“He was feverish for a long time,” the woman said, “and there was some disagreement about what to do with him.” She looked at Garfield and his little boy. “That was why you left, wasn’t it?”
Garfield nodded and looked at the floor.
“In the end I took care of him,” said Hannah.
Angie looked at the woman, at a face drawn not so much by years as grief. She wondered whom Hannah had lost. “James told us some of you might have had contact with others,” she said. “I’m looking for a man named Dean West. There’s a little girl with him.”
Hannah and Abbie both shook their heads, and Sorkin glared. Dylan, the photographer, looked at Angie and said, “Her name’s Leah.”
Angie leaped to her feet, causing Sorkin to roll back in his chair and lift his rifle. “You just sit still, missy,” he barked.
“No,” said Skye, pressing the cold circle of the M4’s silencer against Sorkin’s neck. “You sit still.” She had found the courtyard door open and slipped through the hallways on the toes of her boots, following the voices. Waiting quietly beyond a door frame, she had listened as the conversation grew increasingly heated, then decided it had gone on long enough. Now she was standing behind and to one side of Sorkin, and with her other hand she slipped Hannah’s pistol out of its holster and shoved it in her belt. “Slowly give me the rifle,” she said.
The old man muttered and cursed, handing over the weapon.
“Garfield,” said Skye, “go back to that door and let Carney in.”
The man nodded vigorously and hurried down the hall with Drew in his arms.
Angie moved close to the photographer. His hair was too long for a fifty-year-old, and the blue eyes in his wind-weathered face failed to conceal a deep sadness. “What do you know about Dean and Leah?” Angie said, her heart racing.
The sad-eyed man shook his head. “I’m sorry. They’re dead.”
ORPHANS
THIRTEEN
October—East Chico
Waging urban and guerrilla warfare is nearly impossible with a two-year-old around.
Regardless of one’s level of skill, stalking prey, setting ambushes, and conducting silent reconnaissance all take a backseat to the truly important things: providing shelter, finding food and clothing, keeping her clean, keeping her occupied.
Keeping her quiet.
Dean’s escape from the ranch and their two-day overland trek through the woods had become a blurry odyssey marked by fear and frustration. Leah had to be carried, and even at Dean’s high level of fitness, she began to wear him out and prevented any real speed. Eventually he discarded anything in the go-bag that wasn’t an absolute necessity, burying it in the woods. He cut a pair of holes in the bottom for Leah’s legs, using the nylon strap to support her back, transforming the bag into a child carrier of sorts. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but it let them move faster and allowed him to keep his hands free.
Were the killers from the ranch tracking him? He had to assume they were, and with Leah present, he couldn’t risk taking the time to leave any nasty surprises for his pursuers. He kept moving.
They spent that first night in a hollow surrounded by pines, Leah sleeping wrapped in a sweater from the go-bag and whining about the dirty ground and mosquitoes. Dean comforted her and was relieved when she finally dropped off. At least it wasn’t cold, as the temperatures were still in the seventies. Dean did not sleep. Every rustle of wind or cracking twig could be a pursuing biker or, worse, the walking dead.
The go-bag had only two small bottles of water and some kid-sized cans of mini raviolis, which Leah didn’t want. She wanted chicken nuggets. She wanted to watch Dora, wanted her grandma and her toys. She asked about her mommy.
Dean got them moving early, using his field skills to keep them on a westerly heading toward Chico, just over ten miles away. Ten miles overland and through woods, however, was not like traveling ten miles down a highway. It was slow going, and they were not alone. The first indication that the dead were in the forest with them came early in the morning, and it was Leah who spotted them.
“Daddy, Icky Man,” she said, riding in the bag on his back and pointing to the right. Dean turned to see the corpse of a middle-aged man lurching through the trees, followed by a dead grade-schooler. The MAC-10 cleared its shoulder holster, the tube-shaped suppressor muffling the machine pistol’s flash and sound.
KAFF-KAFF. Throat and forehead. The man went down. With a snarl the grade-schooler galloped at them, sneakered feet rushing over pine needles.
