The driveway corpses stopped scenting and as a group turned their dead eyes on the front of the house.
Dean squeezed his eyes shut and tried to steady his breathing, wishing for some of the meds the VA gave to guys who’d had trouble after they came back from overseas, then instantly changing his mind. Some of those meds turned you into a living version of what was massing outside.
“We have to go,” he choked out, and forced himself to look away from the window and at his daughter.
She stomped a foot. “Want Dora!”
Dean flinched at the noise and shushed her, praying his heartbeat would slow. It wasn’t right. He had made it out of there, done three tours and made it home alive. He had seen the horrors and returned intact. He did not bring that war home with him.
The panic attack, brewing right on the edges of his self-control, disagreed. Dean knew he couldn’t let it all the way in, couldn’t allow it to have its way.
“We’re going bye-bye,” he told his daughter, and she cocked her head at the strange tone in Daddy’s voice. “I need to put you in our fun backpack, okay, sweetie?”
She stomped her foot again. “Don’t wanna.”
Dean crawled across the floor on his hands and knees, arms still shaking. “We need to play the quiet game, and I need you to be my big girl.”
“No.” Leah ran back to the bedroom they shared. A moment later her voice shrieked down the hall. “Wawas!”
Dean bolted for the bedroom just as something heavy slammed against the front door. Leah was standing in the room, fists clenched, looking around frantically. “Wawas!” she cried, and then the tears started. The stuffed walrus was on the floor, mostly hidden by a Dr. Seuss book, and Dean snatched it up, pressing it into his daughter’s hands. She snatched it and turned away, pressing it to her face, still crying.
There was a steady thumping from out front, the sounds of fists. Moans rose behind them.
“It’s okay, baby,” Dean said, pulling her to his chest and shushing softly in her ear. He felt it, what some combat survivors referred to as the Fear Animal, retreat inside him, frightened off for the moment by the power of a man’s need to protect his daughter. He blinked and gritted his teeth. After all these years, all his denials, it turned out that the Fear Animal had indeed hitched a ride back from the Middle East. He had secretly suspected it was true for a long time, but now, admitting it and thinking of the implications, he felt a new hammer blow of fear. His denial and refusal to seek treatment of any kind now left him exposed, unprepared . . . and weak. How was he supposed to deal with this? Could he deal with this without help? How was he going to protect Leah if this was an example of how bad it could be, freezing up when he needed to act? And could it get even worse? He feared it would. In that moment, Dean knew only two things for sure: he hated the Fear Animal, and he wanted to kill it.
“We’re gonna go bye-bye,” he said in a forced, happy voice. “We can look for Dora too.”
“Find Dora?” Leah asked, pulling away, her round, red cheeks wet with tears.
Dean smiled. “Yes. We’re going to get in the pack and go for a walk, but we have to stay really, really quiet. Can you do that?”
She nodded.
He squeezed her again, then got them moving. Dean had prepared long ago for the time when the supplies would run out. The papoose pack was on the kitchen table next to a new, well-stocked go-bag. The deer rifle and the MAC-10 rested beside them, and the Glock never left his hip. Dean pulled on the machine pistol in its shoulder holster; settled Leah, the rifle, and the gear on his back; then moved to the back kitchen door, watching through a slit in the blanket.
Nothing moved in the backyard yet, and Dean didn’t hesitate. In a flash he was out and running for the gate in the fence at the opposite side of the yard.
• • •
The surge, as Dean came to call it, forced them completely out of the neighborhood. He wondered at it, wondered why the dead would suddenly go from completely absent to present en masse. The best he could come up with was their trash. Perhaps there were uniquely human scents that the dead were particularly dialed into, and it gave him pause as he realized he had most certainly underestimated the acuity of their senses.
The two of them stayed on the move for close to a week, creeping between houses, scavenging what they could, never staying anyplace for more than a day. Dean looked for food, water, and toiletries. He found no weaponry other than a hunting knife, which he immediately threaded onto his belt near the Glock. Mostly they hid. There was no other choice, as the residential neighborhoods seemed to be filled with the walking dead, as were many of the houses.
