Dead of Night

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Dez looked up from the arms chest and snarled at the sound of hands beating on the thin skin of her trailer. She hurried to the window, peered out, and looked right into the face of her landlord, Rempel. There were others out there, too. Half the goddamn residents of the trailer park were out there.

“You fuckers,” she said, but the bravado was thin and fragile, nailed to the walls of her heart by rusty pins. She tried not to think about what she was seeing in rational terms. None of them were friends, but she did not even want to see them as her neighbors. She could not afford to pay that kind of coin, not if she was going to get to the school … and right now everything was about the school.

If the school is even there.

A nasty inner voice whispered it to her every few minutes, but Dez could not afford to hear that, either.

She tore open a closet and pulled out a big gray canvas ski bag, threw it onto the floor, and began stuffing as many guns and boxes of ammunition as she thought she could carry. She strapped on an extra gun belt, crossing it with her regulation belt so that both draped across her hips like a gunslinger’s rig. Dez pulled on a nylon shoulder rig and snugged a Sig Sauer nine into that. Magazines were stuffed into every pocket. They were so heavy that she had to cinch her trousers belt tighter. The last thing she pulled on was a heavy leather biker jacket Billy Trout had given her for Christmas two years ago. She pinched the thick leather.

“Bite through this, motherfucker.”

As she slung the bag over her shoulder, Dez caught sight of herself in the floor-length mirror that hung from clips on the bedroom door. She looked like a character from a video game. One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hands during a cartwheel.

“You look fucking ridiculous,” she told herself.

Her reflection grinned back at her. Dez picked up a Daewoo USAS-12 automatic shotgun, slapped in a ten-round magazine, faced the door, and drew a deep breath.

“Yippie ki-yay and all that shit.”

She kicked open the door and jumped out into the rain.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Corporal Wyckoff let the Humvee roll to a stop just inside the big wrought iron gates of the Stebbins Little School.

“Holy God,” he said softly.

Beside him, Sergeant Polk stared openmouthed.

The entry road wound upward from the gate to the block school that sat like a medieval castle on a knoll surrounded by neat rows of ancient oaks. The school looked solid enough to withstand a mortar assault, but that wasn’t the problem.

The road leading to the school was choked with dozens of crashed and abandoned school buses. Hundreds of passenger cars were clustered around them. A few were burning, several were overturned. Even in the downpour, two of the trees were burning as well, the fire having spread from a wrecked yellow bus that still smoldered. And everywhere — everywhere — were the infected.

“Jesus Christ, Nick … there are hundreds of those things.”

“Thousands,” murmured Polk. “Oh man … we are so fucked.”

The dead surrounded the school like an invading army laying siege. Wyckoff and Polk heard a few pops of small-arms fire, but whoever was shooting was either in the crowd, in which case he was dead the second he ran out of bullets, or inside the school, and in that case he might as well be on the moon.

Wyckoff stabbed a finger at the scene. “We’re supposed to go in and secure that? Not a chance.”

“I know.”

“Why’d they send us down here?”

“’Cause no one knows what the hell’s going on, that’s why. They don’t know how bad this shit is. We got no air reconnaissance, Nick; we’re the first ones to put eyes on this.” Polk pulled his map out of its case and studied the position of the school, pointing out landmarks to Wyckoff. “Okay, here’s the school and here’s us. We have two squads, so we’re sure as shit not going in there. Beyond the school is some forestland, what looks like a stream that feeds into a series of ponds, part of a golf course, and then the Maryland state line. That stream is going to be a river right now, so that’s good news. No one’s crossing that, and sure as hell not those awkward sonsabitches. That leaves the western side. There’s a soccer field and a parking lot, and another fence. The east is a fence and then a couple of farms.” He chewed his lip. “We might be luckier than I thought.”

“How?”

“We have a combination of natural and man-made barriers that could contain the infected at least for now.”

“What if they come this way?” Wyckoff asked.

“We hold them.”

“With two squads?”

Polk didn’t answer. Instead he grabbed for the radio and called in a situation report to his commanding officer, Captain Rice. Each squad was composed of two four-man fire teams. That gave him sixteen men to hold a gate and the road. It was ugly math, but at least the infected seemed to be focused on the school. None of them had noticed the vehicles sitting at the base of the long entry road.

At least for now.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Dez landed too hard, the heavy bag driving her into the mud with so much force that her legs screamed in pain and buckled. She went down to her knees in the rain, but she kept the shotgun barrel out of the mud, and, as the first of the dead turned toward her, Dez fired.

There had to be forty of the monsters clustered around her trailer.

Dez fired and fired.

Each 12-gauge shell was packed with nine lead pellets. The blast caught a woman in a bathrobe full in the face and blew half her head away. The dead man behind her caught some of the pellets and one went down with a hole through his eye.

Dez forced herself to her feet and fired, turned and fired, spun and fired. Rainwater hissed on the barrel as it flared hotter with each blast.

The dead were so close to her that she barely had to aim and couldn’t miss. Not every shot was a kill, though. Her own awkward gait as she slogged through the mud and the twitchy shamble of the dead threw wild cards into the point of impact. She blew the left arm off of Donny Phelps and caught Lisa Davis on the shoulder. Seven of them went down before the magazine went dry. Dez kicked one of the dead in the thigh, knocking him back as she reached for a second mag and swapped it out. This was worse than her worst day on the Big Sand. This was a different kind of hell.

Rempel’s Tundra was parked thirty feet away, in the slip by the office, but there were so many of the infected, and more were coming from the other trailers, drawn by the blasts of the shotgun. She fired and fired, and the dead fell away, their faces splattered, their bodies pirouetting sloppily as they fell.

Tears ran down Dez’s cheeks but she didn’t know it. She tried not to name the dead as she killed them. She knew that to allow them to be her neighbors, to be the people she knew, was going to kill her. The process had already begun. So she opened her mouth and roared out an incoherent bellow of rage and grief and need and kept firing.

Then Rempel himself was there, and he was the last one between her and the Tundra. His Tundra. As Dez pulled the trigger to fire the last round in the second magazine, she remembered something from that morning. After the hot water had cut off in her shower Dez had thought that she could put a bullet into Rempel’s brainpan without a single flicker of regret.

The blast caught Rempel on the bridge of the nose and the top of his head leapt off with a geyser of blood and gray matter, and Rempel was falling.

“God!” Dez screamed as she leapt over him. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry … God I’m sorry!”

She reached the Tundra.

Which was locked.

Of course it was locked.

Dez dropped the heavy bag of weapons, whirled and charged back, swapping in the last magazine for the shotgun, firing at the McGill twins and old Mr. Peluzzi, destroying them, erasing their faces while burning their names into her mind.

She knelt by Rempel, trying not to look at his ruined head, and fished in his pockets as the dead drew closer and closer, their moans louder than the rain. The keys rattled in his left front pants pocket and Dez dug into it, scrabbling at them with one hand while pointing the shotgun at the approaching monsters with the other. Then she had then and was scrambling away. She put the leather key ring between her teeth and took the shotgun in both hands, firing as one of them reached over Rempel’s corpse to grab her. The blast caught Max Scheinhert in the throat, pitching his body backward but dropping his head right in the mud between Rempel’s outstretched legs.

Dez gagged as she got to her feet and fired again, walking backward, killing the ones closest to her, trying to buy a second’s room to breathe.

Then the gun was empty. Dez threw it in the face of the closest infected person, then she leapt for the door of the Tundra, jammed the key in the lock, opened it, threw the bag inside, and climbed in as cold fingers began clawing at her thighs. She kicked at them and jerked the door shut.

