Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) Read online

  “Nobody writes an urban battle scene quite like [John L. Campbell] does. The pace of his storytelling will leave you breathless, and his characters are so real and so likeable you will jump up and cheer for them. Omega Days is, hands down, one of the shining stars of the zombie genre.”

  —Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of

  The Savage Dead and Dead City

  NOT A PRAYER’S CHANCE OF SURVIVAL

  A small, walled garden separated the rectory from Sisters of Mercy, the convent next door. Out on the grass, in front of a flower bed, a small, stooped woman in a pale-blue-and-white nun’s habit was standing wearing gardening gloves, facing away from them. On the grass nearby was a basket with rose shears sticking out of it. The nun’s arms hung limp at her sides, and she was swaying back and forth.

  Father Frye squinted. “I don’t know if she’s praying or just daydreaming, but she’s been that way for a while now. Lord, I hope it’s not a stroke.”

  Xavier looked at the old nun. She didn’t look natural. “Maybe—”

  The BOOM of an explosion rolled over the yard, and both men jumped as a cloud of black smoke rose from somewhere beyond the convent. Sister Emily’s head snapped up at the sound.

  They both started toward the kitchen door but stopped short when they saw the images on the silent TV screen. A shaking camera showed a San Francisco street filled with police cars and military vehicles stopped at odd angles while a trolley car burned in the background. A crowd of people was moving toward a small cluster of cops and National Guardsmen, who were firing into them. Only a few people fell to the gunfire before the crowd pressed forward. The cops and troops began backing up as they neared, and on the left side of the screen a single officer was suddenly jumped by people who bore him to the ground and began tearing at him with hands and teeth.

  Xavier stared at the images, disbelieving, and was slow to notice Father Frye going out the back door. “Sister Emily?” the man called. “Come inside, dear.”

  The younger priest tore his eyes from the screen and followed him out. Father Frye was walking across the grass toward the nun. Sister Emily turned at the sound of his voice, and Xavier saw at once that the front of her habit was soaked with blood, one of her cheeks torn nearly away and dangling by a flap of skin. “Dear God,” he whispered.

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2013, 2014 by John L. Campbell.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14633-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Campbell, John L. (Investigator)

  Omega days / John L. Campbell.

  pages cm. — (An Omega Days novel ; 1)

  ISBN 978-0-425-27263-3 (pbk.)

  1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Horror tales. 3. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A47727O64 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013046999

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley eBook edition / June 2013

  Berkley trade paperback edition / May 2014

  Cover images: Omega symbol © Morphart Creation / Shutterstock; Oakland Bay bridge © Sigurcamp/Shutterstock; Texture © Sanexi/Shutterstock; Zombie © TsuneoMP/Shutterstock.

  Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

  Title page art © iStockphoto.com/trigga.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_2

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  UNCLEAN THINGS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FREE FALL

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE DEVIL’S ASHES

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  This is for my boys:

  Harrison, Fletcher, and Daniel

  And for Linda, always

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the following: Charles Liebener, USN, for his inside views of a secret world; my editor, Amanda Ng, and the talented folks at Berkley, for being captured by San Francisco zombies and giving a newcomer a shot; and my agent, Jennifer DeChiara, who believes and who broke her arm at a red-carpet affair. And to all those relentless, ravenous, and wonderful readers who devour zombie fiction with an insatiable appetite, many thanks.

  UNCLEAN THINGS

  ONE

  San Francisco—The Tenderloin

  Xavier Church sat on a bowed, secondhand sofa while a window fan pulled evening air into the tiny living room. The apartment was small and furnished from thrift shops, but it was clean. Jesus stared down from every wall, featured in the Last Supper, his moment of crisis in the garden, and many other scenes. Crucifixes and ceramic Virgin Marys were everywhere.

  He sipped at a glass of lemonade, listening to Mrs. Robles puttering and stalling in the kitchen. Across from him an eighties-era television sat silently on a metal stand, reflecting his image in shadow tones. Staring back at him was a once-handsome black man in his middle forties with close-cut, graying hair, wearing the black suit and white collar of a priest. The collar seemed at odds with his boxer’s build and the cruel pink scar that split his dark brown face. It started above his left eyebrow, snaking down the side of his nose and across his cheek before hooking back in to end at his chin. Not handsome anymore. Not since he was seventeen, when LaRay Johns caught him outside an Oakland 7-Eleven.

  Mrs. Robles finally returned to the living room cradling something
wrapped in a dish towel in both hands and set it gently on the coffee table in front of the priest. Though only in her thirties, she looked twenty years older, worn down from a hard life here in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. She was still in her work clothes, a cleaning company uniform, one of her three jobs.

