Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,84
doubt out there shuffling around with the rest of the freaks.
It was like finding buried pirate treasure. She took the silenced pistol, its holster and ammo. She took a professional-looking, double edged knife from where it was strapped to the side of one man’s calf, fastening it to her own. The shooter had been using an M4 as well, but his weapon had a silencer on the end, so she swapped it for her own assault rifle and took his bandolier of magazines.
Skye drained the Snapple and went upstairs to sleep.
The moon was still up when she opened her eyes some time later, at first unsure about what had awakened her. A sound. A breaking bottle? A cough? Something outside? She padded to the bedroom door, the pistol appearing in her hand without her consciously picking it up, and listened. It was still closed and locked, the house quiet on the other side. She went to her nest and picked up the M24, turning on the night scope and tracking across the two windows.
She saw him at once. Her eyes were drawn to the movement, even as stealthy as it was, the scope showing her a nocturnal world in bright shades of green. He was creeping, trying to be sneaky. Freaks didn’t do that. Hunched over and keeping to the shadows, the man moved slowly down the sidewalk across the street. He had bushy hair and a beard, wore a leather jacket and carried an axe in both hands. A woman’s head was tied to his belt by her long hair.
The man stared at Skye’s house as he moved, never taking his eyes off it.
Had he seen her shooting? Seen her come in here? Did he have friends?
Shink.
The M24’s silencer made a different sound than the M4. The man’s head vaporized above the chin. Skye slid the sniper rifle back into its case and gathered her gear, then slipped down the stairs and out the back door. Time to relocate.
TWENTY-THREE
Emeryville
Mexico wasn’t looking promising, at least not via an overland route. Things were worse than they had imagined, the dead more numerous the further south they traveled, thickening every day. The idea of traveling the length of California, straight into one of the most densely populated areas in the country, quickly became unrealistic.
And it wasn’t just the dead. The roads were steadily deteriorating, fields of abandoned cars and trucks slowing their progress and often forcing time-consuming detours. The heavy Bearcat wasn’t exactly economical with fuel, and they had been compelled to make frequent stops for gas. In many cases others had been there before them, the covers to the underground tanks left open and drained. The only advantage they had was that the Bearcat used diesel, and those tanks were mostly untouched.
An alternative was to head farther east and then turn to the back roads of California or even the deserts of Nevada. Traffic jams would be less common and easier to maneuver around, and the lower population would mean having to contend with fewer of the walking dead. But that solution simply created new problems, the first being availability of fuel. It wouldn’t do to get out into the desolation of Nevada high desert, coasting on fumes into the only gas station within a hundred miles, only to discover the underground tanks were empty or that the entire place had burned to the ground.
They had seen plenty of that already.
The second problem with this plan was even getting far enough east to reach that open country. The attempted exodus from the bay area in the opening days of the plague had effectively clogged not only the eastbound lanes, but the opposite side as well when desperate people discovered they could use both sides of the road to get out. The way heading into Oakland and ultimately San Francisco was only better by a little bit.
Carney sat on the hood of the Bearcat with a scoped M-14 over his knees, a durable rifle battle-tested in Vietnam and still preferred by prison guards and some special operations teams. He smoked a cigarette and watched TC play with a zombie.
They were in the empty parking lot of a Wal-Mart, and the younger man was dancing in a circle around the lurching corpse of a young woman in tight jeans and a belly shirt. She had long blonde hair, looked to be about twenty, and had probably been quite pretty. Before she was dead, of course.