Angie paced the garage, arms crossed. Skye produced a granola bar from her pack and offered it to Drew, who didn’t respond. When she pressed it into his hands, he began to take bites, chewing slowly and still staring.
“Why did you beg us not to take him?” Angie asked, stopping her pacing and pointing at the little boy. Garfield moved to his son’s side and rested a hand on the back of his neck.
“Because that’s what they do.”
“Drifters, you mean?” she said.
“I don’t know what a drifter is. You mean the dead people?”
She clamped her lips and took another deep breath, nodding.
“No,” the man said. “I mean, yes, but the dead take everyone. I’m talking about the people on motorcycles and their friends. They kill people.”
Angie flashed to her family ranch in ashes, her undead father nailed to a cross.
“They find people hiding and kill them, take everything they have. I’ve seen it.”
“What about the children?” Angie asked tightly.
“They take them,” Garfield said, and now tears rolled down his cheeks and he wrapped his arms around his boy. Drew chewed the granola bar and seemed not to notice.
Angie turned to her two friends, lines of despair etched in her face. Skye shook her head, and Carney’s expression was as unreadable as a stone. Angie looked back at Garfield. “Where is your group?”
“It’s been a week,” he said, “they might not even be—”
“Where were they?” Angie demanded, striding at him across the garage.
The man held up his hands and ducked his head. “At the elementary school! Little Chico Creek!”
Angie shouldered Skye’s M4. “Take us there.”
Garfield shook his head violently. “No, one of them is bitten, and Sorkin is crazy. I’m not going back there.”
Angie’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, yes you are.” The look in her eyes ended any further argument from James Garfield.
• • •
It was seven blocks to the elementary school, Garfield pointing the way and regularly demanding assurances that Angie and her friends wouldn’t let anything happen to his son. He never stopped talking, but he also never apologized for hitting Carney with the shovel.
He and his family—wife, fourteen-year-old daughter Kim, and two-year-old Drew—had reported to the refugee camp out at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds, dutifully obeying the instructions of the authorities. They had been given cots under a white canopy, some Red Cross toiletries and bedding, and promises that they would be safe.
“There were soldiers there,” Garfield said, “and high fences. Even Army doctors. Someone said they were going to inoculate us against whatever was changing people.”
Angie, walking beside him, listened without taking her eyes or her rifle off the street.
Garfield told them how one day, two weeks after the outbreak, his wife and daughter had gone to get their family’s daily water ration while he stayed at the cots with Drew. “The dead were always at the fences,” he said, “shaking them. But they couldn’t get in.” His voice grew soft then. “But they did. The fences collapsed, and people were screaming, they were dying and we . . . we just ran.” He was quiet for a long time and then said, “I thought for a while that they might be alive. Then a couple of months ago I saw Kim in the street. She was changed.”
Angie stayed silent, not wanting to upset her guide more than he was already.
The silenced pistol and the M4 went off with regularity as they traveled the seven blocks, Angie stopping to aim, Skye trotting up to the dead and executing them at close range. The drifters came in every form: men and women, old and young, dressed in summer clothes or uniforms for jobs they had been at when their lives ended. All were rotten and gray.
The drizzling rain continued with no promise of stopping, bringing a steady, wet chill. Garfield steered them up Amanda Way, where an apartment complex stood opposite the school. An overturned grounds maintenance cart rested in some bushes against one of the apartment buildings, and it seemed that nearly every door bore the now-familiar black-and-yellow biohazard warning. Nothing moved along the complex sidewalks or behind apartment windows, and except for the patter of cold rain, there was only silence. They took shelter under a tree near the street.
“That’s it,” said Garfield, pointing. “We mostly came and went through a door in the back, by the cafeteria kitchen. The National Guard tried to set up a base in the rear parking lot. We were living off their supplies.”
“How many of you were in there?” Angie asked, looking at the school.
“Other than us, there were five adults, no other kids. One of them is older, a retired cop.”
