Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters

by John L. Campbell

  The Black Hawk dipped low and accelerated toward Chico.

  THIRTY

  January 13—Saint Miguel

  Skye lit the fuse, made sure the ropes were tight on the steering wheel, and dropped the transmission into drive. She ran across a yard and down a shadowy space between two houses, the fifty-caliber sniper rifle bouncing on her back.

  Lassiter’s jacked Ford F-250 rolled slowly toward one of the four intersections around Saint Miguel. In its bed, a tied-together line of rags soaked in gasoline led to a pair of open jerry cans lashed to the back of the cab and down into the truck’s open fuel tank. As the fire leaped along the length of rags, the truck’s grille closed on a line of decaying corpses leashed to a cable crossing the street.

  Just as the bumper connected with a slumping body and pulled it under the front end, the pickup exploded.

  • • •

  Standing in the commander’s hatch of the Bradley, Corrigan’s head snapped to the right at the sudden explosion. He saw a black mushroom of smoke rising above and beyond Saint Miguel, just as the radio on his hip burst to life with a cry of “We’re under attack!” A moment later, the rolling echo of a single heavy-caliber shot carried over the rooftops. Another voice on the radio shouted, “They’re shooting! Jesus Christ, it took his fucking head off!”

  Corrigan dropped into the Bradley and pulled the hatch closed above him. He wasn’t about to let his head be next.

  “Driver, take us to the next intersection and turn left. Gunner, stand by on the coaxial, and select HE for the main tube.”

  Low in the front left of the Bradley, Marx, the driver, gunned the diesel and moved swiftly to the intersection at the church’s northwest corner. He rotated the tracks left, advancing toward a point a block away where a pickup was engulfed in flames, leashed and burning corpses bumping against its sides. Through the armored glass viewports set into the frame of his hatch, so thick they were blue, Corrigan could see armed figures running along the shipping container walls. They were headed toward where the fire was burning.

  “Boss, we’ve only got a dozen HE left,” the gunner reported. “The rest is all armor-piercing.”

  A dozen rounds of high-explosive? Corrigan thought. The twenty-five-millimeter would burn through that in seconds. Still, the high-explosive incendiary would tear apart vehicles and ground troops alike. There was just no way to replace the shells, unless he found an armory that hadn’t been looted, and that was a fantasy.

  What made him more anxious than running out of shells for the main gun was the idea of running into another Bradley, rolling at the head of a regular Army column here to retake Chico and punish Corrigan for his treason. Or perhaps a recon element probing their defenses. Was that what the single gunshot had been? The opening act of a full military assault? Little Emer said no, there were only a few well-armed shooters out there, but that was small comfort for Corrigan. The biker didn’t know shit about war.

  “Driver, take us into that intersection,” Corrigan ordered. “Push that truck to the side.”

  Marx did as he was told, banging the sloped, armored face of the Bradley into the burning pickup and shoving it onto a lawn, where it flipped on its side, flaming tires belching black smoke. The armored vehicle drove over a trio of leashed corpses and broke the cable holding the others. The newly freed dead, most of them on fire, beat at the sides of the Bradley with their fists.

  “Where are you?” Corrigan murmured, watching out his viewports.

  • • •

  Skye sighted on a woman lying prone atop the container wall, an assault rifle thrust out before her as she looked around frantically for something to shoot. Skye eased the trigger back, and the fifty-caliber slug hit the target at almost the same moment the heavy crack sounded from the rifle.

  The bullet hit the woman under the armpit, as intended, nearly blowing her in half.

  Time to relocate. Skye swung the rifle across her back and jumped down from the roof of a motor home where she too had been lying prone, more than a block away from the church. The moment she hit the ground, the machete cleared its scabbard so she could deal with the drifters in the street. Skye kept the blade especially sharp, and the damage caused when a full swing connected with a rotten head was startling.

  She darted across the street and tucked in behind a Subaru wagon backed up close to a garage, laying the Barrett’s long barrel and bipod along the rear bumper and sighting through the narrow gap. From this angle she could no longer see the church or its wall, but the intersection with the burning truck was right there at the other end of the block, and the Bradley revealed itself in all its armored glory as it shoved the truck out of the way.

