Read Omega Days (Book 3): Drifters for Free Online

sobbing like a child.
    He didn’t go into the stables anymore.
    Halsey shuffled into the main room of the cabin, wool socks whispering on the hardwood floor. He was tall and slender, with ropy, muscled arms, and his short hair was bristly, the color of iron. He switched on the generator, tucked into a separate locked shed against the outside of the cabin and wired into the house, then set a kettle on the hot plate. He sat at the kitchen table and picked up an Elmore Leonard novel, starting from the page he had folded at the corner, waiting for the whistle.
    The cabin was small, simple, and clean with a bedroom, a bathroom, an eat-in kitchen, and a tiny living room. There had been a flat-screen TV mounted over the fireplace, but Halsey had taken it down and left it out in the weather behind the stables. He had never watched it much anyway. In its place hung a large map of Butte County, covered in circles and notations from a red felt-tip pen. The cabin’s furniture was crafted from heavy wood, sturdy and comfortable, the décor a simple western theme. Like him, a simple, single man steadily moving out of his prime.
    When the coffee was ready he fried up a skillet of canned hash, longing as he often did for eggs and milk. He couldn’t keep the animals that supplied those things, however. Their presence attracted the dead.
    Halsey shaved and washed up with a rag and a basin of water, then dressed in jeans, boots, and a thermal shirt, pulling on a brown Carhartt jacket and an old John Deere cap. He went to the window beside the front door—all of them were covered in sturdy, barred wooden shutters—and slid open a peep slot like he was a doorman at a Prohibition speakeasy.
    A pair of DTs—Halsey’s shortening of
Dead Things
, since the word
zombie
just felt like kid’s stuff—was out there, a man shuffling past Halsey’s dusty Ford pickup, a woman in what had once been a suit but was now gray rags standing in place, swaying side to side and staring at the cabin. Halsey peered at her.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said. “You’ve come a long way, Dolores.”
    That was the problem with living in the sticks. You knew the folks you shot. Dolores was the branch manager at the bank Halsey had used up in Paradise, five or six miles from here. The gray-black skin of her bare feet was filthy and torn. In life she had been a pleasant sort. Halsey had liked her the way a man likes people he meets only once in a while, those who remember that other folks matter just as much as themselves.
    The ranch hand strapped on a tooled leather gun belt with .44 rounds pushed through the loops all the way around, a big Colt six-shooter hanging low on the right side, the walnut grips worn smooth and dark. He selected a .22 rifle from the rack beside the bedroom door and headed up a ladder made of wood that was newer than the rest of the cabin. Where the ladder met the roof, he unbolted a stout wooden hatch and kept climbing another eight feet before emerging on a covered platform with waist-high walls all around. It looked a bit like a park ranger’s tower, and rose above the cabin’s peak. From up here he could see all the way around his house, and out among the outbuildings; the stables, the smokehouse, the storage shed, and the garage. There was also a commanding view of the valley. Halsey had built the tower himself and knew it was solid.
    Misting rain was coming out of the gray January sky, and it couldn’t have been more than forty degrees. People forgot that parts of California could actually get cold, especially this close to the Sierra Nevada. In Halsey’s experience, most folks thought California was made up of Los Angeles and San Francisco, somehow squished together. He expected that was the way people thought about New York too, just one big city, an endless Times Square. Not that there were many people left to think about such things, he reasoned. He took a pair of binoculars from a hook and scanned the area, rotating in a slow