Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,128
Mark Phillips soon rose to join them.
Jerry got the senior van loaded with as many people as it would hold, and then herded the rest to Maxie’s Cadillac. He let out a relieved breath when he found that the man kept his keys in the ignition.
Margaret faced Elson and Jerry. “They’re not going to go away, and they’re going to force their way in. We have to leave. We’re heading to the navy base, and we’ll hope that helicopter is still there.” She pointed to the men and the vehicles. “Elson you drive the van, Jerry take the Cadillac. The base is on the maps.”
As they moved, Margaret went to where Bud was slumped. His chest was rising and falling with irregular hitches, and his face was colorless. Too much blood covered the floor, and Margaret bit her lip, knowing there was nothing she could do. Bud seemed to know it as well.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, kneeling in front of him, tears filling her eyes.
“…yours…now…” He took a shallow breath and closed his eyes. “Do it.”
Margaret nodded, kissed the man on the cheek, and then stood and pressed the muzzle to his forehead. In the vehicles, the adults made the children look away. When it went off, the shotgun sounded like the world exploding.
Sobbing, Margaret went back into the firehouse and retrieved the walkie-talkie which would connect her with Angie. Before she climbed into the senior van, she opened both rear bay doors, and the two vehicles rolled out the back a moment later.
Angie reached for the radio on her hip as she ran for the doors, then remembered it was on the dashboard of the Excursion. Outside the siren was much louder, even though it was many blocks away. In normal times she probably wouldn’t have heard it at all over the street noise and the airport traffic flying overhead, but Alameda was quieter now. The world was quieter.
The dead were responding to the siren. They emerged from doorways, appeared at second and third floor windows. One even crawled out from under a fire truck, right where she had been standing a short while ago. It couldn’t have been there earlier, she thought. It would have tried to bite her ankle.
Angie raised the Galil and fired. A man in a sport coat went down. A woman in a meter maid’s uniform and another in a bathrobe collapsed with head shots. Turning left, she dropped a high school student, an elderly man, a fireman and the rotting corpse of a teenager limping towards her in a thigh-length cast covered in signatures and lipstick hearts. More appeared.
She trotted to the big SUV and tossed her rifle onto the passenger seat, climbing in and locking the driver’s door behind her. Bodies thumped against the vehicle as she fired up the engine and reached for the walkie-talkie.
“Bud, what’s happening?”
No reply.
“Bud, come in. Do you copy?”
The siren cut off abruptly, and at that moment she caught a horrible, sour stench coming from the back seat. She glanced at the rearview, already reaching for her shoulder holster, and saw a scarecrow seated behind her wearing a hooded sweatshirt. His eyes jittered, the pupils so big and black that they looked like twin bullet holes. The muzzle of a pistol pressed against her right temple, and her hand froze on the butt of her own automatic.
“Hello, beautiful,” Brother Peter said.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Mission Bay
It was only three blocks, but Father Xavier’s journey from the building where he left Alden to the waterfront was the longest and loneliest time of his life. He moved down the center of a street which was like a canyon, the high walls of condominiums rising on the left and right. Cars sat parked in silent rows along the curbs, many of their owners banging rhythmically at windows high above, dead and trapped within their homes.
A rat the size of a housecat strutted insolently across the street in front of him, its grey-black hair slicked flat by the rain. A solitary corpse, a woman in tight jeans and a torn blouse, one hand so chewed it looked as if she had stuck it in a lawnmower, hobbled after it, not seeing the man in the street. They quickly disappeared between a pair of buildings on the left.
The rain drummed on the hoods and roofs of cars, creating puddles on the asphalt and plastering the priest’s clothes against his chest. It was a cold rain.
I saved no one, Xavier thought. I protected no one.