“Are they armed?”
Garfield nodded. “The old man, Sorkin is his name. He has a rifle. It’s the kind the soldiers carried. His daughter Hannah has a pistol. I think that’s it.”
Angie examined the elementary school, a one-story structure with a roof covered in solar panels. From here it was hard to judge the size of the building. She could see part of a parking lot to one side, and the nose of an Army six-by-six, but couldn’t tell what else might be set up back there. Part of a playground was in view, and a large soccer field stretched out behind the building. There were a lot of windows, and getting close without being seen would be difficult.
“Do they post watches?” Angie asked.
Garfield suddenly looked afraid. “Why, are you going to hurt them?”
“No,” Angie said, “I’m not going to hurt them. But I also don’t want to get shot on my way in.”
The man looked at her for a moment, holding his little boy close and trying to shield him from the rain. “We locked the place up as best we could,” he said. “I always tried to stay away from the windows.”
Skye joined them under the tree. “Who was bitten?” she asked, pulling off her knit cap and snugging it down over the little boy’s head. He didn’t react.
“A man named Deacon. He sold farm machinery.”
Neither woman could tell if Garfield was scared to go back in because he was afraid of his old group, or of the man who had been bitten and, by now, turned. It occurred to Skye to think it odd how everyone she had met since the outbreak, upon introduction, seemed intent on announcing what they had done before it all. Mortgage broker, farm machinery salesman, writer and hippie and real estate salesman. Probably just unable to let go, she thought. Her former life felt as if it were a century ago. Now she just thought of herself as a shooter.
“Deacon was out at the National Guard trucks getting supplies,” Garfield said, “and when he came back he was cursing and bloody. Something bit him on the elbow and broke the skin.”
“Who wanted to kill him?” Skye asked.
“The old man and his daughter.”
Angie looked at her friend and said, “Then those two will be the biggest threat.” Skye nodded in agreement. To Garfield, Angie said, “Will they let you back in?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. They didn’t kick us out or anything, we just left.”
“Then you’ll make the introductions,” said Angie.
Garfield shook his head. “I don’t want any part of this. Please just let us go.”
Skye rested a hand on his shoulder and stared at him. “We need you. You can keep people from being unnecessarily hurt.”
Garfield looked at the gray-skinned young woman dressed in black tactical gear, and his lower lip began to quiver. Carney spat on the ground to show what he thought of Garfield. The man wouldn’t last five minutes in the joint.
“Listen to me,” Angie said, softening her voice. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you or your boy. We have questions, and the people you were with might have answers. After we talk, you can do whatever you want.”
James Garfield sucked in a deep breath and nodded, and then they were off, trotting across the street in a line, Angie in the lead. They moved toward the back parking lot, watching the sch
ool’s windows as well as the area all around them.
Angie saw no school buses, no swarms of dead grade-schoolers, and for that she was grateful. Then she reminded herself that it had been five months, and even if school had been in session, the kids who had turned would have wandered away by now. They moved past an exterior wall with Little Chico Creek Cheetahs painted on it with the image of a running, spotted cat, the vision of crowds of dead, shuffling children still poking at Angie’s imagination. In the parking lot behind the school, as Garfield had said, was the National Guard base.
It wasn’t really a base, Angie quickly realized, more of a hastily erected command post, and incomplete at that. Someone had set up a square of sandbags to form a helicopter pad, but there was no chopper. At the corners of the command center someone had stacked sandbags for gun emplacements, with no weapons in evidence, and a square green tent was set up behind three six-by-six trucks parked in a row. Next to the tent was a boxy, tracked vehicle bristling with antennae, and a cluster of green fifty-five-gallon drums not far away. At the back of one of the trucks was a pile of debris, mostly plastic packaging and rain-soaked cardboard boxes that Skye immediately recognized as MRE packaging, the military Meals, Ready-to-Eat her fallen Guardsmen friends had introduced her to back in Berkeley.