She put the key in the ignition and it roared to life without hesitation. Dez pawed tears from her eyes, put the truck in gear, turned the wheel, and smashed her way through a line of things that had been her neighbors.

“I’m sorry,” she said with each sickening impact. “I’m sorry…”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Billy Trout’s panic eased down one notch but not any further. His narrow escape from the National Guard had made him far more cautious, but it also filled him with equal parts rage and hopelessness.

They don’t even want to know if we’re infected.

It was a staggering idea but he knew that this was true. The Guard were not here on a rescue mission. It was a hard, ugly truth but it was irrefutable. If he had any doubts, then what he saw over the next few minutes clarified things for him.

As he turned onto Beaver he saw a silver Lexus askew in the middle of the road, both front doors open. Heather Faville, mayor of Stebbins, lay sprawled in the street a few feet from her husband, Tony. Neither of them bore the signs of infection: no bites, no black goo, nothing. However, they had been gunned down so comprehensively that the car and both bodies were ripped apart. Hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings covered the road. Trout stared. He knew the Favilles, liked them. He wondered if he would live long enough to grieve for them.

The scene was almost a duplicate of what had almost happened to him. The Favilles had seen the Guardsmen and had stopped, probably relieved. They’d gotten out of their car … and died in a hail of bullets.

This wasn’t an attempt to contain the infection … this was murder. The genocide of an entire town.

From then on, Trout went slower, checking each street to make sure there were no soldiers. White-faced things kept coming out of the rain and most of the time he managed to veer around them, but several times he saw them too late and the big SUV slammed into them. After the third impact he felt some eccentricities manifesting in the steering, and there was a disheartening knocking under the hood. However, the tires hadn’t blown and the motor still worked, so he kept going.

There were so many of them on the streets, though. Block after block he saw the infected staggering toward the sound of his engine. He did not see a single living person. Not one. That tore at his heart. This thing was spreading so fast. Even with the rain. It was far worse even than Volker had suggested, and he prayed that the National Guard barricades would hold. That thought felt weird in his head. On one hand he hated the soldiers for what they were doing, and on the other hand he was glad they were there.

He had his doubts, though, about whether the soldiers could adequately monitor and defend the perimeter of the entire town. After all, he had been able to sneak into Stebbins without detection. That thought conjured a flicker of horrific memory — Marcia sliding inch by inch beneath the Explorer’s wheels.

God.

He was almost to the center of town when he heard more gunfire. Trout slammed on the brakes and the SUV skidded forty feet into a sideways stop. He cranked down the window and stared at the scene unfolding before him in the big parking lot around Wolverton Hospital. A mass of about a hundred of the infected, most of them wearing lab coats, surgical scrubs, and pajamas, was lumbering its way toward a pair of National Guard Humvees. Soldiers stood atop each vehicle, alien in their white hazmat suits, and fired pedestal-mounted machine guns at the crowd. Trout didn’t know models or calibers of machine guns, but these brutes were tearing the front rank of the crowd to pieces. Literally to pieces. Arms and hands and heads flew into the rain and were sent flying by the gusting wind. The mass of the dead never paused though. Their bodies soaked up the bullets, and the ones that didn’t fall kept moving, kept reaching.

A figure came staggering out of a side street. He was heavily tattooed and dressed in the uniform of a corrections officer. Trout knew him. Michael McGrath, the sergeant in charge of the county lockup. McGrath staggered jerkily toward the soldiers, a pistol in one hand and the other raised. He called out to them in a voice that was completely human, and with horror Trout knew what was about to happen. He’d once done a story on this man. McGrath always walked like that. He had spastic cerebral palsy and yet was able to maintain his job as a tough corrections officer.

The soldiers did not know this. They turned and saw another shambling, twitching figure coming toward them. Trout tried to yell a warning, but his cry was drowned out by bursts of gunfire. McGrath’s body shuttered and danced as the bullets tore into him. His pistol felt from his hand and his face drained of expression. He took a single, final step, and then fell.

The wave of the infected pressed forward, and the soldiers abruptly yielded ground to them. Maybe they were low on ammunition, or maybe this kind of butchery was becoming intolerable for those poor young men in the hazmat suits, Trout didn’t know which; but the Humvees began rolling backward, and then in the parking lot of a Burger King they turned and raced off along a side road.

Heading where? Trout wondered, though he already knew.

There was only one thing down that road.

The school.

He cursed, threw the car into gear, spun the wheel, and headed down a small side street.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

As she drove, Dez listened for news on the walkie-talkie. None of it was good. Squads and platoons were encountering pockets of the dead, and several of the teams were overrun. Dez knew that each soldier who died would rise as one of the dead, adding to their numbers.

The chatter between NCOs and officers was increasingly hysterical. Some of the soldiers were refusing to gun down innocent civilians. These weren’t terrorists. They didn’t look different from the soldiers, which made it even harder. No difference in skin color, no difference in dress. No way to separate us from them, Dez knew. The soldiers were looking down the barrels of their guns and seeing men, women, and — worst of all — children. Pulling the trigger on them, whether or not they were infected, was simply not something every man could do.

The officers were alternating between trying to sound inspirational with a lot of “God and Country” stuff and using flat-out threats. Dez knew that it was all breaking down. The only chance to maintain control was to pull everyone back to the perimeter. The Q-zone. Pull back and wait for the rain to end so they could bring in helicopters. It was so much easier to kill from five hundred feet in the air. Hellfire missiles and Sidewinders didn’t have hearts that could break.

Dez was tempted to cut in and say something on the radio, to beg them to protect the school, but some of what she heard made her doubt that civilian protection was any part of the operational plan. She heard the phrase “contain and sterilize” several times, and that sent chills down her spine.

She busted through some backyard fencing and drove completely off the street grid, angling toward the school. Schoolhouse Lane was the only road that went to the school, but not the only way to get there. Dez broke through a white picket fence and was on the ninth hole of the Stebbins Country Club. The grass was still green despite the cold, but the Tundra’s wheels tore apart the perfectly maintained lawn. Fuck it. She agreed with Mark Twain that golf was a “good walk spoiled.”

Over the next rise she could see the upper floor of the school. There were columns of smoke rising to meet the black storm clouds, visible only by reflected firelight, but they were in front of the school, and as she bounced over the hill she saw trees, buses, and cars on fire. The school was untouched.

She rolled to a stop and considered what to do. Schoolhouse Lane and that part of the fence line was completely blocked by National Guard vehicles. It was hard to see through the rain to tell what they were doing, but it looked like they were erecting a sandbag barrier. Muzzle flashes were continual and in their glow she could see the thousands of dead in the school compound.

Dez’s heart sank. So many?

There were fewer than eight thousand people in the whole county, and it looked like at least half of them were down there. Then she realized that it wasn’t just the county folk, but kids from neighboring counties who were bussed in to attend the regional schools. And the families of those kids who’d come to the shelter to fetch their children. Lambs to a slaughter.

There was an army of the dead inside the gate, and an army of the living outside.

And her.

The only possible way in was to smash through the side gate.

The upside was that she’d get to the school and maybe help save whoever was still alive inside.

The downside was that she’d open a door for the dead to escape. Not that there weren’t plenty of the bastards out here, but …

Even while she was debating it, she began rolling down the hill toward the gate. At first she let the car coast, picking up speed through gravity, and as she did this she picked up the walkie-talkie and keyed the Send button. She’d listened long enough to pick up the key names.