KAFF, neck, KAFF, neck again. KAFF, eye. The body went face-down.
“Bad boy!” Leah yelled, wagging a little finger at the dead body.
“That’s right, honey,” said Dean. “Look for more. You’re such a good girl.”
“I am good.”
Dean grinned and moved on. Among the hundreds of things he worried about was the psychological impact of all this on his daughter. She had already seen death, moving and not, and had been there when her grandmother died shielding Leah’s body with her own. Kids were adaptable, he knew this, but how much more would she see? What would happen if and when Dean had to go hand-to-hand with one of these things? It was sure to be messy, and Leah, watching it all over his shoulder? She could end up catatonic. It wasn’t as if he could set her down while Daddy ran off to fight zombies. For better or worse, this little girl wasn’t leaving his back.
By midday he found Deer Creek Highway and followed it while still keeping to the woods. Moving this way, father and daughter finally made it to the eastern edge of Chico.
• • •
The house was small, set back from the street with a one-car attached garage. Like many California homes, it had no basement. Dean selected it for its location, off a main street at the end of a cul-de-sac, and for the scattered toys in the front yard. He also noticed the pickup in the driveway, not for the vehicle itself, but for the 49ers flag in the rear window. He reasoned that football fans liked their game-day feasts, and that might translate into a well-stocked pantry. Fortunately there had been no dead people inside, and the presence of toys meant the house would be Leah-friendly. He was only partially right in his assumptions.
A boy of four had lived here, so he was able to keep Leah clothed, although she made a face and declared it to be “boy stuff.” There were toys and books, however, and that seemed to balance things out.
Dean spent a lot of his time helping Leah with her letters and numbers, coloring, playing with blocks, and continuing her potty training. Since the toilet didn’t flush, he used a saw from the garage to cut a hole in a child-sized plastic chair, then put a plastic bin lined with a trash bag beneath it, thinking it looked an awful lot like a cat box. Their waste went into the garage. Leah didn’t like it and said so. She wanted her potty chair and asked her daddy to go get it. Eventually she adapted.
In the attic space, Dean found a proper backpack-style child carrier mounted in an aluminum frame, along with a disassembled crib and outgrown baby clothes in plastic totes. No potty chair, however.
He was wrong about the food. If the prior owners had been tailgaters or game-day partiers, they had done it elsewhere with friends. With the freezer and fridge off-limits, Dean and Leah were left with a small amount of canned and dry goods. Apparently, the previous residents had needed to go grocery shopping. The houses next door might provide more food, but it was a risk Dean would face only when his own pantry was bare.
On the shelf of the master bedroom closet he found a padded, zippered case holding a scoped .30-06 deer rifle and a box of forty rounds. There was a small safe for a handgun, but it was open and empty.
Dean hung blankets over every window, barricaded the doors, and settled in. They would be able to stay as long as the bottled water and soda, canned punch, and water in the toilet tanks—certainly not the bowls—lasted. Dean remained vigilant, watching for and seeing no signs of the bikers. The dead wandered down the cul-de-sac on occasion but left the house undisturbed.
It was a peace that would last just shy of four weeks.
• • •
Flak jacket, helmet, weapons and ammo. Full-battle rattle under a withering Iraqi sun, and 120 degrees. Staff Sergeant Dean West, 14th Stryker Mounted Cavalry, stood beside the idling, multiwheeled armored vehicle and watched the asphalt shimmer and melt. The sun threw a dazzle on his blue-and-green wraparound sunglasses as he gripped the M4 that hung on a strap across his chest, a gloved finger resting beside the trigger.
“King-Two, King-Six,” called a voice in his headset radio. “There’s a dirt road two klicks ahead of your position. Recon the road and the village five miles out.”
“Any word on Wilson’s Stryker?” he asked. The third vehicle in their unit had experienced mechanical difficulties on the highway several kilometers back, and command had ordered West and his remaining two Strykers to proceed without it. They had been waiting at this checkpoint for half an hour.
