Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,70

shoulder slumped lower than the other, small sneakers scraping over the pavement in jerky steps.

Angie touched the trigger again.

And didn’t fire.

She gritted her teeth and shifted to a high school kid in a yellow Polo shirt, putting one through his eye.

There was a long scream from inside the store. Margaret and Mark the insurance guy froze, each holding a case of water. Angie swore again and dropped another corpse, then ran inside. Tanya was running out, a canvas messenger bag hung across her chest and sprayed red. She was crying and had a hand clamped to her other, bloody forearm.

“She bit me! She bit me!”

Angie grabbed her. “Where?”

Tanya shook her head, her breath going in and out much too fast. “Bit me, oh, God, she bit me!”

A moan came from the shadowy interior on the left, and Angie raised her rifle, advancing as the girl ran outside. She followed the blood on the floor, moving quickly but quietly in rubber soled boots, watching the flanks. There was a streak of fresh blood on the service desk counter where Tanya had climbed over, scattered packs of cigarettes on the floor beneath it. A dead girl in a brown smock with a name tag reading BILLY was on the other side, groaning and reaching across.

Angie shot her in the head and went back outside.

The lawyer’s shotgun fired, and the insurance adjustor slammed the back hatch of the Excursion. “We’re loaded.” Margaret was already in one of the rear seats with Tanya, trying to calm the screaming girl and stop the bleeding. Hundreds of the dead pressed in across the parking lot, the kindergartener near the front.

Angie looked at the little girl for a long moment. “Drive,” she ordered, and Mark went to the wheel. “Elson, we’re leaving.” The lawyer fired another shot, missing his target completely, and piled into the back. Angie rode shotgun.

In the third row seat, Tanya was sobbing and wailing, “She bit me!”

The rest of them rode in silence, as rain clouds rolled in from the bay.

Bud Franks was looking for Maxie. He didn’t need him for anything in particular, but he wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. Normally he would have gone straight to the roof, where the man would be stretched out in a lawn chair smoking like a fiend. He was the only one in their group with the habit, and had been politely but firmly told he could not smoke inside. He wouldn’t be up there now, though. Maxie had run out of cigarettes two days ago, and had been sullen and short-tempered ever since.

He wasn’t in the kitchen. The man refused to do much of anything around the firehouse, but he had appointed himself cook, and it turned out he had some skill in that area. Perhaps, Bud thought, that had been his trade before the plague, but after two weeks and even with direct questions, the man had revealed nothing about himself. Margaret and Denny weren’t of any help, either. They had been moving along a sidewalk together and nearly knocked the man down as he came out of a liquor store with his pistol in hand. Maxie had looked them over as if deciding whether to shoot them or ignore them, then sighed and gestured at his Cadillac parked at the curb. “Get on in,” he said. Tanya was already in the passenger seat. That was only fifteen minutes before they showed up at the firehouse. When asked about the older man, Tanya shrugged and said nothing. The total lack of information bothered the cop in Bud. And then there was Maxie’s refusal to do any work outside the kitchen. He wouldn’t even wash dishes or clean his own pots and utensils.

Tanya had taken to him, even though he appeared to be just shy of being old enough to be her grandfather. She cleaned up after him in the kitchen, did his laundry, even made his bed. The rest of their relationship was none of Bud’s business.

The one accommodation Maxie made outside of cooking was to stand watch, but only at night and only up on the roof where he could smoke. He didn’t ask for a rifle or shotgun, and for reasons the ex-deputy couldn’t explain that made him feel a little better. Bad enough the man carried that .32 revolver in his waistband every place he went. Maxie hadn’t said anything to indicate it, didn’t have the tats or the yard walk, but he felt