  “Let’s see what you’re made of,” whispered Skye. Dean West had explained its armor: where it was thickest (most places), thinnest (not many), and where it might be most vulnerable. Skye’s only job was to hit them and get the damned thing out of the area.

  She squeezed the trigger.

  She had been aiming for the barrel of the vehicle’s 7.62-millimeter coaxial machine gun, mounted alongside the much bigger main gun tube. A fifty-caliber bullet would take out the machine gun, pulling one of the Bradley’s teeth.

  She missed, and the round whined off the thick front-slope armor. It did nothing more than leave a bright aluminum scratch in the paint.

  Relocate! a voice screamed in her head, and she couldn’t tell if it was her own or Postman’s, maybe Taylor’s, the dead National Guardsmen who had saved her life in Berkeley. Skye ran left, around the corner of the house, gripping the Barrett in both hands. A second later a rattle of explosive shells disintegrated the Subaru and half the garage.

  Skye’s boots slid to a stop on the grass, and she darted back behind the shredded remains of the Subaru, hoisting the Barrett and firing from the shoulder without bracing against anything, the weight making the cords in her arms jump out. The shot wasn’t aimed beyond simply hitting the vehicle, which it did, glancing off turret armor.

  As soon as she fired, she hauled ass back behind the house and kept running.

  The Bradley’s auto-cannon, now firing only high-explosive incendiary, tore apart what remained of the garage.

  Skye bolted across the street to her left, hearing the big diesel thrum to life and send the Bradley up the block in pursuit. She bared her teeth savagely and ran for her next position.

  • • •

  Sergeant Scott Corrigan was not all he appeared to be, and nothing close to what he claimed. That he was Army and trained to command an M2 Bradley was accurate. That he was a murderous and hateful individual was also true, but it was here that fact and fiction parted.

  The horrific scar that split his face was not a combat wound obtained overseas as he boasted, but the result of an industrial accident at a sheet metal plant where he had worked one summer. A combination of drinking and moving machinery not only maimed him but cost him his job.

  Corrigan had never been active duty. He was a reservist; his unit was never deployed overseas and had in fact not been activated for anything serious until the outbreak of the Omega Virus. Before all this, Corrigan had never seen combat and thus lacked the experience earned by so many others who had faced clever, battle-hardened insurgents.

  Despite his training, he failed to recognize that he was being led away from Saint Miguel.

  This duel had now become a personal matter, and he kept up his pursuit, feeling invulnerable inside what was, for all practical purposes, a tank.

  • • •

  From her prone position behind a green curbside power company box, Skye watched the Bradley roar past the shattered garage and Subaru, stopping in the intersection. She put the Barrett’s sight on the broad, flat flank of the vehicle and fired.

  The round failed to penetrate.

  She stood up in full view then, waiting until the turret began to swing in her direction, then sprinted up a side street as automatic weapon fire tore apart the power box, part of a lawn, and the front half of the hou
se on the corner. Skye ducked into a backyard, then began vaulting fences, one after the other, just as she had done during her days in Oakland, but now without so much caution. If a drifter was waiting in the next yard, she wouldn’t know it until she was in its arms. The roar of the Bradley’s accelerating diesel floated over the rooftops.

  Skye went over another fence, where a dead housewife stood swaying on a patio, bumping against a glass slider door. The corpse had barely started to turn when the young woman was through the yard and over the next fence.

  She could have lost herself in the residential neighborhood, evaded the armored vehicle completely, but instead she measured her distance, wanting to only stay one block ahead. The Bradley had to stay in the game.

  • • •

  Driver, left turn,” Corrigan barked, straining to see through the thick observation blocks. He kept one hand on the commander’s joystick, ready to take control of the main gun away from Lenowski if he saw his target. The Bradley turned up the new avenue, its left track crushing the rear end of a parked car.

  “Boss,” Lenowski said below him, “we’re getting kind of far from the church.”

  “That’s a sniper out there with a heavy-caliber rifle,” Corrigan shot back. “We’re not leaving her alone so she can pick at us when she pleases.”

