“Our move,” said Sorkin, “was to hide in here nice and quiet, and it was working just fine until you people showed up.”
Carney gave him those hard blue eyes. “And now things have changed. There’s strength in numbers.” His time with Father Xavier and the others had taught him that lesson.
There was a thump behind them, and everyone turned toward the long row of windows. A pair of corpses had their faces pressed against the glass, and one of them slammed a fist into it hard enough to make it rattle in the frame. Both were moaning, and behind them, others of their kind were making their way across the grass, heading toward the window. The street beyond was filling with drifters.
“Not again,” Abbie sobbed.
“We need to—” Carney started, but at that moment a trio of galloping corpses burst into the room from the hallway Garfield had taken and slammed into Carney.
• • •
James Garfield ran across the parking lot at the back of the school. Behind him, the kitchen door swung slowly closed but didn’t latch. The man and his boy fled onto the soccer field, drawing the attention of a dozen drifters who immediately turned to follow.
At the school, a ghoul in paint-spattered jeans walked from behind a Dumpster, sniffed the air, and pulled open the back door. Before it could close behind him, two more drifters followed, and then a group of the dead moving through the parking lot headed in that direction.
Garfield held tight to his son as he ran across the brown grass, a low whine escaping his throat. Lurching, crooked figures angled in at him from the right and left, and when he risked a look back, he saw the crowd of dead people in pursuit.
“We’ll be okay, we’ll be okay,” he chanted, puffing hard, heading for the low fence at the back of the soccer field and the row of houses beyond. “We’ll be okay, we’ll be okay.”
Drew bounced in his arms, looking at the sky.
• • •
Skye yelled Carney’s name, and the big man twisted just as a drifter in paint-spattered jeans hit him, reaching and snapping. Carney raised his rifle like a bar and held the creature back for a second, but then the other two struck and they all went down in a pile, Carney on the bottom.
The sound of dragging feet and an echo of moans came from the hallway.
Skye fired three times, hitting two of Carney’s drifters in the head, then leaped to drag the bodies clear. Carney was barely holding the last creature’s jaws away from his face by forcing the rifle into the thing’s neck. Angie ran to the hallway entrance and began firing the Galil. There were screams and panicked cries in the cafeteria behind her.
“Get that,” Sorkin said to his daughter, pointing at an assault rifle on the floor where someone had dropped it. Hannah did, and in a moment the old man was once again armed. Sorkin glared at Abbie and Dylan. “Piss on you,” he spat before moving quickly through the cafeteria and down another hall, Hannah following without a look back.
“Lift its head!” Skye yelled, and Carney pushed as if he were doing a bench press in the San Quentin yard. The creature’s head came up with a growl, and Skye put a bullet in it, gore blowing out the other side. Carney hurled the corpse to the side and got to his feet.
“The door’s open,” Angie shouted between cracks of the Galil. “They’re pouring in!” She was dropping bodies in the hallway, but not enough. More were pressing forward. After several more rounds her trigger clicked and she shouted, “Changing mags,” and stepped back. Carney stepped in and fired, the M14 deafening.
Now the cafeteria’s windows were lined with the snarling dead, all of them slamming their fists. The glass began to fracture in a dozen places.
Angie was reloaded. “We can’t stay here,” she said, taking Carney’s place at the hallway so he could switch to a full magazine. The sound of falling glass came from the far end of the cafeteria, where a pair of corpses was climbing through a broken window.
“The roof,” said Skye.
“No,” Angie yelled, “we do not want to get trapped on a roof.”
“We’ll be able to check all sides,” Skye yelled back. “They can’t be everywhere. We’ll find a gap and get out. It’s a short drop.” The young woman pointed to Dylan and Abbie. “I found a roof hatch when I was up there. Do you know where the ladder is?”
Dylan shook his head, but Abbie nodded. “Sorkin made us go around and lock all the doors. I closed that one.”
“Is it padlocked?”