“Break, break, break, this is Officer Desdemona Fox, Stebbins PD calling for Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich. I know you’re on the line, sir. Please verify that you can hear me, over.”

There was a confusion of voices and Dez repeated her call. And again. Finally Dietrich’s gruff voice responded.

“Who is this?”

“Already told you that, sir. Officer Fox, Stebbins, PD.”

“This is a military line and—”

“Excuse me, sir, but cut the shit. Far as I know I’m the last surviving police officer in Stebbins, and I am going to enter the Stebbins Little School to look for and protect survivors.”

“The hell you are, officer—”

“Pardon, sir, but the hell I’m not,” she barked. “There are a couple of hundred kids in there.”

“Everyone in that compound is compromised, Officer Fox. You need to report to a checkpoint and—”

“And get shot? No thanks, sir. Besides, I see muzzle flashes coming from the second floor of the school. Those dead sonsabitches can’t shoot a gun, so someone’s alive in there.”

“Officer Fox, I am ordering you to stand down.”

“Sir, I’m calling to inform you, not to ask permission. And to tell you to secure the hole in the west gate.”

“What hole?”

Dez answered with a rebel yell as she gunned the engine and sent the Tundra smashing through the wrought iron at seventy miles an hour. The windshield cracked, metal crumpled, and glass flew into the air and was whipped away by the wind. The engine coughed but did not die and Dez fed it gas all the way across the lawn and up the far hill.

There was a new crackle of gunfire and she looked in the rearview mirror to see a Humvee with a top-mounted.50 caliber come racing along the fence line. The gunner was firing in her direction, though the range was too great and more than half the bullets hit the fence.

Trying to get my attention, she thought. Okay, dickheads, you have it. Now let’s play.

She gunned the engine and raced across the parking lot, swerving only enough to avoid smashing into living dead who staggered toward the sound of her roaring engine. Dez recognized faces and could put names to a few of them.

Behind her, the army Humvee was inside the fence now and continuing to fire. Dez cut in and out between parked cars, letting them soak up the rounds from the heavy.50 caliber. A few of the dead went down, too, their bones shattered by the foot-pounds of impact as the bullets pounded them.

Dez circled the building to see what was what. She didn’t like what she saw. There were thousands of the living dead in the parking lot. Littered among them were at least fifty corpses who lay unmoving in the rain. Somebody knew how to kill these things. As she shot past the crowd of monsters, they surged after her, and that effectively blocked the pursuing Humvee. She could hear the constant machine-gun fire as she rounded the corner again.

The real problem, the thing that drove nails of ice into her flesh, was what she saw at the back of the school. There were far fewer dead back there — fifty or so — but the back door of the school was open.

As Dez watched, two zombies shuffled inside.

“You bastards!” she yelled and angled toward the door, then suddenly thought better of it and cut left in a tight circle, coming up behind a parked school bus and stopping. The engine idled roughly, the sound like the throaty growl of a wrestler waiting for the next round. She looked from the knot of dead milling near the back door to the corner of the building. “Come on, come on…”

The Humvee roared around the side of the school and then slowed as the driver tried to spot the Tundra. From where she sat, Dez was sure she could see them but they would have a hard time spotting her. The dead near the back of the building turned toward the Humvee, which was fifty yards closer to the building than Dez’s Tundra was, and they began moving toward the soldiers. A few moved at a loping run, the rest tottered on clumsy legs. The soldiers immediately began firing at the living dead.

“Perfect,” Dez said, grinning. She grabbed the stick shift, stepped on the gas, and shot out from behind the bus, driving at full speed in a straight line toward the Humvee. The driver and the gunners never saw her coming.

Dez gave the truck all the gas it could take and the huge pickup slammed into the Humvee with the force of a thunderbolt. With that much momentum and the rain-slick ground, the Humvee was slammed sideways. Dez kept her foot pressed to the floor, driving the other vehicle across thirty yards of asphalt. Then the Humvee’s far-side tires collapsed and it canted down to the blacktop. It slammed everything to a teeth-jarring halt, and the Tundra’s airbag deployed hard enough to punch Dez to the brink of unconsciousness.

But her mind was racing now, revving with fear and need. She struggled to remain conscious as she fished in her jacket pocket for a knife, flicked the blade open, stabbed the airbag, and slashed it down to ribbons. She kicked the door open and staggered out. The world took a few sickening sideways steps and she followed with it, then she grabbed the crumpled hood to steady herself. The closest dead were thirty yards away and closing.

The Tundra was a wreck, but she didn’t care. It was Rempel’s anyway. The Humvee was also a pile of junk. The driver was slumped over, dead or unconscious. Dez could not afford to pare off a slice of compassion. She knew they were following orders, but that cut no slack with her. The gunner had been flung out of the vehicle and was on the ground, groaning and clutching a broken arm. A third man, a rawboned guy wearing sergeant’s stripes stenciled on his hazmat suit, was struggling to get out of the Humvee through the shattered window. Dez ran around to his side, grabbed him by the neck, and hauled him out. He thumped down on the ground and looked up at her face from behind the plastic mask of the biohazard suit. He reached for his sidearm and Dez kicked it out of his hand as the weapon cleared the belt holster. Dez reached out and tore off his hood, mask and all, and screwed the barrel of her Sig Sauer in the man’s eye socket.

“Freeze, motherfucker,” she said.

“God! No, please … don’t!”

“What’s your name?”

“Polk. Teddy Polk. Sergeant, Pennsylvania Army National—”

“Skip that bullshit.” She pulled the pistol out of his eye and hit him on the top of the head with it. Not hard, but hard enough. Not a love tap. “Okay, Polk, why were you trying to shoot me?”

“We have to. You’re infected…”

“Do I fucking look infected?”

“How can I tell? It’s easy to hide a bite.”

“I wasn’t bitten.”

“We were told that some of them spit infectious materials and—”

Dez stiffened. The Russian woman had spat the black goo at her. So had Andy Diviny. Had she gotten any of it on her skin? She was almost certain she hadn’t.

Almost.

“I’m not infected,” she said again, her voice hard and cold. “Point is, you fuckers didn’t even bother to check.”

Polk’s eyes shifted away toward the approaching dead and came reluctantly back. “I … they said…”

“They said what?”

He flinched. “We were told that everyone in town was infected.”

“Christ. Well, news flash, Einstein, they’re wrong. Your commanding officers are lying to you. I’m not infected … The people in the school aren’t infected, the—”

“Were you in there?” he cut in.

“No, but—”

“Then you don’t know. Everyone outside is infected.”

“Someone inside is shooting. Have you seen any of them fire a gun?”

“Some of them drive cars and—”

She hit him again. Harder.

“Ow! Goddamn it…”

“You dumb shit. If they’re driving a car or shooting a gun — or speaking, for Christ’s sake — then they’re not infected. Are you asswipes just killing everyone in town?”

Polk did not answer.

The rain was thinning, the roar of the wind was less intense, and they could hear the moans of the approaching dead.

“Please,” he said desperately.

Dez felt her anger flare to the boiling point. “‘Please’? Seriously? How many of the infected said that to you? Please?”

She wanted to shoot this son of a bitch so bad it made her teeth hurt.

“We only know what we were told. What were we supposed to do?”

Dez said nothing. Polk was right and she was picking a fight with someone too many pay grades below policy level.

She backed away, keeping the gun on him.

“Listen to me, Polk,” she said sternly, “I’m going into the school. I know that there are people in there. Uninfected people. Kids. This is the shelter for the whole county. This is where people go because it’s supposed to be safe. You hear me?”