  The gunner did not respond, and pressed his face back against the rubber cowling of his optics.

  The Bradley prowled up the block and came to the point where the street met Chico’s Esplanade, two broad, one-way streets divided by green space and trees. Several drifters stalked toward the vehicle, drawn by the noise, but nothing else moved. There was a sudden bang from the driver’s compartment, followed by a man’s scream.

  “Marx, what happened?” Lenowski shouted.

  “Bitch nearly blew my head off!” the driver yelled. “Blew out my viewport. Shit, my face is bleeding!”

  “Where is she?” Corrigan demanded.

  “Hell if I know,” the driver shouted back, rising from his seat. “Fuck this, man.”

  “Sit back down,” Corrigan snarled. “You leave your position and I’ll take your head off. Now turn left.”

  “I can’t see. The viewport is fucked.”

  “Then pop your hatch so you can see,” Corrigan said.

  There was silence in the Bradley then, as everyone considered what poking your head out of your hatch in sniper country would mean. Then came the soft click of the hammer easing back on Corrigan’s .45. “Now,” he said softly.

  Marx popped his hatch a few inches, then pulled on his tanker’s helmet and stuck his head up and out just enough to see what was in front of the Bradley. A drifter turned toward the sound of the opening hatch, then moaned and tried to claw its way up the sloping front armor to reach this new meal.

  “Up yours,” Marx muttered, driving over the corpse as he executed a left turn.

  The deep crack of the Barrett arrived a quarter second after the bullet. Marx’s head disintegrated in a cloud of pink, red, and white, sheared off at the bridge of his nose.

  “Jesus Christ!” screamed the gunner.

  Corrigan didn’t make a sound and overrode the gunner’s control of the turret, depressing the fire button for the twenty-five-millimeter auto-cannon. He had seen what looked like a flash of light on a scope lens, and now he poured incendiary rounds on the target.

  • • •

  Skye moved. She had been standing beside the front steps of a large granite building with a columned entrance, and she ran in a crouch across a lawn just as the steps and pillars disintegrated in multiple explosions. The blasts knocked her to the ground, and she lost hold of the Barrett as granite and steel fragments whined overhead. A hot piece of metal or stone slashed a red groove into the back of her neck, and a swarm of fragments buried themselves in her pack and body armor.

  Alive. Move.

  She scrambled to her feet, snatching the fifty-caliber off the ground and sprinting across a lawn and sidewalk, passing another large stone building. The architecture looked somehow familiar, and in an instant she realized where she was: the north end of the university. Skye had seen Chico State on the map, knew its approximate area and thus her position.

  Machine gun fire tore up the turf at her heels and raked a stone wall ahead of her as she cut left, running as fast as she could between two buildings, looking for cover.

  Too close. Too close.

  The Bradley howled after her.

  • • •

  I see you, bitch!” Corrigan screamed. “Lenowski, take the driver’s position. I’ll handle the gun.”

  The gunner slipped out of his seat, moved forward, and dumped his headless friend to the side, then slid into the blood-slicked driver’s chair. In a moment the Bradley was surging forward up the street, aiming for a wide space between two stately-looking stone university buildings.

  Corrigan kept his face to his viewports, one hand flexing on the weapon control stick. “I see you,” he growled.

  • • •

  Leaping over a suitcase lying on the sidewalk, Skye ducked right around the corner of the building and nearly fell over a hot-pink steamer trunk. She saw plastic totes and duffels of clothes, laptop bags and mini fridges strewn across an expanse of lawn, and came to a stop.

  Chico State. It had happened on one of the moving-in days, just like at UC Berkeley. Her mouth opened silently and she stared as the memory flooded back, one of running, screaming people, sirens and gunshots, and her sister’s dead eyes. She barely noticed the many drifters that turned and began moving toward her as she stood frozen as images flashed through her mind.

  Something killing Dad in the parking lot.

  Mom being eaten.

  Crystal’s eyes opening to her new unlife.

