice soft, no longer taunting.

  The younger man stood there, unsure of what to say or do, and then the rage just drained out of him. He knew his father knew it would. He righted the stool and sat at the worktable again, reaching for another of his old man’s smokes. This time Big Emer didn’t protest, and even leaned across the table to light it for his son.

  “You’re a big dummy,” his father said, his voice a rasp, “but I love you.”

  Little Emer closed his eyes and nodded.

  The elder Briggs regarded his only son for a long moment. Brawn, a spark of cleverness, and an absolute willingness to visit death and destruction upon his fellow man had kept the boy alive so far, but Briggs wondered how long that could last. Certainly longer if he listened to his old man, as he had done fairly consistently throughout his adult life.

  Little Emer and his Skinners motorcycle club had been the distribution arm of Briggs’s marijuana business for some time, with a small but lucrative sideline in illegal weapons. Of course they also dabbled in meth and white slavery, but it was the weed that kept them flush and, as it turned out, the weed that saved their lives when the world went tits up.

  Briggs senior and Andrew Wahrman had been running a sizable indoor grow at a warehouse near the train tracks on the west side of Chico. In mid-August, Little Emer and his Skinners rolled into town after a successful distribution run to Seattle and Spokane. Not only did they return for more grass, they brought with them a cache of military-grade automatic weapons, which they intended to sell in Sacramento. Fate put them all together when the plague struck: violent, well-armed men used to working together. It was a combination that allowed them to keep the dead at bay while they gathered the supplies they needed, keeping their distance from military and civilian authorities who were losing more and more control over Chico every day.

  But then his son had gotten this conquering warlord shit in his head, going out and taking from others, forcing people to join his “army” with the threat of death, slaughtering any who opposed him. Big Emer wondered how much of it was real, and how much was just for kicks. Not that it mattered, the results were the same: a lot of dead and frightened people, a lot of shattered lives. Big Emer was no humanitarian, but he had always believed violence should not only serve self, but have a bigger point. Beating his son throughout the boy’s childhood had made Little Emer strong, for example. He didn’t see much of a point in any of this, however.

  Not that it was his place to stop the boy. The cancer would take him soon, and then none of this bullshit would matter anymore. Yet he had spoken the truth; for all the flaws he did love his son, and he worried what would happen to his boy once Daddy wasn’t around for counsel and advice.

  Little Emer looked at his father. “Some of the boys saw another helicopter yesterday. A second one, military just like the first.”

  The older man set down his shears and crushed his smoke.

  “They said it hesitated over the wreckage,” Little Emer continued, “then flew up the canyon toward Paradise.”

  Big Emer traced a nicotine-yellow finger over the curved blades of the shears. “Two helicopters in one day,” he said. “We haven’t seen one helicopter in months. That,” he said, reaching for another cigarette, “is a fucking problem.”

  Little Emer nodded. “What do you think I should do?”

  His father smoked and thought for a bit, then leaned in and told him.

  TWELVE

  January 12—East Chico

  “Please,” said the man on the ground, “please, don’t.”

  “No one’s taking your kid,” Angie said. “Stand up.”

  Behind her, Skye knelt beside Carney, who was on his hands and knees. The body armor and his own muscle mass had absorbed most of the blow. “Hey,” Skye said, “you think you’re some kind of Secret Service agent, jumping in the way like that?”

  Carney stood. “Yeah, that was stupid. I should have let the shovel take your head off.”

  Skye squeezed him. “You okay?”

  The ex-con nodded, then eyed the corpses coming at them from all points. “We need to move,” he said.

  The boy the man was holding was bawling, and then there had been the echoing reports of Carney’s M14. “We made a lot of noise,” Skye said to Angie, “and this is about to get worse.”

  Angie prodded the man, who stood and wiped the blood from his broken nose. He didn’t let go of the boy. “You’re coming with us, so keep up,” Angie said. She trotted ahead with Skye’s rifle to her shoulder, pausing to fire, sweeping a slow arc left to right, dropping the dead. The man hesitated but got moving when Skye gestured with her silenced pistol. Once Angie had cleared a path, the little group moved out of the trailer park and back into the neighborhood. Behind them, a crowd of drifters numbering thirty or more followed slowly.

  Angie led them right at an intersection, left at the next, then another left, putting distance between them and the trailing crowd. The M4 and Skye’s pistol coughed as they engaged anything that moved in their path, both having to change magazines twice. Carney’s M14 was silent, and Skye kept the newcomer moving. His little boy had quieted down and now bobbed in his father’s arms, staring back the way they had come.

  The neighborhood they traveled through was middle class, streets lined with small, neat brick houses that looked much like their neighbors. After several blocks they came upon an intersection where a UPS truck had crushed a red Mini Cooper against a telephone pole. Just beyond, at the far corner, a gas station had burned flat and taken half a block of homes and small businesses in each direction with it. A black and flaking corpse, little more than charcoal, shuffled blindly through the ash.

  Angie took them right again and midway up the block detoured up a driveway, rifle at the ready. The drive curved behind a small brick house to a detached garage and a tiny yard with a swing set. To Angie’s delight the garage door was open, and there were no cars inside. She led them in, and Carney took watch at the opening.

  “Who are you?” Angie asked. The man was taking a lawn chair off a hook on the wall, settling his boy into it. The newcomer had no pack, no supplies, and both he and the boy were filthy. A raw sore bloomed on the man’s cheek, another on his neck. Skye handed him a canteen, then
went to work on the toddler’s grubby face with a baby wipe. The little boy didn’t flinch or complain, simply sat with his hands in his lap, staring through Skye as if she weren’t there.

  “My name’s James Garfield,” the man said. When Angie cocked her head, he nodded. “That’s right, my parents named me after the twentieth U.S. president, assassinated after only two hundred days in office. God knows why.” He took a drink, the canteen shaking in his hand. “I was a mortgage broker. That’s my son, Drew.”

  “What are you doing out here?” Angie demanded, taking in his bedraggled condition and suspicious about his lack of weapons or supplies. “How have you survived?”

  Garfield wiped at his nose and winced—it was starting to bleed again—and retrieved an oily rag from a workbench, pressing it gingerly to his face. “We’ve been hiding in a trailer for a week,” he said. “There was food in there. We would have stayed but you stirred them up through the entire park.” His eyes were beginning to bruise from the broken nose. “We were with a group for a while before that.”

  “What happened?” Angie asked. ‘Why did you leave?”

  “Because one of them got bitten, and the others were arguing about whether to kill him. I got scared.”

  “So you ran with a little boy and no way to defend yourself,” Angie said, shaking her head.

  “I’m not—I’m not confrontational.” His eyes grew wet.

  Angie ignored it. “I’m looking for some people,” Angie said. “Maybe you’ve run across them in the past months. The man is Dean West, thirty-three, dark hair, ex-military. He’s got a little girl with him, about your son’s age.”

  Garfield shook his head.

  “Are you sure?” Angie’s volume went up, and she took a step toward the man. He took three steps back.

  “I’m sure. No one like that.”

  Angie took a deep breath. “What about the others in your group?”

  “You mean do they know him?” Garfield shrugged. “It never came up. People came and went, I don’t know who they met out there. Maybe.”