Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) Read Online Free Page A

She stopped and leaped back as a campus police car roared across the lawn in front of her, spitting up grass, siren wailing. The squad slid to a stop, tires digging furrows in the turf, and a paunchy cop struggled out of the driver’s door, holding his pistol.
    “Help them!” Skye pointed to her mom and sister. The cop didn’t. He charged toward the entrance to Cunningham Hall, where dozens of students and parents were shoving and trampling one another, trying to get inside. Behind the mob, half a dozen wounded and bloody people were pulling down stragglers, biting and snarling.
    Skye ran around the back of the police car but then stumbled to a halt as she realized the people on top of her mother were
eating
her. A scream of her own rose in her throat. The rapid
POP-POP-POP
of the campus cop’s pistol got her moving again, and she grabbed Crystal by the arm.
    “Run!” Skye shrieked.
    Not waiting for a reply, she pulled at her sister and started running across the tree-covered lawn, away from their mother, away from where a cluster of snapping figures were pulling the campus cop to the ground as he wailed like a hurt child. It seemed everyone was running, and everyone was screaming.
    The ones who weren’t running were the worst, however. Slumping and stiff, flesh ripped and dangling, heads tilted and twisted, they moved steadily toward knots of cowering people, students trapped in doorways and parents cut off between parked cars. Skye heard pleading and attempts at reason from frightened voices around her, and she heard the terrible tearing of flesh, the thud of bodies hitting the ground.
    With Crystal’s arm clenched tightly in hand, Skye hauled her along, dodging piles of luggage and plastic totes, weaving around bodies with
things
crouched over them and pulling them apart. She batted aside the outstretched hands of a staggering man in a janitor’s uniform, pulled Crystal past a bloody parent who was savaging a teenage boy against a tree. The boy was screaming,
“No, Mom, no!”
She didn’t know where they were going, only that they had to keep moving.
    A loudspeaker was blaring something she couldn’t understand, and there were sirens off to the left. She took them between two buildings, finding another grassy area with another parking lot and more buildings beyond. Skye had visited the campus only once and didn’t know her way around. She turned them left toward the sirens. Screaming seemed to come from every direction, people running toward and away from them, sometimes into the arms and teeth of shuffling figures. Over in the parking lot she saw a woman with a shrieking toddler trapped between two cars as bloody figures closed on her and her child from both directions. Skye almost stopped, almost turned to help, but then glass exploded above on her left.
    She jerked her sister back just as a body slammed to the sidewalk in front of them with a crunch of bone. The body lifted its pulped face, one side of its head flattened, and hissed at them through broken teeth. It began crawling forward using its arms to pull its shattered lower half.
    Crystal screamed and Skye pulled them away, across the grass. Ahead, in a building across from them, a woman in a dark-blue-and-gold tracksuit was standing at an open doorway, looking left and right. She waved at the girls. “C’mon! Hurry! Hurry!”
    They did, and a moment later they were in some kind of ground-floor office. The woman pulled the door closed and locked it, staring out through its small window. The room had a couple of desks and a long table ringed with chairs, and the walls held dry-erase and bulletin boards. An open door led to a hallway.
    “Thanks,” Skye breathed, but the woman at the door ignored her, muttering to herself.
    Crystal started to cry, her whole body shaking. “Mommy.”
    Skye pulled her close and started to cry too, once more seeing her mother being devoured, her dad’s twitching leg, a dozen other horrors. They held each other,