Abbie said, “No, it’s just closed with a latch. I didn’t have a padlock.” She looked at the rear of the cafeteria. The corpses were on their feet now, moving between the tables as others scrambled up and through the broken window. “But there’s one of those things on the roof,” she said, her voice shaking. “A janitor, I think.”
“Not anymore,” said Skye. “Show me the ladder. Angie, we’re moving!”
Abbie, the former Red Cross volunteer, started toward the hallway Sorkin and Hannah had taken, then froze when a pair of zombies snarled and headed in her direction, bumping against tables. Skye shouldered Abbie aside and shot both creatures. “Show me!” she demanded again.
Abbie got moving, Dylan taking her by the arm. Angie fired several more times, and then she and Carney followed. The little group moved down a short hall lined with cubbies and coat hooks, crayon pictures on construction paper rustling in their breeze as they hustled through. Abbie turned left at an intersection, passing closed classroom doors, and stopped at one marked STAFF ONLY. Sorkin and Hannah might have come this way, but there was no sign of them.
“The hatch is at the top of a metal ladder,” Abbie said, clinging to Dylan, “inside that room.”
Skye opened the door, ready to kill anything inside. It was empty except for janitorial supplies and a metal ladder bolted to one wall. Skye slung her rifle and climbed, unlatching the flat metal hatch and pushing it up on hydraulic arms, popping it open. The gray light of January and a drizzling rain came in as Skye scrambled out onto the roof, disappeared, and then returned to the opening.
“All clear. Everyone up, right now.”
Dylan spoke softly and urged Abbie up the ladder, climbing close behind her. Angie came next, and Carney closed the door to the janitor’s closet before following.
The roof was as Skye had left it, air-conditioning units and solar panels over wet gravel. She got her bearings, then led the group across the roof in a direction opposite the open rear door. Moans floated up from the school grounds, and they could see hundreds of the walking dead in the streets, shuffling in from intersections, hobbling across lawns.
“Hold them here,” Skye said, leaving Abbie and Dylan with her companions as she trotted away to scout the school’s perimeter. Almost at once, the picture looked grim. It seemed the dead were on all sides, spread out and scattered, but thickening into a dense crowd as they neared the walls of the school.
“Plan B,” she muttered, taking the Hydra radio from her belt and keying the mic. “Come to my position. We’re going to have to blast a hole.” Then she knelt, settled the rifle against her shoulder, and scanned for an area she deemed the least populated. She fired, and bodies jerked and fell. Ten rounds, twenty, thirty, then a magazine change. She continued firing, shapes falling as puffs of gray and pink filled Skye’s rifle optics, bodies spinning around or into each other, and in a smooth motion she was changing mags again, her mouth set in a grim line.
Die, she thought. Stay down.
A lane of sorts began to appear in the street, a long area that crossed from the school to the buildings on the other side, where only motionless bodies lay. The rest of the group appeared behind her, but Skye didn’t look back, her rifle barrel twitching like an automaton now, left, left, right, left again, spent brass flying from the ejection port, the muzzle speaking over and over with its muted PUFFT.
“How will we get down?” Abbie wanted to know.
“You’ll hang by your arms and drop,” said Carney. “You’ll be okay,” he added when he saw the doubtful look on
the woman’s face, not adding that they would be lucky not to break an ankle. Angie lined them up and explained how they would lower themselves from the roof and drop to the lawn below.
PUFFT, PUFFT. Two more bodies fell.
Across the street stood a low brick building that looked like a medical practice and a large Victorian home that had been converted to legal offices. Several cars sat in the small parking lot between the buildings, and an electrician’s van was parked lengthwise against the medical offices. A crowd of twenty or more drifters was surging out of the parking lot and into Skye’s freshly cleared lane. One by one they appeared in the M4’s optics; the weapon would kick, and a drifter would fall.
A woman in pajamas.
A teenager in cutoffs.
A man in a shirt and tie.
A girl in a bathing suit.
