Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters by John L. Campbell Page B

indoor pool. A baseball field sat behind the gym, and the entire grounds occupied nearly half a city block.
    Improvements had been made since the outbreak.
    Every house on the same block that was not part of Saint Miguel had been burned and bulldozed flat. The perimeter was now lined with steel shipping containers brought in from the rail yards and shoved in tight together to create a defensive wall. It had taken weeks, but there had been more than enough equipment in Chico’s rail and truck yards—forklifts and flatbeds—to accomplish the impressive task. Afterward, the trucks had been abandoned on side streets, and those not already run dry were siphoned for their last drops of fuel. The constant talk and worry over fuel use bored Little Emer, but in this case, he could proudly declare that it had been worth it. The wall kept out the dead.
    Wide openings had been left on each side at both Ninth and Tenth Avenues, then protected by gates made out of steel cut from other containers. Riflemen were positioned in the bell tower, and armed men and women patrolled the top of the container wall, picking off the dead that wandered up to thump against the steel.
    Then there were the dog runs. The warlord was especially proud of these, mostly because they had been his idea.
    At three of the four intersections around the fortress Emer Briggs called Rome, steel cables had been strung across the street. Drifters in collars clipped to the cables by chains formed curtains of the dead, able to shuffle back and forth along the length of steel without straying too far, the rasp of sliding metal clips and dragging feet joined together. Little Emer reasoned that anyone—any
living
person—who wanted to enter the intersection would be forced to face the dead. He hadn’t encountered any enemies or refugees at his walls, so he assumed it worked.
    The Harleys approached via the only road without a dog run, motoring up to a gate that rolled open to greet them and closed as soon as they were inside. Little Emer and his biker brothers drove through a parking lot and backed into a curb beside the church. At the far end of the lot, the M2 Bradley was backing into its own shelter, a high aluminum canopy intended to cover motor homes. A trio of men in Army uniforms emerged from the armored vehicle, threw a wave, and walked into the nearby school.
    No one else waved at the bikers, not the handful of people at the gate or on the wall, not the riflemen in the tower, and not the woman trundling a wheelbarrow of human waste from the church out toward the baseball diamond. They all made a point of finding somewhere else to look.
    Saint Miguel’s main chapel was warm as the men entered, a fire burning in a large, freestanding iron bowl in the center of the room, smoke climbing into the high, arching beams before drifting out a hole in the stained glass. The pews had been removed, making room for the pallets of goods and supplies lining the walls. A mannequin in a bridal gown stood near a pallet of canned goods, her face painted to look like an overdone prostitute. Muted light from the stained glass combined with the fire to cast deep shadows, and motorcycle boots echoed across the marble floor. Where the altar had been now rested a heavy Gothic chair of intricately carved dark wood, pilfered from the Regents Hall at the university. A pair of human skulls had been wired to the uprights at the top of the chair.
    Little Emer climbed three marble steps and dropped into his royal seat. The other bikers settled on the steps as Titan produced a six-pack of warm beer and Red Hen lit a pair of fat joints. Their weapons—a collection of assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns, handguns, and axes—littered the steps around them.
    They bullshitted about nothing in particular for almost half an hour before a pair of dirty men in need of shaves walked in, marching the captive from the post office between them. His hands were bound and the blood from his ears had dried.