  There was a snarl on her left and a thump as a drifter stumbled over the hot-pink trunk and fell. Another one lunged, the dried blood on its Wildcats T-shirt turned black, and it tripped over the first, banging its forehead against the trunk. They were everywhere, the walking dead in tattered clothing, flesh torn and pale, taking jerky steps and all staring at her with baleful eyes. A collective moan rose across the lawns as the creatures closed a circle about her.

  The rumble of the Bradley’s engine, the squeal of its tracks echoing off granite, snapped her back. It was following her between the buildings, cracking sidewalks and chewing up grass and corpses, preparing to chew her up as well. Skye ran, ripping her machete from its sheath and chopping down a dead man that came at her, burying it in the head of another and tugging the blade free, swinging again, making a hole she could dart through. She headed for the scant shelter of another stone-walled stairway, throwing the Barrett across a flat surface, raising the weapon on its tripod. The sound of the Bradley increasing speed roared off granite walls as Skye fed a fresh magazine into the sniper rifle.

  As soon as the armored vehicle cleared the corner of the building and was out on the lawn, Skye braced the stock against her shoulder and fired four quick rounds, trying to keep a tight grouping. Even over the bellowing of a military diesel, the Barrett’s reports echoed across the open, grassy space, bouncing off campus buildings where professors would never again speak.

  Four black holes appeared in a cluster, penetrating the Bradley’s side skin near the vehicle’s front. Twenty-seven tons of armor bucked to a halt. At once, Skye had the rifle strap across her chest and was running again, heading for the far corner of the building while the turret whined and rotated behind her. She turned right—

  —and a legless corpse rose up on its arms and hissed under her boots. Skye couldn’t get her feet up high enough in time, and the tip of her right boot caught on its rib cage. She went down hard, twisting an ankle, and in a second the corpse was on her, teeth snapping at her right calf.

  Skye screamed, rolling over and kicking it in the face. Its head rocked back, jaws working, cloudy eyes staring at her. Skye pulled her silenced pistol and shot it through one of those eyes, then scrambled to her feet and ran,
favoring her right ankle.

  • • •

  Lenowski, why did we stop?” Corrigan shouted from the turret. He had rotated the main gun to the right, but the sniper was no longer in view. More than a dozen corpses were moving between the far buildings, indicating the direction she had fled, and dozens more were headed toward the Bradley, a few already arrived and beating at the armor with their fists.

  The gunner-turned-driver did not respond.

  Corrigan realized that something was sparking and smoking below him. The sniper had succeeded in damaging something, but he couldn’t tell what. “Driver, right turn,” Corrigan commanded.

  The vehicle did not move.

  “Lenowski!” Corrigan dropped from his seat to the lower deck, ducking his head and moving forward. To his right, several circles of daylight poked through the side armor, and an electrical box hung open where a bullet had ripped into it, fused wires giving off a curling, acrid smoke.

  “Lenowski?” he repeated, grabbing the shoulder of the man in the driver’s seat. The body slumped left and the head fell over at a sickening angle. There was blood everywhere, and Corrigan could see that the sniper’s bullet had not only hit the man in the neck but severed his spine at the base of his skull. Lenowski’s eyes stared in a perpetual state of surprise.

  “Goddammit,” Corrigan muttered, just as a pair of pale hands hauled the driver’s hatch fully open, daylight spilling into the vehicle. A corpse began crawling down through the hole.

  Corrigan fumbled for his sidearm as he backed up, smacking his head on the edge of the gunner’s elevated seat. The creature scrambled over Lenowski and dropped onto the steel deck. Corrigan fired, missing, the bullet bouncing around the interior, making him cringe. A second, steadier shot from the .45 took off the top of the zombie’s head.

  Two more corpses fought to crawl down through the open hatch.

  Corrigan cursed again and climbed back up to the commander’s seat, looking through his viewports. He would have to abandon the Bradley and hunt the bitch down on foot. Fortunately, it looked like none of the dead had managed to climb as high as the turret. A short, cut-down assault rifle with a folding metal stock hung in clips beside the commander’s seat, and he slung it over his shoulder as he popped the hatch above him and stood, taking a quick look around the outside of the vehicle to find his best exit route.