Ghastly faces appeared and disappeared, eyes glazed, flesh sagging or missing from rot or old bites, complexions of gray and green. And then the sight fell on a drifter with a bald head, bare-chested with taut skin defining every muscle, clearly dead from a savaged and open throat. It was impossible to identify its former race, because now it looked like nothing Skye had ever seen. Its skin was glossy, unnaturally smooth. Most startling of all was its dark, cherry-colored skin. It reminded Skye of something she had once seen online, the body of a person who had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. That person’s skin had been nearly this shade, although blotchy. This thing appeared unblemished.
It wasn’t following the other dead things, either, simply standing near the back of the electrician’s van with one hand resting on the metal side. The creature’s teeth were bared, and it stared directly up at Skye from across the street, then licked its lips with a coal-black tongue.
Her breath caught and she moved her eye from the sight for a second, blinking. She had never seen one of them do that before. Then she centered the sight’s luminescent green chevrons on the thing’s forehead, tensed her finger—
—and the creature stepped out of sight behind the van.
“Did you see that?” she shouted to the others.
Angie dropped to one knee beside her, rifle raised. “See what?”
Skye pointed. “There was a drifter out there, and it was looking at me. It moved behind that van just before I fired. Like it knew.”
Angie used her binoculars but saw nothing but the same type of drifters they had seen for months, moaning and walking stiffly to fill the lane Skye had cleared. “I don’t see it.”
“It’s behind that van. It’s red, smooth, and kind of shiny. It was looking at me and it moved out of the way. They don’t do that!” Skye made a growling sound and fired at the new drifters in her lane until her magazine was dry. The glossy red drifter did not reappear.
The dead frightened her, always had, though she had learned to control her fear. This new . . . creature . . . was even more terrifying. It was self-aware, that much was clear, and it could think. One of her literature teachers in high school had used a word once that resonated with her: hobgoblin. He said it was a creature that originated from Celtic mythology, but he told them the term had been used to describe other things as well. “Hobgoblin,” he had said, standing in front of the chalkboard, “something frightening, dangerous, and hard to get rid of.”
Hobgoblin, she thought. That’s what it was. And then another word occurred to her. Mutation.
“This might not work,” Angie said, watching as drifters immediately replaced those that fell. “It’s not much of an opening, and the activity is drawing in even more.”
But someone thought the gap was worth the risk. Below them, a fire exit banged open as Sorkin and Hannah bolted out of it. They ran across the lawn and into the street, into the lane choked with fallen bodies, Hannah in the lead. They dodged around reaching arms, the old man carrying the assault rifle and keeping up with the younger woman.
Hannah had almost made it all the way across when she cut too close to a reaching creature in khakis and a red shirt. It caught hold of her waistband, and though her forward movement jerked it off its feet, it also brought Hannah to the ground. Two more drifters galloped in as the first clawed a better hold on the struggling woman.
Hannah screamed. Sorkin ran past without stopping.
“Son of a bitch,” Skye hissed, putting her rifle sights on the old man’s back. But then she shifted right, trying to line up on the head of one of the thrashing figures atop Hannah. It was too late. Beside her, Angie saw Sorkin dodge more reaching arms and then run into the small parking lot and around the back of the electrician’s van.
There was a horrible scream, quickly cut short.
Below, Skye’s exit lane was full of the dead once more as drifters moved in to participate in the feeding frenzy where Hannah had gone down. Skye cursed and looked for another way out.
Then everything stopped.
Every thing stopped.
Every drifter in view came to a complete halt and slowly shuffled in place until they were all facing the same direction: southwest. Those feeding on Hannah climbed to their feet and did the same, and all the corpses tipped their heads back in the same instant. They were silent, standing motionless in the drizzling rain.
The survivors on the roof stared at one another with unspoken questions, but it was Angie, in a sharp voice, who said, “Don’t ask, just take advantage. Everyone off the roof.”