  “I find this in his room, Padre,” she said. She perched on the edge of a chair and clasped her hands tightly in her lap, watching him with eyes red from crying.

  Xavier lifted the edge of the towel, revealing a black, short-barreled revolver. “Did you ask him where he got it?”

  Mrs. Robles nodded. “But he no tell me. He curse at me, tell me to mind my business. But I know he get it from those boys.”

  The woman didn’t need to tell him who those boys were. It could only be 690K, the Latin gang that controlled this part of San Francisco. The 690 represented an address, supposedly where their founding member—a gangster now long dead himself—had made his first kill, an apartment building that his followers had turned into a shrine and where no one dared live. The K stood for killers. They were as ruthless as MS-13 and dreamed of one day rivaling the size and reach of that infamous gang. Recruiting young was their specialty, the random murder of an innocent their initiation. Xavier knew them well.

  “Has he been going to school?”

  She shook her head.

  Xavier let the dish towel fall back over the pistol. Years of running the parish youth center and providing counseling for inner-city families had taught him many things. One was that by the time a gun came into the house, it was usually too late. He hated the idea, hated the pessimism that had steadily crept into his life, tainting his views on everything and souring his belief in the goodness of people. He prayed for strength, but the thought that mankind as a whole was happy in its race toward damnation, content to abuse and destroy one another, had taken hold and grown in him. He hated his own weakness most of all, his inability to fight back against this cancerous attitude.

  He forced a smile at Mrs. Robles. “Let me talk to him.”

  She smiled back and came to him, taking his hands in hers and squeezing them, then left the room. Xavier saw the gratitude in her eyes, the belief that he would actually help her son, and he felt like a fraud. Voices in Spanish came from the other room, one soft and the other sharp, angry. Then a fourteen-year-old boy slouched into the room, head down with his hands in his pockets, being prodded along by his mother. He dropped into an armchair across from the priest, crossed his arms, and looked away. Mrs. Robles stood in the kitchen doorway, nervously smoothing her uniform apron.

  “Hey, Chico,” Xavier said, using the boy’s nickname. “I haven’t seen you around the center for a while. You don’t like boxing anymore?”

  A shrug.

  “You should come by Saturday night. The fight’s on pay-per-view, and we’re all going to order pizza and hang out.” No reply. “Your friends miss you.”

  “They’re not my friends,” Chico said. “Just a bunch of losers.”

  “You’ve got some new friends now, huh?”

  Chico crossed his arms tighter, still not looking at the priest.

  “Is that where this came from?” Xavier gestured at the lump under the dish towel. “Want to talk about it?”

  The boy glanced at the table. “Not really.”

  Xavier looked at the boy, a skinny adolescent in need of a haircut, trying desperately to grow a mustache. He wore baggy jeans and a long-sleeve, plaid flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and down to the wrists. Some styles never changed. The priest noticed that his left sleeve was dark and reddish just below the elbow. “What happened to your arm?”

  Another shrug.

  “Roll up your sleeve for me, Chico.”

  He hesitated, then unbuttoned the cuff and slid the flannel up past his elbow, wincing. A blood-soaked bandage was wrapped around his arm, and at the sight of it his mother gasped and crossed herself.

  “What happened?” asked Xavier.

  “I was coming home from school.” He looked at his mother and curled his lip. “I did go today, I wasn’t lying. I cut through an alley and got jumped by a homeless guy. Crazy fu . . . guy bit me.”

  Xavier saw that the boy was sweating. “Take a ride with me to the ER, Chico. We’ll get it looked at, just to be—”

  The apartment door crashed open, wood splinters flying, banging hard into the wall and smashing the glass frame of Jesus ministering to children. Two men rushed in, not much older than Chico. One was bigger, his head shaved bald, the other more stocky with slicked-back hair. Both had “690K” tattooed in small black characters at the corners of their left eyes, and both held black automatic pistols at arm’s length, turned sideways.

  Mrs. Robles screamed and moved toward her son, but the man with slicked-back hair pistol-whipped her across the face, sending her to the floor. Xavier started off the couch, but the gangbanger turned the automatic on him and shouted, “Sit the fuck down!”

  Chico Robles swore and charged them, but the bald one punched him hard in the side of the head, knocking him to his knees. He straddled the fallen boy from behind and took a fistful of his hair, jerking his head back. “So you a little bitch, huh?” he hissed.