There were close calls. Once, Dean forced a door open only to have the corpse of a woman fling itself at the wood from the inside and slam it back at him, reaching a gray arm through the opening. Her aggression saved them from walking in on her.
Many times, the dead saw them and pursued, slow but relentless, sniffing after them even when visual contact was lost. Turning to fight wasn’t an option, not with Leah on his back, and so he ran. The ugly panic attacks kept their distance for now, but Dean felt them circling, looking for an opening.
In time they came upon an apartment complex, a sprawling collection of three-level buildings with open breezeways and concrete stairs between them, surrounded by lawns gone shaggy and brown.
“Time to go apartment hunting,” Dean murmured, scratching at his beard and eyeing the closest building from a position across the street.
“Home, Daddy?”
“Soon, baby. Daddy is going to find us a new home.”
She gave him a kiss on his right ear. “I love you, Daddy. Is Mommy home?”
“Not yet, honey. We’ll see Mommy soon.” He reached back and stroked the side of her face. “We’re going to have to make some loud noises. Daddy might kick some doors, but don’t be scared.”
“You mad?” she asked.
“No, sweetie.”
“Not supposed to kick. It’s bad.”
“I’ll only do it a little. There might be Icky Men.”
“And bad boys,” she said, nodding seriously.
“Maybe. But we won’t be scared, right?”
She said she wouldn’t, and even giggled each time her daddy kicked open an apartment door. Dean moved through swiftly, clearing rooms with the MAC-10 extended at arm’s length. There were zombies in some of the apartments, and Dean shot them the moment they appeared.
Leah began giggling at that too, and that was both startling and unsettling for Dean. Part of him was relieved she saw it as a game, the part of him that needed her calm so he could search for the things they needed. The other part, the parent in him, felt a heaviness in his heart at the horrors to which the little girl was growing numb.
As he moved room to room he wondered if, instead of raiding, might they not set up here in a more permanent way? Something on the top floor with a good field of vision? Dean knew there was likely only drywall, insulation, and aluminum studs between the apartments. He could chop several escape routes or even break through walls to explore without having to go outside.
They were standing on a concrete landing outside a door with 3C attached to it in brass characters, when a voice spoke from the stairs to the landing below. “She’s beautiful.”
Dean pivoted and pointed the muzzle of the MAC-10 at the man’s face, index finger sinking pressure down onto the trigger. The man was in his early fifties, with lots of hair and sad blue eyes. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a soft blue work shirt, he carried a bulging canvas laundry bag. There was a hatchet in a sheath on his hip, and a professional-grade camera on a strap around his neck.
The man blinked. “Please don’t.”
Dean didn’t squeeze but didn’t move the machine pistol away.
“Don’t kill him,” a woman’s voice said softly to Dean’s left. He spun, pointing the weapon at a blond woman in her thirties, standing in the open doorway of apartment 3D.
“We live here,” said t
he man on the stairs. “Me and Shana.”
The woman nodded. “Please . . . come inside.”
Dean looked at them both, tracking the muzzle of the MAC-10 back and forth between them. A foul, black little voice inside him urged Dean to kill them both quickly and take their place and their supplies, to be ruthless in order to survive.
But the man who was a daddy to the wide-eyed, almost three-year-old watching it unfold could not do that. Dean lowered his weapon, and soon got to know Dylan Stern and Shana DiMarco.
• • •
I was backpacking when the plague hit,” Dylan explained, sitting on a small sofa across from Dean and Leah. Shana had already provided bottled water and conjured up a juice box for Leah. She also offered a box of diaper wipes so father and daughter could clean themselves.
Dean thanked her and kept the MAC-10 in his lap, muzzle angled in their direction, finger resting beside the trigger.
Dylan noticed but said nothing. “I lived in the hills as long as I could,” he said, “until I ran out of food. Then I had to come down.” He was a professional photographer, he explained, paying the bills with portraits and weddings and graduations, but his real love was photographing the outdoors.
