Leah’s spirits were good, though, and that was a blessing. She was learning to read, learning her numbers, and no longer seemed to miss television. Dean hadn’t realized how much she had watched until it was gone. They colored and played, keeping to a structured routine of sleep and meals. But she had grown quiet, and that troubled him. Despite the benefits of her usually being silent when he needed her to, it wasn’t natural for a three-year-old. How much had she been affected by all this? He couldn’t tell, but it was clear she was slowly going numb. She no longer awoke in the darkness with nightmares.
She had stopped asking about her mommy.
Dean tried to keep that piece of her alive, reassuring her that they would only be waiting awhile longer, that Mommy was on her way, but it was Dean who had to bring up the topic. Leah seemed engaged when they started talking about Angie, but she quickly drifted away from the subject. He couldn’t tell if that meant something, or if it was just an example of a three-year-old’s short attention span.
One day Leah came to him. “Is Mommy in heaven?” she asked.
“No, honey,” Dean said, putting her on his knee and brushing a strand of long blond hair behind her ear.
“Is Mommy an Icky Man?”
“No, honey, Mommy’s fine. She’s coming.” He wondered whom he was trying to convince. Leah looked at him with those blue eyes for a long moment, then just shook her head and hopped off his knee, walking back to her coloring.
I’m failing, Dean thought now, sitting in the living room with horizontal slats of light falling through the boards and curtains. My daughter is slipping away, and my wife is probably dead.
Dean pressed his face into a pillow so his sleeping child wouldn’t hear him cry.
• • •
Around the middle of December, Dean was outside filling water jugs from the barrel in the yard. He turned and there they were, standing in the driveway with surprised expressions on their faces, a woman in her thirties with piercings and a tattoo on her neck, and a young black man with a bald head. Both wore ski coats against the cold and were loaded down with backpacks and satchels. The woman carried an assault rifle; the man had an identical weapon slung over a shoulder and was holding a machete.
They stared at one another for a heartbeat, and then the woman turned and bolted.
These weren’t wandering survivors, Dean’s brain flashed. There was no question who they were scouting for. “No,” Dean breathed, pulling the Glock and firing. The bullet hit her between the shoulder blades and hurled her sliding to the driveway asphalt. The gunshot echoed and carried. The bald man dropped the machete and struggled to get the rifle off his shoulder, but Dean advanced, gripping the automatic in two hands and pointing it at the man’s face.
“Don’t,” Dean said softly.
The man froze.
Dean gestured at the rifle with his chin. “Shrug that off onto the ground.”
The man complied and raised his hands slowly. “We’re just looking for supplies, didn’t know you were here.” He glanced at the woman lying motionless a few yards away. “I won’t say anything, just let me go.”
Dean shot the man in the head.
He had barely hit the ground before Dean was dragging both bodies off the driveway and out of view from the street, pulling them into the yard. He imagined the echo of his second shot carrying for miles and quickly moved to the back corner of the store, peering around and down the driveway, waiting for more of them. When no companions came storming toward him, he stripped the bodies of their coats and clothing, of anything useful: packs and satchels of scavenged goods, ammunition and blades, a single walkie-talkie.
Stupid. Careless. I let them walk right up on me. Are they alone? They’re going to be missed.
Dean hustled the equipment and weapons into the house, dumping it all in the living room. He was turned toward the front door when Leah’s sleepy voice came from the bedroom they shared.
“Daddy? I have to go potty.”
The gunshots had woken her from her nap. “Okay, honey, you’re a big girl, go ahead.” Then he called, “Try to go back to sleep, okay?” He knew that was a waste of breath. She would not voluntarily return to her nap. Little feet thumped across the floor toward the potty seat he had set up in the bathroom. Dean poked his head in as Leah did her business. “Not sleepy,” the little girl said from the chair, rubbing her eyes with small fists.
“Okay, when you’re done, just play in our room.”
She gave a noncommittal shrug.
Dean returned to the front of the house and looked outside. No one else had come down the driveway, and the bodies were still—
One of them was missing.
“Shit,” he hissed, snatching up the newly acquired machete and rushing outside. He saw her at once. The woman with the neck tattoo and a fresh bullet wound in her back was standing with her arms limp at her sides, swaying slightly as she stared with glassy eyes. Upon seeing Dean she bared her teeth and galloped at him with reaching arms.
Dean ran at her and buried the machete in the top of her head, jerking it free as she crumpled. He cursed himself. Stupid! Sloppy! She could have turned when you were taking her gear, bitten you without warning.
Another check of the empty driveway and a quick examination of the looted store told him that perhaps they had been alone after all, but he knew he was right in thinking they would be missed, and he knew on whose behalf they were out scavenging. Dean recognized the bald black man as one of the people looting the Target, the raiders he had seen during his rooftop observation just before the dog bit him. The same killers who had slaughtered Lenore and Ed.
What would he do with the bodies? The fresh meat would draw the dead. If he dragged them out into the street, it would keep the dead out of his yard but would risk discovery by others in their group.
The front door creaked open. “Daddy, can I come outside?”