“King-Two, recovery vehicle is on site, all are returning to base. Proceed with recon.”
Great, Dean thought. They would continue the mission at two-thirds strength. The area was supposedly secure, this was a routine patrol, but the term secure was an intangible thing out here in the sand.
“King-Two copies,” he said, signaling to the men around him. They piled back into the Stryker, and Dean radioed the second vehicle behind them with the new orders.
To call it a road was an attempt at humor. Little more than a goat path, the twin ruts to which they had been directed cut away from the highway at an angle and vanished into the featureless, brown Iraqi desert. The two Strykers, maintaining good distance between them, kicked up a cloud of dust that could be seen for miles.
“Another fucking village,” griped a corporal seated on a troop compartment bench across from Dean. “Did they tell you what we’re supposed to be looking for, Staff Sergeant?”
Dean looked at the corporal, a kid named Dennis from a small Montana town. He was reliable, a good piece of gear, and bitching was the favorite pastime of solders worldwide. “Negative, Corporal,” Dean said. “Another opportunity to spread American goodwill, I’m sure. You got someplace better to be?”
The young soldier nodded and proceeded to describe the exact place involving a part of a woman’s anatomy.
“None of that where we’re going,” Dean said.
“None of that in this whole fucking country,” the kid griped.
Dean leaned his helmet back against the vibrations of the armored hull and closed his eyes. “Embrace the suck,” he said. At once the words were echoed by the other men in the compartment: “Embrace the suck.” Most aspects of military life sucked, and getting used to it was really the only option.
“Copy that,” the corporal said, following his sergeant’s lead and closing his eyes.
The two armored vehicles had just come within sight of the village when the right front tire of Dean’s Stryker hit the IED. The blast from the improvised explosive device tore through the armor, killing the vehicle’s driver and gunner instantly and shearing off the Stryker commander’s legs. A storm of shrapnel and fire blew through the troop compartment.
Behind them, the second Stryker stopped and began to spin its turret to the right, just as a pair of men popped up from the desert with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and fired. The RPG warheads smoked through the hot air in seconds, hitting the vehicle broadside, blowing it open.
Dean couldn’t hear anything. His first conscious impressions were the stink of roasted human flesh and the sight of the headless soldier still seated beside the young corporal. Dennis, the kid from Montana, was on his feet and hauling Dean out of the vehicle by his combat harness, dragging him down the Stryker’s open rear ramp. Dean tripped over something, realized it was a leg, then saw the corporal screaming something at him, yet couldn’t hear a sound. There was smoke, figures moving, another body on the ground in desert camo bright with blood. The corporal lowered Dean and leaned him against the side of the vehicle, raising his rifle and disappearing. To his left, Dean saw that the second Stryker was ablaze and boiling black smoke into the sky. No one had escaped the fire.
Muzzle flashes sparked in the desert on Dean’s side, and he saw puffs of dirt kicking up around him, felt the vibrations through his back as rounds smacked the Stryker’s side. He raised his own weapon and began to return fire from his sitting position, trying to put three-round bursts on the flashes that seemed to double and waver before him.
There was a roaring in his ears now, like listening to a large conch shell, and the sounds of the world flooded back quickly.
“Get third squad moving on the right flank!”
“Third squad is gone!”
“There! Put fire on that position. It’s another RPG!”
Dean wasn’t having any effect shooting into the desert, and he climbed to his feet, rounds still hitting around him. “Comms!” he yelled. “Call in the goddamn fire mission!”
“. . . requesting medevac, coordinates to follow,” a soldier yelled into his radio, at the same time trying to fire at shapes darting across the sand.
Dean was certain he was wounded, didn’t know how bad, but knew that if he didn’t turn this fight around right now it wouldn’t matter. Of the eight who had been in the troop compartment, five were still up. Suddenly there was an RPG blast close enough to knock Dean to the ground, sand and shrapnel lashing the side of the Stryker.
“Dean,” a thin voice called, “my legs, man . . . I can’t find them.”
He thought it sounded like Dennis, but he couldn’t be sure. Two of his men were dead on the ground, and a third was down and twitching, bleeding out fast.
