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

The gunfire made Angie jerk away from Skye. “Don’t! He could be out there!” She grabbed Skye’s combat harness in one fist. “Did you kill him?” she demanded, her eyes darting and wild. “Dean could be out there! Did you and Carney kill him with the door guns?”
    Skye stepped back. “We only shot dead things, Angie.”
    The other woman held on to the harness, sobbing.
    “I’ll help you look for them,” Skye said, softly.
    The brown grass was pressed flat in every direction as Vladimir kept the Black Hawk’s blades turning, just in case they needed a quick exit, and Carney remained close on security while the two women walked together, examining bodies. Angie couldn’t look at what had become of her father, groaning and struggling up on his cross, and she wasn’t prepared to deal with him. Skye didn’t know what Angie’s husband looked like, so she stayed close to her friend. There wouldn’t be any trouble identifying a murdered little girl, however.
    Half an hour and a full circuit of the grounds revealed only dead drifters, most of them fresh kills from the door guns, and none of them Dean or Leah. There was also no sign of Angie’s mom, Lenore, even among the cinders and fallen timbers of the house. They looked inside the small, original fallout shelter her grandfather had built, which Lenore now used as a potato cellar, but it was empty of both the living and the dead. Then they approached the entrance to the main bunker.
    “Why is it open?” Angie moaned. “It should be sealed, they should be locked inside.”
    Skye didn’t have an answer, and she knew Angie hadn’t really been talking to her.
    The door yawned wide and debris was littered on the ground around it: some batteries, a can of string beans, a gray sweater, and a gas mask with a cracked eyepiece. The ground outside was pocked with craters, and there were at least a hundred shell casings, the empty brass of an assault rifle scattered across the torn earth. A set of narrow concrete steps descended like a throat into the darkness, and both women switched on flashlights. Angie went down first.
    Daddy is on a cross, he’s on a cross, they killed him and he’s on a cross.
Her boots scraped on the concrete steps.
He’s on a cross and he’s like them, like them, he’s dead, oh, God, my daddy is dead!
She felt like screaming.
    To say the bunker was made out of concrete was misleading. It was actually a series of eight-foot segments made from connected corrugated steel pipe, sealed in reinforced concrete and covered in earth, resting fifteen feet belowground. It was designed to be bomb resistant. The main entrance was the outer steel door, four inches thick, that was supposed to cover a long flight of steps leading to a second, inner door, this one as solid as a bank vault and ringed with a rubber gasket to make it gasproof when it was closed. The inner door, however, also stood open.
    The design was simple: a long central tube with a raised floor, two chambers opening off each of the left and right sides. There were dedicated areas for supply storage; a bunk room; the well pump and water storage; a generator and air-handling room; a chamber to handle waste, complete with sinks and showers; and the armory. The bunker had not burned, but it was immediately apparent that it had been completely looted. The flashlight beams threw a cold, blue-white light on the central chamber, revealing empty shelves and pallets where supplies had once been.
    Why are the doors open?
Angie screamed silently. They should have been sealed up tight in here. No one could have reached them.
    A scrabbling, chittering noise came from the well chamber, and the two women advanced, rifles ready as they peered inside with their lights. Some of the blue plastic barrels holding the water supply were still in here, and the motorized pump that serviced the well still looked intact. A dark shape moved low against the floor, peering out from behind the pump motor with yellow