He nodded.

“You get back and tell your commanding officer that Officer Desdemona Fox, Stebbins PD, is in the school with the survivors. I’ll make sure everyone who isn’t infected is kept safe and in one place. I’ll get the uninfected to safety inside the school.”

“What if there are infected people in there?” he countered. “They said this thing spreads so fast that it can’t be contained. Once a person’s bitten or whatever, they’re done. It’s just a matter of time, and not much time, either.”

“The people in there are fighting back. They’re not sick.” She said it with venom, but in truth the gunfire from the upper window had stopped and she had no idea at all about what waited for her inside that old building.

Polk was staring at her, reading the doubt on her face. “They’re probably dead inside there…”

Dez raised her hand to backhand him across the face and he flinched, but she did not hit him. Instead she lowered her hand. “What did they tell you about this thing? How did it start? What is it?”

Polk rubbed his bruised head and looked past Dez.

She smiled without turning. “Yeah, I know, company’s coming.”

“We got to get out of here—”

“Talk to me, Polk, or I’ll kneecap you and leave you here for those dead fucks.”

He squirmed as if weighing his need to run against the chances she’d really gun him down. “They didn’t tell us much. Mostly about how to avoid the infection.”

“They must have told you something…”

“Terrorists,” said Polk. “They said that this was a terrorist bioweapon.” He licked his lips as he looked past her again. “Come on … please…”

Dez smiled. She could feel the ice in her own lips. “Yeah, Polk … the big bad monsters are coming to get you. Sucks, doesn’t it? Sucks to be afraid. Now — imagine how those kids in that school feel? They were counting on you. People believe in you guys. You’re the heroes, you come and save people.”

He said nothing.

“Except when you don’t,” she sneered.

There was a sound behind her. Dez turned in place and fired four shots. Double taps. One to the chest, one to the head. Twice. Two of the infected fell. The others were still far out of reach.

Dez turned back and pointed the gun at Polk. “You remember what I said. You tell them that people are alive in there.”

“It won’t matter what I say,” he said. “They won’t care.”

Dez stepped forward and touched the hot barrel to his upper lip. Polk hissed in pain.

“Make them care,” she said.

Polk stared up at her. His eyes were filled with doubt and fear and anger. But in the end he nodded.

Dez lowered the pistol and stepped aside. “Get your friends and get the fuck out of here. I’ll cover your ass.”

As he rose he continued to stare at her. “Why?”

“Because,” Dez said with a faint smile, “that’s what we’re supposed to do. Now go on. Git!”

Polk went past her, giving Dez a wide berth. He pulled the groggy machine gunner out of the crumpled turret. The man was badly banged up, but he was able to walk after a fashion. Together, he and Polk pulled the driver out of the wrecked Humvee. The man, a corporal, groaned but did not wake up. Polk and the gunner lifted him and they hobbled off at a limping pace. Dez watched them go and then turned to the wall of living dead that was coming toward her.

When the three soldiers were at the fence, Polk paused and looked back at Dez for several seconds. She was tempted to shoot him the finger, but she didn’t; and before he turned way Polk gave her a single, short nod.

Dez frowned, trying to ascribe meaning to it.

A moan drew her attention and as she turned, her bravado melted away like fog on a hot morning. There were dozens of the things. Mangled faces torn to raw meat, eyes missing, legs twisted … and with all that they kept coming. Dead things pretending to be alive, their mouths working with hunger.

The open door of the school was on the other side of them. Seventy yards. Might as well be on the moon.

“Shit.”

Dez holstered her pistol and quickly searched through the wrecked Humvee and found two M4s. She did not have time to look for extra magazines. They had to do the job or the job wasn’t getting done.

She pulled the bag of weapons out of the Tundra, slung it over her shoulder, groaning a little at its ponderous weight. She slung one of the M4s on the opposite shoulder, worked the bolt on the other, and stepped out from behind the wreck of the two trucks. Dez took a breath, set her jaw, then set the selector switch on the M4 to semiauto and started running, cutting to the left of the leading edge.

The dead turned to follow her, but she didn’t fire. Not yet.

She moved in a wide arc, hoping to draw more of them away from the entrance so she could make a run at the doorway. They came for her, hungrier for her flesh than they were for whatever waited inside the building.

Finally, she had no choice, and she fired a burst at the closest infected. The unfamiliar weight of her burden threw off her aim and the bullets stitched holes in the chests of the dead closest to her. She corrected, steadying the gun, and fired again. One of the monsters staggered back with two new black holes above its empty eyes. As it fell, Dez fired again and again. Some of them went down, but by the time she’d burned through the magazine, only five of them were down. With the gun bag on her shoulder she had no aim at all. Without stopping, she dropped the first M4 and unslung the other, tried to aim better, fired, fired, fired. And it clicked empty.

“Shit!”

She dropped the second rifle and pulled her Glock. The rear security door of the school was closer now and she could see a couple of the creatures standing just inside. She fired at them, dropping one but wasting three rounds on the brick doorframe trying to hit the other. The angle was all wrong.

She ran into the rain, toward the school, sloshing through the muddy grass, firing at everything that moved. She was only halfway there when her foot came down on a Frisbee lying in a puddle and she was sent sprawling onto the grass. The big bag of guns came off and went sliding away into the darkness. She kept her grip on the Sig, but the barrel punched three inches into the mud, totally clogging it.

Something moaned and she rolled onto her back as Harvey Pegg, the school’s gym teacher, lunged at her. His hands closed around the open V of her jacket and his head ducked down to bite her arm with terrible force. Dez screamed and brought her knee up into Pegg’s crotch, knocking him forward and over her. As he tumbled over, she tore her arm out of his mouth and gave it a quick, desperate look. Pegg’s teeth had scored the leather but hadn’t bitten through.

“Thank you, Billy Trout,” she said between gritted teeth.

Dez started to get to her feet even as Pegg got to his. He was a second sooner and began to rush at her, and there were three other dead behind him. Dez fired two shots and then the slide locked back.

Shit.

There was nowhere to run and no time to grab another weapon. She was done and she knew it.

Then suddenly the world was filled with bright light and noise. There was a huge crunch! as a black SUV slammed into the infected, splattering them and flinging their bodies away like rag dolls. The car slid three-quarters of the way around and its engine died with a broken rattle.

Dez stared up in total shock as the driver jumped out.

Voiceless with the impossibility of this, she mouthed his name.

“Billy?”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Goat trudged through ankle-deep mud for miles. He was not built for this kind of physical activity, and by the time he was halfway to the highway his muscles were screaming at him. He tried to buck himself up with images conjured from a thousand news stories he’d watched. Soldiers humping fifty pounds of gear through twenty-five miles of desert under relentless Arabian suns. Medical teams for Doctors Without Borders walking for days through malaria-filled jungles in order to bring medical supplies to remote villages. Stuff like that. It helped, but not much.

What really kept him going was Dr. Volker’s voice. He had his earplugs in and as he walked he listened to the recording Billy Trout had made at the doctor’s house. It had scared him then and it scared him worse now.

When he finally reached the highway he thumbed a ride with a guy driving a semi from Akron to Baltimore. Goat spun a story about his car breaking down. The driver didn’t care and seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t have company for longer than the five miles it took to get to Bordentown. The trucker had the radio tuned to Magic Marti, who said that the storm showed signs of weakening. From where Goat sat it was hard to tell. Well … maybe the rain was a shade less intense.

The trucker dropped Goat at the Starbucks, accepted a coffee for the road, and left.