Rain drummed on the tent and the flat metal roof of the antenna vehicle. There were no drifters here, but a wet crow perched on one of the antennae, watching them with black eyes.
Garfield pointed to a metal door in the back wall of the school, next to a group of Dumpsters. They started toward it. Angie was still twenty feet away when the door opened slightly and a rifle muzzle poked out.
“Stop there or you’re dead,” called a voice from inside.
Angie didn’t like having guns pointed at her and nearly cut loose with a burst of automatic fire, but the impulse left before she could pull the trigger. She’d get no answers if she did. Instead she froze, as did the others behind her.
“Drop your packs and weapons,” said the voice, “and get the hell out of here.”
No one moved, except for Skye, who poked Garfield with her pistol. He stumbled forward. “Is that you, Sorkin?” he called, his voice wavering. “It’s James Garfield.”
“You sell us out to those animals?” the voice yelled. “I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“No!” Garfield didn’t seem to realize that he had lifted his son to block his view of the rifle. “These people found me out there. They’re looking for someone.”
“We’re not here to hurt anyone,” Angie said. “We just want to talk.”
There was a long silence from the doorway. Finally the voice called, “Put your weapons down and move away. We’ll send someone out to collect them. Then you can come in.”
“Fuck that,” Carney muttered.
“Amen,” said Skye.
Angie set the M4 on the wet asphalt, shrugged out of the Barrett, and dropped her sidearm and knife. “Just me then,” she said.
“No,” Skye said sharply.
Angie grabbed hold of Garfield’s sleeve and pulled him along as she started toward the door.
“Angie, no!” Skye reached for her, but Angie pulled away. As she neared the door, it swung open to reveal a man in his late sixties, with silver hair and whiskers, wearing a checked shirt. The muzzle of his M16 was pointed at Angie’s chest.
“Nice and slow, so there’s no mistakes,” the old man said.
Angie nodded, arms at her sides and palms up as she entered, Garfield and his little boy right behind. The metal door slammed closed, leaving Carney and Skye alone in the rain.
Skye retrieved her M4 and slung it across her back, scrambling up onto a Dumpster. “Watch the door,” she said, then jumped straight up, catching hold of the edge of the roof. She did a smooth pull-up and swung over the lip onto gravel-covered tar. Below, Carney collected Angie’s weapons and set them on another Dumpster, then turned to stand guard.
There was simply no way Angie could be allowed to be alone in there, Skye thought. There were too many unknowns, and she didn’t trust this Garfield character. He didn’t seem malicious, far from it, but he also didn’t seem to be capable of making good decisions. How he was still alive was a mystery. Had he now unknowingly led her friend into a trap? Skye knew Angie was desperate for information, she got that, but desperation could lead to bad decision making as well. Skye had no intention of letting her stay in there without backup.
She found herself in a rain-soaked world of air-conditioning units, rows of solar panels and electrical boxes. From up here she could determine that the elementary school was made up of four quads set in a giant square, each with its own courtyard. She moved on the balls of her feet across the gravel, rifle up. Not even a quarter of the way across the roof, a Hispanic man in coveralls with the name Jesus on a patch over his pocket lurched from behind a bank of solar panels. His skin was the color and consistency of dough, and much of the flesh around his mouth hung in tatters.
Skye instantly put a round from the silenced M4 through his eye.
As she neared the first courtyard, she dropped prone and eased up to the edge. Below she could see trees, cement pathways, and a few benches. Long, continuous rows of windows looked out into the courtyard, many with grade school art taped to the glass. A pair of corpses, both women in advanced stages of decay, lay motionless on the paths.
Skye circled, spotting two doors, one beneath where she had initially looked down and another in the opposite wall. She was betting those inside wouldn’t bother locking the doors to the interior courtyards, but the two corpses down there changed the dynamic. Were they really dead? Or were they like many she had seen, dormant and still, waiting for stimuli? If so, those doors would be locked. And if she did drop down to find that they were, she would have no way to return to the roof on her own. She moved on.
