Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,25

SUVs were moving at first, but they were quickly abandoned as streets and intersections clogged. Fires burned unchecked, entire buildings ablaze and putting off heat so intense it drove people away.

There were so many people, all of them running; groups and families, singles and pairs, headed in every direction and none appearing to have a sense of where they were going. He saw no checkpoints, no uniformed people with bullhorns directing people to safety, no organized evacuations. Car horns sounded, fires roared, glass broke as looters took advantage of the chaos. On a few relatively clear streets he saw cars tearing along recklessly, at high speed, scraping parked cars or plowing into others, slamming into hydrants which popped and erupted in great plumes. A big red Coke truck pushed unstopping through crowds of screaming refugees, its horn blaring as bodies disappeared under its front bumper. The driver wore a crazed grin and pounded the wheel as a Kenny Chesney tune bumped at max volume from the cab. There was gunfire and screaming. Lots of screaming.

And there were the dead. They seemed to be everywhere, monstrous corruptions of the human form relentlessly pursuing the living, which were often too slow, or panicked and allowed themselves to be cornered. They were pulled down, savaged and killed, and within minutes arose as freshly made ghouls. Their numbers multiplied with every passing hour.

Father Xavier went straight to St. Joseph’s, only blocks from the rectory, and found only the janitor, a man named Raul who spoke no English. Xavier’s Spanish was passable, but despite this the man couldn’t be made to understand what was going on. Or perhaps, the priest thought, it was simply too horrible to accept.

“Si, si,” the man repeated, nodding his head and smiling nervously. Xavier grew frustrated. Could Raul at least understand that there was a crisis, and he had to find safety? The janitor nodded faster and started backing away. Xavier took a deep breath and held up his palms. He hadn’t wanted to frighten the man. He had come here thinking the people of the parish might have been drawn to St. Joseph’s as a sanctuary, but that had not been the case.

Xavier’s parish – it wasn’t actually his parish, it was Monsignor Wellsley’s, Xavier was just a priest – sat in the middle of the Tenderloin, serving a San Francisco neighborhood not far from downtown, Union Square and the financial district. Despite its proximity to those upscale addresses, however, it might as well have been another planet. The Tenderloin was hell.

Over forty-four-thousand people lived in its one square mile, packed together in a soup of crime, drugs, homelessness, prostitution and heartbreaking poverty. It was a place of vermin infested hotels, liquor stores, thrift shops, pawn shops and XXX video stores. Vagrants (San Francisco held the title for having the most aggressive vagrants in the U.S.) slept lined up on sidewalks, huddled against buildings in nests of plastic bags, cardboard and piles of filthy clothes. A functioning shopping cart, the vagrant’s home on wheels, was prized above all else, and savagely defended against would-be cart-jackers. Xavier had once heard two women in designer coats and shoes, standing in line at a boutique coffee bar, talking about the city’s vagrant population. They speculated that they were worse than the New York homeless, because the weather here wasn’t as hard on them.

“At least the bums in New York have the decency to die off in the winter,” one said, and they both laughed.

It turned out that they died off in San Francisco in August, by the thousands. Now they roamed the streets as never before, giving a new definition to the word aggressive.

Xavier told the janitor to go with God and headed to the youth center next, moving cautiously along the streets. When he saw the dead he ducked out of sight to let them go by, and when he couldn’t do that, he sprinted past them. He didn’t try to join any of the running knots of people he encountered, and most veered away when they saw him, a muscled black man on his own with a frightening scar. He decided he was lucky no one had shot at him.

The kids at the youth center called him “Father X,” and liked the fact that he had grown up in the tough streets of Oakland, never losing touch with what that was like. They were drawn to his imposing size and fearsome appearance, paired with a gentle and understanding nature. He