Goat brought his coffee with him as he searched out the most isolated corner of the coffeehouse. He opened his laptop and went to work.

The first thing he did was to download the files from Volker’s flash drives and e-mail them to himself at several accounts. He copied the e-mail to Trout and their editor, Murray Klein. Then he updated his Twitter account with a “Breaking News Coming Soon” post. With that done, he downloaded the interview as MP3 files.

Then he waited for Trout to call.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

Billy Trout had rehearsed this moment fifty times since bypassing the National Guard out on the highway and sneaking back into town. Not this exact moment — in none of his fantasies did he imagine that he’d swoop in and rescue Dez Fox — but the moment where they’d meet again. In most of his scenarios, Dez’s mouth would soften from the angry stiffness it wore since the last time they’d broken up; her eyes would glisten with unshed tears, and the two of them would fly into each other’s arms, realizing the rightness of them here at their darkest hour. He knew it was a chick flick ending, but he secretly believed that such tender moments could happen. In each scenario they would kiss. The kind of kiss Bruce Springsteen could get a number one record out of.

So he was already smiling and reaching for her when Dez stared up as he looped the equipment bag over his shoulder and got out of the Explorer.

“Billy—”

“Hey, Dez,” he said warmly. “I knew you’d be here … I knew you’d still be alive.”

She said, “What in the deep blue fuck are you doing here, you asshole?”

Trout’s smile faltered. “What? Um … I’m … rescuing you?”

“Oh, great. So what am I supposed to do now? Swoon into the arms of the big, strong ‘Fishing for News with Billy Superman Trout’ hero of the day? Give me a fucking break.” She dropped-out the empty magazine and slapped a new one angrily into place.

“Huh? No, Dez, I—”

“You should have gotten your ass out of town, Billy.”

“I was out of town,” he snapped, his own anger flaring, “but I came back for you.”

“Oh, please. With all this going on? You expect me to buy that shit? You came back for a Pulitzer and a ticket out of this shithole. The only thing you care about is your next byline.”

“You know that’s not true, Dez.” He shook his head in disgust. “Where’s JT?”

“He left me. Just like the others.”

“Left you? You mean he was infected?”

Her eyes shifted away from his. “I don’t know what happened to him. He just left.”

“Just like that? No mitigating circumstances?”

“No, not just like that, okay? They arrested us and put us in separate cruisers. His crashed. My driver got attacked. JT never came back to look for me.”

“Did you look for him?”

“I tried.”

“You try his house?”

“No … there wasn’t time.”

Trout took a step toward her. “Dez … JT didn’t abandon you. You do know that, right?”

“He left me alone. It always happens. The trooper, too…”

Trout came closer still. There was a strange light in Dez’s eyes that he’d caught glimpses of before. Now it burned like a torch. “The trooper didn’t leave you. He died. He was taken. It was something that was part of his life drama, and its effect on you, scary as it must have been, was a side effect. It had nothing really to do with you. Same goes for JT. You said his car crashed. Either he escaped from the backseat, injuring himself in the process, or he was taken. I don’t think that in either case he was thinking, ‘Yeah, this will really fuck over Dez. This will show her.’”

“Show me what?”

“That you should be abandoned. That it’s what people do to you.”

“That’s bullshit. I’m not making this shit up. I mean … you left me.”

“Really? This is the conversation you want to have right now? Fine, ’cause God knows we have nothing else pressing. So, here’s the truth, Dez: you left me the first four times, and the only reason I bailed that last time was because you were screwing that biker. Maybe I read that wrong, but it seemed to have ‘fuck off’ written pretty clearly on it.”

She said nothing.

“God knows this isn’t the time for you to try and catch up on fifteen years of very heavily needed therapy, Dez, but you have some serious issues. You always think people are abandoning you. Your mother did it…”

“She had cancer…”

“And your father did it.”

“He was killed in the war.”

“I know, Dez. I’m the guy who does know this stuff. Maybe you told JT, too, but I doubt there’s anyone else you opened up to about it.”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“Of course you are. You’re crazier than a barn owl on meth, and you damn well know it. Look at your lifestyle. There’s nothing about your daily habits that doesn’t speak of self-loathing. You drink too much. You’ll screw anything with even a high school level pickup line and a tight ass. You’re a bitch of legendary proportions. And you’ve done just about everything you can — which is saying a lot — to make sure that nobody likes you. And definitely that nobody loves you. What makes it all so cheap and dime-store is that it’s pretty much textbook stuff. Child abandonment issues played out with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll here in backwoods Stebbins County. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

Dez did not tell him he was wrong. She glared at him for a two count, and then she drew her Glock and pointed it at his face.

“You better run, Billy.”

“Jesus Christ, Dez … let’s not go totally over the edge here…”

“Run!” she screamed, and fired. The bullet burned through the air an inch from his ear. Trout heard a wet thwack behind him and turned to see a zombie pitch backward with a neat black hole in the center of its pale face. Behind it were a dozen more, and at least a hundred of the things were coming around the sides of the building.

“Oh … shit!”

Dez shoved him hard to one side and fired again and again. “Get the duffle bag!”

Trout looked around and saw the canvas bag on the ground. He ran at it and bent to scoop it up, but it was far heavier than he expected and the weight jerked him back. He felt sudden pain flare in his lower back.

“Stop fucking around and get the bag!” Dez yelled.

“I’m getting the bag, Officer Hitler,” he muttered under his breath as he bent and used his knees to lift the bag. He slung the strap over the same shoulder that was supporting Goat’s equipment, hugged the bulky bag to his chest, and looked around.

“Go wide,” shouted Dez, pointing.

Trout nodded and went left, cutting a wide line around the closest mass of zombies. The way Dez was indicating would take him behind the line of parked faculty cars. There were no dead visible over there. He understood her plan. Run wide around a big obstacle, get the dead to follow, and then cut between the cars and head to the open door. Good plan, except that with every step pain shot down the back of his left leg. He realized that he must have pulled his sciatic nerve when he grabbed the bag.

“Well, that’s just peachy,” he growled, but he kept going, gritting his teeth against the pain.

Dez was right behind him, walking backward while she fired at the oncoming wall of the dead. Trout kept looking over his shoulder, watching with horror as Dez brought them down, one at a time. The girl who worked at Mario’s Pizzarama; Archie from the Allstate office; the school’s vice principal; Melissa Crawford, mother of new twins; and others. Trout knew almost every face, could put a name to almost every one of them. He knew that Dez did too, and he knew that this must be killing her. Just as it was killing him.

The rain was thinning more and more, and Trout could see all the way to the wrought iron fence. The National Guard were there in force, and they had to be able to see what was happening … but they did nothing.

Bastards! Trout thought, but his real rage was not directed at them but at the insect-brained generals and policy makers who were so willing to accept a scorched earth policy rather than find a solution that would save American lives. Trout was moderate enough, even as a liberal, to accept that military power was necessary and that even some wars needed to be fought. He wasn’t a fool. On the other hand, he didn’t like the obvious disconnect between the human element and most military theorists and the generals who paid them. Year after year he lost ground to the cynical view that humanity was far less important than either tactical advantage or financial gain. When he heard politicians use the phrase “in the best interests of the American people” he knew that it was always a profit-based decision. And it wasn’t just in war. The cold detachment was evident in the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the hesitation to provide financial support for the health needs of the Ground Zero workers, and the apparent abandonment of returning U.S. vets, especially those wounded and requiring expensive medical treatment.