Dean hurried to the door, slipping in and moving his daughter back into the living room. “Not now, honey.”
She crossed her arms. “I never get to go outside.”
He tried to guide her back to the bedroom. “Daddy needs you to play with Wawas for a while.”
Leah didn’t allow herself to be moved. “Don’t wanna.”
Dean didn’t want to raise his voice. She was only being three and had no idea of the position her father had just put them in. He could hear the two pistol shots still in his head and closed his eyes, wishing there had been a faster, quieter way.
“Will you draw me a picture?” he asked.
“Don’t wanna color,” she said.
He took a deep breath. “How about if I color with you?”
She brightened. “Can we draw a horse?”
“I’ll try. I’m not too good at horses.”
“I’ll show you, Daddy.” She tugged at his pants leg.
Dean rubbed her back. “Will you take your crayons and paper into the bedroom? Daddy has to do something really quick, and then we’ll draw a horse.”
Leah looked at him, raising a suspicious eyebrow the same way her mother did when she thought she wasn’t getting the complete story. “Okay,” she said finally, collecting her crayons and running down the hall. Dean went back outside, convinced he would be walking into a pack of ghouls sniffing out the fresh meat. The yard was as he had left it.
Dean worked fast, stretching the two bodies out spread-eagle and then using the machete to turn them into more manageable pieces. It was brutal, bloody work, and he kept glancing at the front door of the house, expecting to see his daughter standing there with a horrified expression on her face as she saw what her daddy was doing. The door remained closed, however, and Dean gave thanks for small mercies.
Using a ladder from the garage, he moved the pieces up to the flat roof of the convenience store and scattered them across the tar surface, including the heads. Let the crows have them. There were still plenty of them left alive. Dean prayed he wouldn’t look out in a few hours to see the store surround
ed by the reaching dead, drawn by the scent.
Back in the house, he locked up and then went to the bathroom, using a liberal amount of their water and a dozen baby wipes to wash off the double murder. Not murder, he thought as he washed. In war it isn’t murder. When he was done, he colored with Leah as promised, all the while waiting for the PTSD to kick in. Other than the occasional hand tremble, however, it remained at bay.
Throughout the evening he made repeated checks through gaps in the board-covered windows, looking for the dead or for anyone come looking for their missing scavengers. There was only the raucous cry of crows, and he saw them winging in to land on the convenience store roof. When he began to worry that the crows themselves might attract attention, he told himself in his inner sergeant’s voice to cut the shit and trust in his plan, since things couldn’t be changed anyway.
Once Leah was down for the night, Dean sat in the living room and listened to the dead man’s walkie-talkie, the volume turned low. He heard some chatter and started taking notes. Saint Miguel was mentioned several times, and the context gave him a good idea that it might be the raiders’ base. He also learned that there were probably more of them than he had originally thought.
The two he had just killed weren’t missed until almost ten o’clock, when someone named Titan began calling for them. The woman was Kelly, the man Jared. Titan called them for only thirty minutes, his voice growing increasingly annoyed. After that, no one called for them at all.
Dean stayed up all night with one of the assault rifles across his knees and the radio on the table in front of him, wondering if and when anyone would come looking for the two dead people. He feared he had irrevocably compromised their little sanctuary.
No one came; the walking dead seemed unable to pick up the location of the dismembered meat on the rooftop and did not congregate outside. It wasn’t until morning that Dean was finally able to close his eyes.
• • •
Leah was sick. She didn’t want to sleep but didn’t want to play either. A fever had turned her round cheeks to cherry-colored circles, and her eyes were glassy. Dean got her to drink water as often as he could and kept a cool, damp washrag on her forehead, the fever drying it out quickly. She didn’t whine or complain, simply lay on the bed, lethargic. Wawas was tucked in beside her, but she showed little interest in her favorite stuffed animal.
According to the Omega watch on his wrist—an extravagant gift from Angie to celebrate their contract renewal for a second season—it was December 26. Leah’s inquiries about Santa and whether he could find her in this new place had stopped the day before Christmas when she began to act out of sorts. Instead of chattering, she sat quietly on the couch or lay on the floor beside her untouched crayons, staring at nothing. Her appetite had vanished as well.
Dean gave her baby aspirin, wishing for some Children’s Tylenol, and spent hours sitting with her head in his lap, stroking her hair. Sometimes she drifted off, and her daddy remained motionless so as not to disturb her.
She had been sick before, of course, but not like this, or so Dean remembered. Angie had usually been the one to keep Leah home from daycare when Dean was working. Still, he couldn’t remember a fever hanging on this long. In the old world, she would have already been seen by her pediatrician and, by now, most likely an emergency room. Now there was only Dean, and he cursed himself for not taking the time to learn more about childhood illnesses, for leaving it all to Angie. Google and WebMD were no longer options.
Rest and liquids, his mother had always said, but Dean couldn’t remember the old saying. Was he supposed to starve or feed a fever? His medical training had been focused on battlefield trauma.
As he sat in the living room of the small house, Leah was once more in his lap. She always wanted to cuddle more when she wasn’t feeling well. Dean’s hand slowly smoothed her long, damp hair.