The man looked at Leah, who was sipping happily at her juice, sitting close to her daddy with Wawas tucked under one arm. Dylan said, “On the stairs when I said she was beautiful, that probably sounded creepy. It just came out; I do a lot of kids’ portraits. I didn’t mean anything by it, so thank you for not killing me.” He gave a nervous, embarrassed laugh.
Shana sat beside him and put a paper plate of chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table, along with an open can of tuna and a fork. “She is beautiful,” the woman said, smiling at Leah. “We haven’t seen a little girl in a long time. Not one who wasn’t . . .”
Dylan put an arm around her.
After a few moments, Shana told Dean that she had been the manager of a wine shop here in Chico. When the city ordered all nonessential businesses closed, she had chosen to stay in her home instead of report to the refugee center out at the fairgrounds.
“It’s good you did,” said Dean. “It was overrun.”
Shana glanced at Dylan and put her head on his shoulder. “We thought something like that must have happened. It’s been so quiet for a long time, no loudspeakers or helicopters, nothing in the street but them.”
“We were both out wandering,” Dylan said. “The dead keep you moving. We ran into each other in this complex, looking for supplies like you were. We’ve been here for a month now.”
Dean let Leah have a cookie, and she gobbled down four before he had to ask Shana to take the plate away. Leah wasn’t happy about that, but then the woman returned with a faded Raggedy Ann doll.
“I found it in one of the closets,” she said. “It’s pretty beaten up.”
Leah squealed and reached with little grabbing hands, hugging the doll close. After some prodding by her father she said, “Thank you,” and knelt on the carpet, where Raggedy Ann was soon engaged in a conversation with a stuffed walrus.
Dylan smiled as he looked at the little girl. “They get used to situations. Thank God.”
“That’s what worries me,” said Dean, then looked back at his hosts. They seemed harmless enough. Was he prepared to trust them? “You had your camera with you,” Dean said. “What do you take pictures of these days?”
The older man smiled and offered the digital camera. “It still has juice. I have a solar charger, and it comes in handy when I’m out in the woods for a week at a time. I photograph the same thing I did before: nature. There’s lots of shots of Shana in there too, a few of the vacant city, but they’re terribly sad. I won’t photograph the dead,” he said, frowning. “That’s not nature. They’re abominations. I delete any picture they show up in, no matter how good I think it is.”
“You can stay,” Shana said, then glanced at Dylan, who nodded. “We’ll share what we have.”
“Why would you do that?” Dean asked.
Dylan’s sad eyes drooped just the slightest. “Because the world’s become ugly enough without us being ugly to each other.”
Dean told himself he didn’t dare trust them, couldn’t risk exposing Leah to strangers, but in the end he did.
By the end of October, Dylan and Shana were friends. Dean told them what he and Leah had gone through in Sacramento, and at the ranch. He told them about Angie. They said they were sure she was alive. Leah took to Shana, who, though she’d had no children of her own, seemed to happily assume the role of surrogate mother. Dean watched closely and was finally convinced that she was a genuine, caring person. He knew there probably weren’t too many of them left.
Dean eventually grew comfortable enough to leave Leah in their care so he could go on short scavenging and scouting missions without being weighed down by a toddler. It was from one of these missions that he returned freshly bitten.
FOURTEEN
January—East Chico
Dylan looked at Angie and shook his head. “He told us it was a dog bite, even showed us the wound. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I believed him.”
Silence filled the elementary school cafeteria. Without thinking, Skye reached out a hand to Carney, and he took it with a gentle squeeze.
Angie tried to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Dylan filled the gap. “We didn’t have any way to treat it, not really, only first aid. It got infected and Dean got feverish.”
Tears welled in Angie’s eyes, and she wiped at them angrily, determined to hear the rest, no matter how terrible.
“I never saw anyone turn,” Dylan said, “because I was in the woods for the worst of it. Shana had, though, and she said there was a fever before it happened. She was scared. I still believed it was a dog, but she wasn’t sure. We decided to go out to look for antibiotics.”