Here was another example, one that was biting him in the ass right now. Solving the problem of the Lucifer 113 outbreak would clearly be easier and less of a political nightmare if there were no survivors. Wipe the slate clean, maybe kick out a few bucks for a memorial, and do some spin control to blame it on terrorists, the former administration, the policy makers on the other side of the aisle, or on anyone who was the target du jour. Even if he lived through this, Trout doubted he would ever see the name Volker in the papers, and certainly no mention of Lucifer 113 or the CIA. That would all be erased because the truth would cost too much to tell.

To hell with that, he thought as he bit down on the jolts of pain. But what was the answer? How did he and Dez and Goat fix this? Could it, in fact, be fixed?

As he ran — as he listened to Desdemona Fox, the woman he loved, shoot their neighbors down — he began to get an idea. A really wonderful, ballsy, nasty idea.

Dez fired her last shot and swapped out the magazines.

“How we doing?” she yelled.

Trout looked ahead. “Clear … but only if we haul ass.”

“Then let’s haul ass,” she barked. She fired two more shots, spun, and sprinted to catch up with him. When she saw that he was limping, she grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him roughly along with her.

With the storm abating slightly the moans of the dead filled the air. It was such a horrible sound that it made Trout’s knees buckle, but then as he thought about what those moans meant — the insatiable hunger of the parasitic zombies — he bared his teeth and willed more power to his legs.

They ran down the far side of the faculty cars. A zombie lunged at them from behind a parked Highlander.

“Dez!”

“Got it!” She pivoted and shot the dead man through the mouth just as the thing spat black goo at them. The bullet snapped its head back, and the black liquid geysered straight up and splashed back on the zombie’s face as it fell. A few drops landed on Dez’s sleeve, but there was still plenty of rain to wash it away. Or so Trout hoped.

At the end of the row they cut toward the school. Most of the infected — frightening but without intelligence or imagination — had followed them on their wide course and only three of the dead were lingering by the open door.

Dez pulled out in front, bringing her gun up in a two-handed grip and changed her pattern of running so that she took smaller steps to steady her body as she aimed.

The zombies heard them coming and turned toward them. Trout saw that one of them was the attorney for his second wife. When Dez shot him, Trout expected to feel a nasty little thrill in his chest. He didn’t. This wasn’t a video game and that man was someone he knew. It didn’t matter that Trout didn’t like him. This wasn’t about who liked who; this was a human being who did not deserve what happened to him. As he fell, Trout made himself say the man’s name, quietly to himself.

“Mark David Singer.”

All at once that began a ritual that Trout knew would be with him throughout this crisis. No one should have to die without a name, without some recognition of their humanity.

As Dez shot the second zombie — needing two shots to bring her down — Trout fished for her name. She was the music teacher here at the school. He had interviewed her last year about the Christmas pageant. She was sixty, with gray hair and a corpulent figure. A nice lady. She loved the kids she taught.

He watched her fall with the right side of her face blown to red ruin by Dez’s bullets.

“Sophie Vargas,” Trout said as he ran past her falling corpse.

The last of the infected outside the school was a stranger. Dressed like a businessman. Probably the father of one of the kids, Trout guessed. Come here to pick up his child. The businessman grabbed Dez’s left arm and tried to bite her wrist, but Dez used her right to bring the barrel of the Glock to the man’s temple. The blast knocked his head sideways and he crumpled at Trout’s feet.

Dez was at the door now, pointing the gun inside.

But Trout stopped. He looked over his shoulder. The other zombies were closing fast, but Trout was trapped by the needs of his new ritual. He bent down, hissing at the pain, and patted the man’s pockets until he found a wallet. He pulled it out, shoved it in his jacket, spun, and hobbled to the door with two yards grace. He staggered inside, dropped the heavy duffle, twisted around, grabbed the door handle and gave it ferocious pull. It slammed, but not shut, and with horror Trout saw that a hand was caught between the door and jamb. He had to pull on the door to keep it from being whipped out of his hands.

Behind him, Dez was still firing her pistol.

“Dez!”

“Not now, Billy!” she fired back.

So, he took the big risk. He stopped pulling and shoved on the door, slamming it outward into the faces of the crowd of infected. So many faces. Torn and bloody. They spit black blood at him, and Trout cried out as it splattered on his jacket. With a snarl of rage and fear, he raised his leg to kick out at the zombie whose hand was caught in the door. With a jolt he realized that the man fighting to get in was Doc Hartnup.

“Doc?”

Hartnup’s dead eyes looked right through him, but his mouth was a hungry snarl. Hartnup spat black blood at him, which splattered on Trout’s chest.

That sent Trout into a panic. Doc or not, he lashed out with his foot and caught the dead man in the stomach. Again and again before it lost its hold and Trout fell backward, hauling on the crash bar of the door so that the heavy metal panel swung all the way shut with a huge clang.

Closed. Locked.

Fists pounded on the door from the other side. Trout tore off his jacket and flung it into a corner then pawed at his shirt, looking for traces of the black mucus.

Nothing.

“God almighty,” he wheezed. Another gunshot made him turn and he saw Turk, the little guy who owned the Getty station, go tumbling to the ground.

“Turk,” Trout murmured. “Danny Turkleton.”

Dez stood with her back to him, her shoulders heaving with exertion. Four other zombies lay on the steps. Trout knew two of them and he spoke their names aloud. The others were strangers. A corrections officer and an Irish guy Trout recognized from Dez’s trailer park but couldn’t name. Trout pulled the wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open to the driver’s license.

“Kealan Patrick Burke.”

“What?” Dez asked sharply, then saw what he was looking at. Her expression changed slowly, and Trout could see that she somehow understood what he was doing. She looked down at the bodies around her and nodded.

“Did you know them?” Trout asked.

She nodded. “All of them.” She said their names, and he repeated them.

They looked at each other for a fractured moment, the stink of cordite, blood, and human waste in the air, the steady pounding on the door, the bodies sprawled in what, for them, was a “second death.”

“It’s all impossible,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“It’s worse than impossible,” he said.

Dez narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I know how this started,” he said. “And it’s a lot worse than you think.”

A voice spoke from the shadows behind Dez. “Then you’d better tell us everything, Billy.”

They turned and stared as a big man came walking out of the shadows. His clothes were torn and he had makeshift bandages wound around his head and left arm. His face was battered and bruised, and his eyes were haunted by the things they had seen. But for all that, he looked powerful and dangerous, and he had a hunting rifle held in his strong brown hands.

“JT!” cried Dez.

As Trout watched, she ran to him and wrapped her arms around him and buried her face against his chest, and sobbed.

Son of a bitch, Trout thought with an inward rueful smile. That’s my goddamn scenario.

JT Hammond gave Dez a fierce hug and he kissed her hair.

Then Dez pushed herself away, glared up and him, and slapped him across the face.

“You asshole!” she yelled. “You fucking left me!”

And that’s my girl, Trout thought, and this time his smile reached his lips.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

He stood as silent as a tombstone. A few of the Hollow Men pounded on the door, some of them milled around, drawn by trace scents of fresh meat that were tricks of the storm winds. But Doc Hartnup and most of the others stopped moving and stood staring at the closed door.

Hartnup had recognized the two people his body had been chasing. Desdemona Fox, whom he’d known for years, and the reporter, Billy Trout. Even as his hands tried to grab them and tear them apart, his mind tried to communicate with them. He screamed their names. His screamed his own name. He begged them to shoot him. Dez Fox had shot so many of the others, and now they lay still and unmoving. Hartnup wondered — hoping, praying — whether they were really and completely dead now. He had seen others gunned down by the police and later by the National Guard. Taken down with bullets to the brain. He believed that this was the trick. Any bullet was a magic bullet as long as it struck the brain. He had to believe that or there was no God, no hope, and all was red madness forever.