The next courtyard was similar, trees and paths, but this one was occupied by a trio of drifters, and they were moving. Locked doors, definitely. She continued her search, wanting to call Angie on the handheld Hydra but fearing that a sudden radio transmission would startle Angie’s captors into shooting.
The dead maintenance man gave her an idea, and Skye went searching for a door or hatch that would give roof access from below. The man had to have gotten up here somehow. It didn’t take long to find a metal square set in the roof at the northeast corner. She tugged at it.
Locked.
Cursing, Skye went back to inspecting the courtyards. The third one looked like the other two, but it was clear of corpses, moving or otherwise. She did a slow walk around it, rifle muzzle always pointed at the windows, ready to return fire. Nothing moved. As before, there would be no way back up once she was down. Mindful of how long Angie had been gone, she moved to a corner and did a dead hang before dropping the last five feet to winter grass. In an instant she tucked behind a tree.
No one fired at her, and no alarm was raised. There was only the rain dripping through the branches.
M4 to her shoulder, Skye headed to one of the courtyard doors.
• • •
Angie sat on the bench seat of a lunch table in a long, tidy cafeteria with posters on the walls warning against drugs, gangs, and bullying, and promoting healthy eating and exercise. Windows lined one wall. The other people in the room stared at Angie as if she had come from another planet. There were four of them. Sorkin, the ex-cop in his sixties, sat on a rolling office chair a few yards away holding an M16 that he kept pointed at Angie’s belly. A woman in her early forties stood next to the man, a pistol on her hip.
For ten minutes, Sorkin peppered her with questions. Where did you come from? How did you get here? How many more are in your party? Are you with the bikers?
Angie was careful with her responses and said nothing about the helicopter. “We’re here looking for my husband and little girl. We’re not with the people you’re afraid of.”
“What makes you think you know what we’re afraid of?” Sorkin demanded.
Angie looked at them all, and decided she knew quite a bit about them, actually. They were emaciated and dirty, covered in sores from lack of washing, and they smelled bad. All but old Sorkin had a haunted look, eyes constantly flicking to the windows and doors, cocking their heads to listen for noises that weren’t there. Underlying their fear was a sense of hopelessness. They were just going through the motions of surviving. Except for Sorkin. There was still fire in those aged eyes.
“James told us you were here,” Angie said.
Sorkin swung the rifle barrel toward Garfield, who ducked and let out a cry. “Turned rat, huh, Garfield?” Sorkin said.
“It wasn’t like that,” said Angie, holding up her hands. “We needed to ask some questions, that’s all. We can trade for information. Supplies and weapons.”
The two others in the room, a man and a woman, began rummaging through Angie’s pack. She had already learned from Garfield during their walk here that the man’s name was Dylan, a photographer and backpacker in his fifties. The woman was Abbie, a Red Cross volunteer who had been out at the refugee center when it fell to the dead. The two of them made happy noises as they found food, toiletries, and a box of nine-millimeter rounds.
“Trade?” Sorkin said. “Looks like I can just take what I want, can’t I?”
Angie kept her voice even, wanting to tell them that Skye and Carney might have a different perspective. Instead she said, “You could, but you’re not like that, are you? Not like the bikers.” She looked at the old man. “Some people we know had some trouble with them too. They killed my parents, burned down our ranch.” She fought against wanting to tear up at the thought of her crucified father, and Halsey’s depiction of her dead mother chained in the back of a pickup.
Sorkin only snorted.
“James told us one of you was bitten,” Angie said.
The woman standing beside the old man, whom the others had called Hannah—this must be his daughter, Angie thought—nodded. “Mr. Deacon. He was bitten on the arm.”
“You don’t need to tell her a damn thing,” Sorkin growled, but Hannah quieted him with a hand on his shoulder.
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 13