“Daddy?” she said.
“Yes, sweetie. Are you thirsty?” He uncapped a bottle of water, but she pushed it away.
“Daddy, Santa has a deer.”
“That’s right, a reindeer.”
She was quiet for a while, then asked, “Did Santa come yet?”
Dean smiled. It was the first time she had mentioned the subject in days. “He sure did, and he brought you a present. Would you like to see it?”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. Dean soaked the washrag from the water bottle and folded it over her head, half expecting it to sizzle when it touched her skin. He glanced at the front door, where one of the assault rifles stood on its stock, leaning against the frame. He found he looked at the door often.
It was two weeks since their discovery by the scavengers. A few drifters did finally show up to paw at the walls of the convenience store but soon moved on. Even the crows no longer came and went. He imagined by now there wouldn’t be much left up there.
Once a day he switched on the walkie-talkie and listened for ten minutes, taking notes when he could, then switching it off to conserve the battery. Over the past two days the signal had seemed weaker, the voices harder to make out. Soon it would be as dead and silent as the city around them.
After that first day, however, no one mentioned the two missing people again. That told him something about the nature of the opposition. The raid on the ranch had given a clear demonstration about their regard for life, of course, but it was now obvious they cared little for their own as well. This was not only good news, but expected. Dean knew from his urban warfare training that outlaw bands tended to implode as they turned on one another. They were different from the insurgents he had fought, a people united by faith and culture, family and political ideology. The band in control of Chico was nothing like that; they were dangerous parasites feeding off a dead world and its survivors. Eventually they would begin to prey upon each other until they disappeared completely.
Dean didn’t think he had that sort of time, though.
Leah needed more care than Dean could provide alone. She needed safer shelter, a community, other children. He did not doubt that there were groups of decent people still out there, communities where people relied on and trusted one another, protected each other from the horrors of this frightening new world. Dean had the kind of combat and field skills that would be welcome in such a community, and he could trade those abilities in exchange for sanctuary for Leah and himself.
Angie wasn’t coming. He was beginning to accept it, forcing himself to believe it. The idea hurt, and it was difficult to even think the unspoken words, but how long could he continue to expose Leah to the dangers in Chico? Sooner or later they would be discovered, by chance or during a move to a new location once supplies ran out. This fearful Gypsy existence had to end.
Leah’s eyes remained closed as in a sleepy voice she said, “Daddy, the sun is made of fire.”
“Shh,” he crooned, still stroking her hair.
After a moment she whispered, “And the moon is made of light.”
Dean smiled and breathed deeply, resting his hand on her too-hot head. It all had to be about Leah now. His heart broke for his lost wife as he accepted what needed to be done, and he turned all his thoughts to his daughter in an attempt to push the grief away. They would be leaving, starting a new life together, and he would find them someplace truly safe.
His left hand trembled, the PTSD putting him on notice that the Fear Animal might very well decide not to cooperate.
• • •
Leah’s fever broke that evening and stayed away. By morning she was hungry and wanting to play a little, and Dean breathed a sigh of shaky relief. He asked her if she was feeling okay so many times that the little girl finally said, “Daddy, stop.”
By December 28 she was asking about Santa and expressed a joy unique to three-year-olds when Dean showed her the gift the jolly old elf had left for her, another small pony with hair she could comb.
“Santa loves me,” she said, marching her two ponies side by side across the living room carpet.
&n
bsp; “Yes, he does,” said Dean.
He began planning immediately, as he would take the time necessary to find a vehicle, outfit and stock it properly, and calculate a route and destination. He was thinking north, possibly Eureka. There was no way he would leave Leah home alone while he prepared, so he would have to risk bringing her along on his preparation missions, but not until she was a little stronger.
Dean gave himself a two-week window. After that, he and Leah would leave Chico forever.
TWENTY-FOUR
January 13—Halsey’s Place
Vladimir hit the ground beside the cabin and at once was surrounded by snarls and grabbing hands. He snapped on the flashlight and ran from Halsey’s tower, intent on retrieving his night-vision goggles, shadowy shapes lurching at him from the front and sides. A hand caught at the sleeve of his coat and he jerked away, running into a rotting woman who clawed at him, ragged fingernails tearing the nylon of his jacket. He shouldered her aside as more hands tore at his back, a middle-aged man galloping in from the right, a teenage boy with yellowing skin snapping and charging him from the front.
The pilot shrugged out of his coat, freeing himself from the creatures to his rear, dodged the teenager, and straight-armed the middle-aged man, knocking him down but nearly losing fingers to gnashing teeth. The dead wailed all around him.
The jittering flashlight lit the ground before him, lumpy turf coated in snow and marred by dragging footprints. His boots pounded the earth as he broke free from the knot of drifters gathering around the cabin, a chorus of hungry growls now to his left. A pass of the light in that direction revealed a line of corpses, four or five deep, marching toward him. His heart hammering, Vlad moved in the direction of the Black Hawk, out there somewhere in the darkness.
Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters Page 22