Dez Fox had not shot him. Each time she fired in his direction there was another one of the Hollow Men to take the bullet. Some died, some were with him now, pounding or milling or standing.

Please, he cried within his darkness. Please …

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

JT rubbed his face and grinned.

“I didn’t leave you, kid,” he said. “It took about six state troopers to keep me from you after you fell.” He touched his battered face. “They weren’t very nice about it, either. Officious pricks.”

“Wait, wait, hold on,” said Trout, “why were you fighting the state troopers?”

“They thought we were on a killing spree,” said JT, and he quickly explained the chain of events that started at Doc Hartnup’s.

“Doc’s outside,” said Trout. “He’s one of them.”

“I know. I saw him from the upstairs window but I couldn’t get an angle on him,” said JT, though he looked sad. “Anyway, the staties put Dez in one cruiser and me in another and that was the last I saw of her.”

He glanced at Dez, who nodded. “I know.” She explained what happened to her, and about the death of Trooper Saunders. Then told them about the Guardsmen, the fight at the trailer park, and meeting Trout.

JT said, “We were run off the road by the Guard. As they were driving me to the station the trooper got a call that all state police were being ordered out of Stebbins. Right now, no questions. But that isn’t what happened.”

“I can guess,” said Trout.

JT sighed. “It was an ambush. Guess they didn’t want any armed infected in town, and they’ve pretty much decided that we’re all infected. I was in the back of the cruiser when a Humvee opened up on us. We crashed and they drove off. The trooper with me was hit pretty bad. He managed to unlock the back and take off my cuffs, but by then the dead were closing in around us. It was all I could do to get out of there. Wish I could have helped the trooper, but he was dying already. Two rounds, one in his chest. I fought my way out and went to the station, but that was a total loss.” Sadness darkened his eyes. “I had to … um … take care of Flower.”

“Oh shit, Hoss,” Dez said, touching his arm.

“I’m sorry,” said Trout.

JT nodded. “That was almost the worst thing today.”

“Almost?” asked Trout.

“Yeah … worst thing was the thought that my girl here was gone.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Dez said with a twisted smile. “But I got home from the prom unmolested.”

Their grins were forced, and they didn’t last.

“After the station,” continued JT, “I decided to head over here. It was already a mess. Couple of these things attacked the middle school kids while they were getting onto the buses to come here. By the time the buses arrived, the infection was rampant. Things went south from there.”

Trout looked past him to a set of closed fire doors. “What’s the situation in here?”

“One of the parents came out through this door to try and reach his car. His kid wasn’t here.” JT shook his head. “He left the door open and about twenty of those things got in. Me and a bunch of teachers have been searching the building. I think we got most of them, but we still need to check the top floor — and I’m down to six rounds—”

Dez nudged the duffle bag with her toe. “Merry Christmas, Hoss.”

JT glanced at her, then knelt and unzipped the bag. Trout peered over his shoulder and saw all the guns and boxed ammunition.

“Sweet Jesus on the cross,” murmured JT, lifting out a Mossberg shotgun. “I’m so happy I could cry.”

His tone was light, but Trout could see the tension in the big man’s face, feel it vibrating in the air around him. Shadows moved behind JT’s eyes. Trout knew that, strong as he was, this was going to ruin him, too.

Dez looked up the stairs. “What about the kids?”

“Everyone’s in the auditorium,” said JT. “We have a couple of guys in there with guns. They’re watching the doors, but they only have a couple of rounds each. We got kids from both schools, a lot of parents. Some townsfolk.”

“How many?”

“In all?” His eyes shifted away for a moment. “Eight hundred, give or take.”

Dez brightened. “Eight hundred kids? That’s great!”

“No,” JT said softly, “eight hundred all told. Kids, parents, and everyone else. We lost more than half the kids when those monsters attacked the buses. Some ran away, but…”

Dez closed her eyes. “Ah … God…”

“I wanted to call in some backup,” said JT. “I wanted to tell the damn National Guard that we needed help, that we’re mostly safe in here. But they aren’t listening. They shot at us. They killed a couple of the teachers who were trying to help the kids. Maybe they thought the teachers were attacking … I don’t know. With the rain and all, I just don’t know. We can’t seem to get them to understand…”

“They’re not here to help us,” said Trout. He and Dez told JT about their encounters with the Guard.

“That’s nuts,” said JT. “We’re not infected.”

“They don’t care,” said Dez. “They’ve been told to keep this from spreading at all costs. End of story.”

JT shook his head. “Do they even know what this thing is? Is this something that’s happening everywhere or is it some kind of toxic spill? We don’t know anything about this infection.”

“It’s not an infection,” said Trout. “Not exactly. It’s an infestation, and it started with Homer Gibbon.”

“What?” demanded Dez. “Gibbon…?”

“His body was shipped here after the execution,” Trout explained. “His Aunt Selma was going to have him buried on her family farmland. It’s a long story, but the short version is that his body is infested with a genetically engineered wasp larva. Parasites. Most likely Doc got it from Gibbon and it spread from there.”

“How do you know that?” asked JT.

Dez pushed past JT and grabbed a fistful of Trout’s shirt. “What do you know?”

“I know everything,” Trout said quietly. “And … you’re not going to like what you hear.”

“Well, gee, Billy, I guess I’ve spent so much of today laughing my tits off that I suppose I could use some depressing shit to balance it all out.”

Trout gently pulled her hand free and smoothed down the front of his shirt. He took a breath and told his story, starting with the call from the prison guard, the visit to Aunt Selma, and the horrifying discussion with Dr. Volker. He told them everything, and by the time he was finished, Dez had gone dead pale and JT looked like he wanted to throw up.

“This is totally fucked,” Dez said at last. “I thought this was going to be some kind of terrorist thing.”

“Terror begins at home,” said Trout, and she shot him a withering look. “Oh, come on, Dez … you’re too smart to think that we’re only ever the white hats. Wake up.”

“No,” she said, letting out a breath. “It’s just…”

She shook her head. There were no adequate words to express how she felt, and Trout understood that.

“Knowing how it started doesn’t help us much,” said JT, “’cause we sure as hell know how it’s going to end. I think the only reason they haven’t nuked us back to the Stone Age is the storm.”

“No,” said Dez, “they wouldn’t nuke us. They’d firebomb us. It’s safer for them and the fire—”

“—purifies,” finished Trout. “I thought of that.”

“Great,” JT said. “That’s just great. The storm’s already lessened. Pretty soon they’re going to be able to put birds in the air and fry our asses.”

“I have a walkie-talkie,” said Dez. “We can talk to them.”

“Let’s give it a try,” said JT. “We have eight hundred people in here.”

Dez turned on the walkie-talkie and adjusted the squelch. There was steady, overlapping chatter and it took her several tries to get through. Trout produced a small video recorder and began taping.

“Break, break, break, this is Officer Desdemona Fox, Stebbins PD, calling for Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich. Please respond.”

The chatter slowly died down and then Dietrich’s gruff voice responded. “This is a secure military channel, Officer Fox. You are not authorized to broadcast on this—”

“I think we’ve been through this already, Colonel. Let’s cut the crap and get right to it,” Dez said forcefully.

“What is the reason for this call, officer?”

“Trying to make it to the end of the day without dying, sir.”

A pause.