  Chico cried out as the bald man twisted his hair.

  “You was supposed to meet Chato,” he said, jerking a chin at the man with the slicked-back hair. “Let him watch you do someone, show me you had balls. That was two days ago.”

  “I was gonna do it, I swear!” Chico cried.

  “Yeah, sure you was.” Another jerk of the hair, another cry. “You pussied out like a little bitch.”

  “Do him, Perro!” Chato yelled, keeping his pistol pointed at the priest.

  Perro shoved his gun against the back of Chico’s head. “Ain’t gonna be no bitches in my set.”

  Xavier held up his hands. “Wait. Take a second, Perro, think about it.”

  The gangbanger looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Bitch, no one gave you permission to use my name.”

  “Yeah,” said Chato, taking a step closer, prodding the air with his pistol.

  “He’s just a kid, man,” said Xavier, glancing at Chato’s gun. The opening of the barrel looked big enough for a train to come out of it. “You made your point; he’s not good enough for you. Why not split?”

  “Shut up, Padre,” snarled Perro. He gave Chico’s head a rough shake and leaned in close to the boy’s ear. “After you I’m gonna do the priest, and then your mama. Me and Chato both gonna fuck her first, though.”

  “Do him, Perro,” yelled Chato. “Do him!”

  Perro clicked back the hammer of the automatic. “Good night, bitch.”

  An all-too-familiar rage boiled inside the priest, and Xavier did nothing to hold it back. His hand shot out, snatching the revolver out of the dish towel. It came up quickly and he pulled the trigger twice, knocking Chato against the wall. Perro looked up in surprise and swung his automatic toward the priest, firing, as Xavier turned the revolver on him. The crash of Perro’s gun was deafening, the white of muzzle flash at close range blinding as something whispered past the priest’s ear. He pulled the trigger of the revolver, once, twice, three times, four, and clicking. Perro was still firing, and something hot kissed Xavier’s cheek. Then the bald gangbanger was falling backward, tipping over the TV and going down with it in an explosion of glass and plastic.

  Silence then, with only the thumping of his heart in his ears. Xavier was standing, didn’t remember getting to his feet, and his nose burned with the scent of cordite and the sharp tang of blood. He stood with his arm outstretched, blinking, the revolver hot in his right hand, suddenly heavy. He let it fall to the floor and stared at his hand, while something warm and wet ran down his cheek and neck.

  Chico cried and crawled to his mother, taking her in his arms and stroking her hair, yelling for her to wake up. The frightened faces of neighbors appeared in the hall beyond the open doorway, voices speaking urgently in Spanish as in the distance sirens beg
an to wail.

  Father Xavier Church felt his legs give out and he collapsed back onto the couch. He couldn’t stop staring at his hand.

  • • •

  Red and blue lights flashed in the street in front of the apartment building, squad cars and ambulances packed in tightly, uniformed officers warning away the curious. The ambulance carrying Mrs. Robles and her son, who refused to leave her side, had already left. Near the steps of the building, an old man with white hair and a Windbreaker zipped up to his priest’s collar stood with two inspectors, one a black sergeant and the other a Hispanic lieutenant, who had just finished telling him what had happened.

  The older man was Monsignor Wellsley, the senior clergyman in Xavier’s parish. He glanced over to where Xavier was sitting at the back of an ambulance, a medic applying a bandage to the side of his face where a bullet had carved a red furrow. “The men he shot?” he asked.

  The sergeant jerked a thumb at the apartment building. “Both dead,” he said. “He got one in the chest and the throat. The bigger one caught a single round in the forehead. The other shots went wild.”

  The lieutenant gave his sergeant a look. “Thanks for the graphics, Tommy. Father, they were both known gangbangers, and it looks like they came here to execute the boy. Your priest got them first.”

  The monsignor looked again at Father Church, who sat quietly, staring at nothing. “What happens now?”

  The inspectors looked at each other. “We’re in pretty strange territory here, Monsignor,” the lieutenant said. “It looks like a clear case of self-defense, or going to the defense of another. But a priest as the shooter is a new one for me.”

  “Is he going to be charged?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “I can’t say what the DA will do with this, Father, but I really don’t want to book him tonight. We’ve got the weirdest calls coming in, and we’re pretty busy. I’d just as soon release him to you, if that’s okay.”

  The sergeant nodded beside him.

  “I don’t see him making a run for it,” the lieutenant said. “If the church will take responsibility for him tonight, and make sure he comes in tomorrow morning to make a statement, I don’t see any reason why he can’t go with you.”