“Dennis is hit!” another man screamed. “Oh, Christ, over there! Kill that fucker!”
Automatic weapon fire rattled around them. Still no one had emerged from the second Stryker. They were alone. Dean shouted for his remaining men to cover both sides of the road, then began pouring fire into the desert.
A 5.56-millimeter, M203 grenades, an M249 squad automatic weapon: Everything that could deliver death was unloaded on the robe-clad attackers swarming in on both sides to complete their ambush. Figures fell to the ground, shell casings arced through the air, and cries of “Changing mags!” and “I’m hit!” were lost in the roar of gunfire.
The radio operator was still up; Dean could hear his voice, trying to keep steady. “King-Six, King-Six, we are fully engaged, requesting immediate air support at previous coordinates.” A pause. “Negative, King-Six, we cannot hold.”
The two soldiers on the left flank died a moment later as an insurgent got close and chopped them up with an AK-47. Dean’s radio operator was hit in the neck and sagged to the ground, his blood soaking into the sand. A bullet tore open Dean’s right calf, and he went to one knee. Several more slammed into his body armor, and one clipped his helmet, knocking him down. Blood ran into his eyes.
The only soldier left in his command, a nineteen-year-old named Wickham, ran toward his sergeant holding a trauma bandage. Bullets kicked up dirt and pebbles around him and he grunted, sliding face-first to the ground, unmoving. Three running shapes appeared on the left, and Dean’s thumb flicked his M4 to full auto before he swept fire across them, throwing them back and to the ground. He lay on the ground, changing magazines and trying to crawl to Wickham, then saw the spreading red stain in the sand around the boy’s head. A bullet hit inches from his face, cutting his cheek with fragments of stone. He could hear them now, shrieking in their fast, harsh language, heard sandals thudding on the ground. Dean saw movement, tried to raise his rifle.
The angry hum of auto-cannons tore the desert air in half, followed by the deep-throated impact of rockets and the thump of rotor blades. Bodies spun through the air or came apart in storms of blood and bone as an Apache gunship, looking like a giant prehistoric insect, roared overhead, blotting out the sun for just an instant. More choppers followed, the beat of their blades overwhelmed by the thunder of weapons.
<
br /> Staff Sergeant Dean West blinked at the blood in his eyes, then slipped away into cold, dark pain.
• • •
Dean crouched at the front window of the small house, staring out through a slit in the blanket he had hung. The memory, so intense he could smell the blood of his friends and feel the hot grit of the sand, had come unbidden and quickly overwhelmed him. Now his hands trembled and he bit the insides of his cheeks so hard they bled.
Not now. Not now.
It had been months since he’d had an episode, and none so far could compare with this. He was paralyzed, trapped in a shaking body over which he had no control, sweating, breathing hard, fighting to hold down the moan trying to claw its way out of his throat.
Beyond the window, the cul-de-sac was filling with the walking dead.
For weeks the street had been empty, undisturbed except for the odd corpse. Now, only a day before Dean was preparing to relocate, to find a new location that would replace their now-exhausted supply of food and water, they had come. Hundreds strong, a steady tide of walking decay was making its way into the circle at the end of the street, spreading out and stumbling across lawns and up driveways, pressing against houses and hammering at doors and windows. A dozen or more shuffled up the driveway to Dean and Leah’s house, heads tipped back and turning left and right, scenting the air.
Dean gnawed at his cheeks. It’s our trash, the bagged waste in the garage, oh, God, they can smell it, oh, God.
“Daddy, I want Dora,” Leah said, standing in the living room behind him wearing a kid-sized football jersey that hung on her like a dress. She was dirty, they both were, and it was so hard to keep her clean when the water had to be saved for drinking. Dean trembled, stared at the corpses sniffing in the driveway. He couldn’t reply.
“Daddy.” Leah’s voice was low and petulant. It had been one of those days when nothing made her happy or kept her occupied for long. “Daddy,” she demanded, “want Dora. Want Dora!”
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 14