“Both of you?” Angie asked. “You left Leah with him after he’d been bitten?”
The photographer nodded. “Shana refused to be alone with him, just in case it hadn’t been a dog, but she didn’t want to go out by herself, either.” He sighed. “I offered to bring Leah with us, but Dean wouldn’t have it.”
Angie wanted to scream at him. How could he have left a little girl alone with someone who had been bitten? Her hands turned to fists to keep them from shaking. “What happened?”
“Shana and I started searching apartments on the other side of the complex, places we hadn’t been.” He gave her a sad smile. “She insisted we not go too far away from them.” Then he swallowed hard. “She was the one who found the antibiotics, a Z-pack in a nightstand drawer. There were still four tablets left in it, and she was so happy she was laughing.” He closed his eyes. “They got us in the breezeway outside the apartment, just came tumbling out through the door across the way. She never had a chance, and all I could do was run.”
Angie saw the words behind Dylan’s sad eyes, the ones he used on himself. Coward. Failure. Her fists relaxed, and she let out a long breath.
“There were a lot of them in the complex then,” Dylan said, “coming out of apartments and in from the parking lot. I don’t know, maybe we made too much noise, stirred them up.”
“What about Dean?” Skye prompted.
Dylan looked at the young woman in black. “I was hiding and running; I didn’t want to lead them back to our place. I spent the night in an apartment, and in the morning it looked clear enough to move.” His voice took on a bitter tone. “The dead weren’t gone, they just shifted over to the other side of the complex. Our side.”
The photographer looked back at Angie. “I got close enough to see that the dead were all over the place, and I could see them up there, walking in and out of our apartment. I locked it when we left, but they must have broken in.” He put his head down. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you see them?” Angie asked, her voice breaking. “Were they turned?”
Dylan was shaking his head. “I had to keep moving. I didn’t see them, but the
apartment door—”
“They might still be alive,” Angie interrupted, looking at Carney and Skye. Her friends nodded slowly.
“Not likely,” said Sorkin, “and that part about the dog was just a story. All the dogs are dead.”
“We’ve seen dogs,” Skye said.
Sorkin acted like he hadn’t heard her. “The dogs are dead and so’s your family. The faster you get used to it, the better off you’ll be, missy.”
Angie looked at the old man and bit her lip, turning away. Skye gave the old man a sharp prod with her rifle barrel, saying, “You’re an asshole.”
“They could be alive,” Angie said, looking at Carney. “They could have gotten out.”
Carney looked back with hard blue eyes. “And we won’t stop looking until we find them,” he said. Then he looked at the people who had taken shelter in the school. “So, your friend who was bitten. He went through the fever, right? How did that look compared to what Dean went through?” This he directed at the photographer.
Before he could answer, Hannah cut a hard look at the other two. “Abbie and Dylan tried to take care of him. He shouldn’t have been in here with us.”
“That’s right,” said Sorkin, “we should have shot him as soon as he got bit.”
Abbie pointed at the old man. “We can’t just shoot people. We can’t.”
Sorkin raised his voice. “You’re goddamned wrong about that, missy! He nearly killed us all when he turned.”
“But you took care of that, didn’t you?” Dylan said to Hannah.
“I had to,” she said, raising her own voice. “You weren’t going to do it. You wanted him in here.”
“It was the right thing to do,” said Abbie, starting to cry.
Standing across the room, James Garfield looked from one face to the other as his lower lip trembled. He hugged Drew more tightly. The child didn’t notice, only stared at a wall.
“He was bit,” Sorkin yelled. “He turned and she shot him, and I’d do it to any of you!”
Against his own practices, Carney’s attention was on the argument, and he didn’t see Garfield cradle his son’s head against his chest and hurry out of the room down the hallway to the kitchen. “Quiet down,” the former inmate told the room. His voice carried, and the arguing stopped. “All that’s over now,” he said, seeing their faces, a group divided. “This isn’t helping, and neither is all the noise.” He had their attention, and that was important. “We need to make a plan, figure out our next move.”
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 15