One by one they sat on the edge, turned, and hung from the lip, legs dangling before they dropped. Abbie made a small whimpering noise but did as she was told, and within a minute all five of them were on the ground without injury.
Skye took the lead again, and the others followed in a running line as they crossed the street, weapons raised, winding through the stationary dead. Nothing moved or reached, nothing moaned.
The young woman stayed well to the side as she took them past the electrician’s van, her M4 switched to full auto and ready to shred the glossy red drifter as soon as she saw it. The pavement, the rear doors of the van, and the medical office wall were covered in what looked like paint cans’ worth of red. Sorkin’s assault rifle lay in a pool of it, and what remained of the man was difficult to identify. He had been torn to pieces. Separated limbs rested yards away from the savaged torso, as if ripped off and thrown, and the head was missing.
Abbie screamed and pointed. At the rear entrance to the medical offices stood a row of white metal boxes for lab pickup and drop-off. Sorkin’s head sat upon one of them, eyes gouged out and mouth open in a frozen scream.
The head couldn’t have landed there, in an upright position, by chance. It had been intentionally placed.
Of the glossy red zombie there was no sign, but Skye came to a halt and sighted, turning in a slow circle. Angie gave her a hard bump. “We need to keep moving,” the woman said, taking the lead with her raised Galil. The others followed, but Skye stood there a moment longer, staring at the head as a shudder raced up her back.
When Sorkin’s lips peeled back from his teeth and his tongue began moving inside the decapitated head, Skye caught up to the others.
The earth began to tremble seconds later.
• • •
Across town from the elementary school, at an intersection outside Saint Miguel and its fortress walls of shipping containers, a line of drifters stood in the late-afternoon drizzle. Each was collared and leashed to a long cable spanning the street, a dog run for the dead. There were twenty-two corpses forming a gruesome curtain, but a twenty-third leash, at the end of the line opposite the church, led to a row of hedges and out of sight.
In the shadows behind the hedge, a drifter lay curled on the ground in a fetal position. In life the drifter had been Anne Marie O’Donnell, twenty-four, with long red hair and a fair, almost pale complexion. She had once been a parishioner of Saint Miguel, before she was bitten by her own mother in mid-August.
Nearly twenty-four hours ago, Anne O’Donnell’s tongue turned as black as soot, and she shuffled away from the others to crawl
behind this bush.
Now her skin was a glossy crimson that had pulled taut to accentuate bones and muscle. Her body shook as if having a seizure, and a low, wheezing croak issued from her throat. No one noticed her absence from the dog run, and no one discovered her quivering body behind the hedge. Anne O’Donnell’s corpse did not react to the tremor that shook Chico.
By nightfall, the body’s trembling slowed and then stopped. The corpse stood and stared in amazement at its hands for a moment, slowly flexing its fingers, head cocked. It scented the air and looked across at the lights of Saint Miguel, at the wall and the sentries. A hunger pulled at its insides, along with a curious but pleasant, violent urge. The creature let out a low moan that came out more like a growl.
The newly born creature reached up and unbuckled its collar, letting it fall, staring again at its hands before breathing in the night. There was another out there, another like itself. It eyed the sentries once more, wanting to destroy and feed upon them, but sensed danger. Instead it turned and ran into the night, as fast as any human.
FIFTEEN
January 12—East Chico
Russo and Lassiter sat in the cab of Lassiter’s new Ford F-250, watching the column roll by on Deer Creek Highway, making the turn south onto Forest. There were three pickups packed with armed people, led by a pair of bikers wearing their Skinners colors. At the tail end was the Bradley, the armored vehicle rumbling down the center of the road and Corrigan riding high in the open hatch, one hand resting on a mounted machine gun. The prey they were hunting would require the heavy firepower.
Scott Corrigan, an Army deserter with a nasty scar down the side of his face and cold eyes, glanced over at the two men in the truck with a look Russo thought said he would enjoy rolling over them with the tracks of his Bradley.
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 16