“What is your location?”

“I’m at the Stebbins Little School. There are eight hundred people in here. None of us are infected. We have steel security doors and this building is the town evacuation shelter.”

“The infection has spread throughout the entire town, officer,” said Dietrich. “I’m sorry to have to inform you of this, but—”

“The town, yes. Maybe. But the school is a secure facility. This is where the survivors are. We need you to come and get us out.”

“I don’t believe you understand the nature of this event, officer.”

“Colonel Dietrich, you are incorrect, sir, when you say that we are unaware of the nature of this event. We are very goddamn aware. And we are asking how you intend to help.”

There was silence on the line. When Dietrich spoke his voice was tight. It was hard to tell if it was anger or fear. “There’s nothing we can do. If you’re in the thick of this then you should be able to comprehend that.”

“I comprehend some of it, Colonel. What I don’t comprehend is why you’re not even trying to rescue or protect the uninfected. This isn’t an airborne disease. It’s spread through spit or a bite or some other fluid contact.”

As she spoke, Trout panned the camera to show the dead zombies on the floor and the black goo around their mouths. He zoomed in to focus on the wriggling threadlike worms in the muck. Then he panned back up to Dez. In this light, with her disheveled hair, her hard beauty, her Valkyrie bone structure, she looked like a hero out of legend, a warrior woman who could have belonged to any of the great battles of history. Trout never doubted that he loved Desdemona Fox, but at the moment he felt like he wanted to shout the fact.

Dietrich said, “You are a police officer, I believe, in a small town? Not a biologist or medical doctor?”

“Yes, sir, I’m a small-town cop. I also spent a couple of years in Afghanistan taking orders from cocksuckers like you, so I know when someone’s blowing smoke out of their ass.”

“Watch your mouth, Officer Fox.”

“Or what? You want to come here and arrest me? Go ahead. Otherwise stop acting like you’re in command of this situation. I’m asking you—telling you — to get in touch with your boss and tell him to get in touch with his, as far up the line as you have to go. Tell them that we know who let this monster off the chain and who’s responsible for killing an entire town … and who now wants to try and cover it all up by pretending that the surviving witnesses are infected just so you can slaughter us all. You tell them that.”

No reply.

“Colonel…?” No reply. In fact there was no further chatter on the walkie-talkie. Not one word.

Dez shook her head and stared at Trout, who was still taping. “They’re going to let us die here. God … they’re going to murder all these kids.” Tears broke from her eyes and rolled down over her cheeks. She weighed the walkie-talkie in her hand and then with a snarl turned to hurl it against the wall but JT scooped it out of her hand.

“No,” he said, “we might need that.”

“I blew it,” she snapped back. “I pushed too hard and blew it. God, why am I always such a bitch?”

“Actually,” said Trout, turning off the camera and lowering it, “I thought you were magnificent.”

“Oh, shut up, Billy.”

“No,” said JT, “boy’s right. You were great. You smacked that officious prick’s ass.”

“That’ll look good on my tombstone. Let’s face it, I played the wrong card. He knows that we’re a liability and now he’s going to burn this town down just to keep us from telling the world.” She glared at Trout. “Why the fuck are you smiling?”

“I taped that conversation you just had. Dietrich’s voice is crystal clear.”

“So? We can’t do anything with it. The Internet and cell service is as dead as we’re going to be.”

Billy Trout unslung the equipment bag he carried and bent down — hissing a little at the pain in his back — to unzip it.

“You’re not the only one who brought goodies to this party, Dez.” He produced a device and showed it to them, his smile never wavering. “This is a satellite news uplink. If we’re going to go down, babe, then let’s at least go down swinging.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

Lieutenant Colonel Dietrich set his walkie-talkie down and stared at it for five long seconds. Across the table from him, Captain Rice stood in silence, not daring to intrude into this moment. He could see the fires that rage were lighting under the colonel’s skin. His commanding officer’s mouth was a tight knife slash; his nostrils flared wide like a charging bull.

Rice tried to make himself invisible. He expected Dietrich to suddenly dash everything off the table, or hurl the walkie-talkie the length of the room. But the colonel said and did nothing as the seconds splintered off the clock and fell like debris on the floor.

Dietrich walked over to the window and looked out at the storm.

“The wind’s dropping,” he said. His tone was quiet, calm, and that surprised Rice, who had heard the full exchange between Dietrich and that crazy female cop in Stebbins.

“Yes, sir,” said Rice. “Weather service says that we’ve seen the worst of it. The storm front is turning north by east. Winds are down to—”

“How soon before we can get some birds in the air?” asked Dietrich.

Instead of directly answering, Rice made a call, spoke to another captain, listened, and hung up.

“As soon as the wind drops another fifteen miles per hour, sir. We’re still at the outer range of unsafe.”

Dietrich nodded. He clasped his hands behind his back and continued to stare out the window.

“That cop is well intentioned,” he said quietly, “but she does not understand what’s at stake.”

Rice cleared his throat. Very quietly. “No sir. She was totally out of line. Probably stress … or the onset of the disease.”

“Probably,” agreed Dietrich coldly.

“Your orders, sir?”

Dietrich said nothing for almost twenty seconds. Rice waited him out. Then the colonel turned.

“Sound draws these things, correct?”

“The infected, sir? Yes, that’s what we’ve heard from our people on the ground.”

Dietrich nodded. “Then here is what I want to do.”

Rice listened in silence. Dietrich’s plan was as solid as it was brutal.

As Rice hurried out of the office to set things in motion he said a silent prayer for the people in Stebbins.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

“Are you sure this will work?” asked JT as Trout set up the satellite equipment.

“Goat said it would, and he knows this stuff pretty well,” said Trout. “I’m no damn good at all in a fight. I do this or I go hide in a closet.” He handed the unit to JT and showed him how to work it, then he stepped away and ran his fingers through his wet hair and straightened his soaked shirt. “How do I look?”

“Like a drowned golden retriever,” said Dez.

“Thanks.”

“But a good-looking drowned golden retriever,” she said, giving him a small, crooked grin.

Trout flashed her a brilliant smile. “That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve said to me in two years.”

He expected her to smile at that, instead he saw a flicker of pain dart through her eyes; and he felt like an ass for making a bad joke at a time like this. He busied himself with clipping the lavaliere mike to his shirt collar.

“Ready,” he said.

JT held up crossed fingers. Dez merely nodded, her expression on the doubtful side of neutral. Trout cleared his throat and gave JT the nod to start recording.

“My name is Billy Trout,” Trout began. “I’m a reporter for Regional Satellite News in Stebbins County. Please watch this video. This is not a hoax, this is not special effects or a gag. This is real. People are dying and more will die. There’s a good chance I’m going to die. Maybe today.”

Trout paused and took a breath. He was sweating and used his fingers to wipe the sweat out of his eye sockets. From behind JT, Dez gave Trout a thumbs-up, and he plunged ahead.

“If you’ve been watching the news you know that the big storm is centered over southwestern Pennsylvania right now. You may also have heard of some problems here in Stebbins. Rioting and looting. However, I am here to state for the record that there is no rioting in Stebbins. There is no looting. However a lot of people are dying here. I am going to tell you the truth about what is happening here in Stebbins. If I live through this, I’ll probably go to jail. That’s okay, as long as the story gets out. Please watch this video. Please post it on YouTube. Put the links on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else you can think of.

“I am in the Stebbins Little School, the elementary school here in town. There are eight hundred people in here with me. More than half of them are children. A lot of people have died here today, but unless we all work together, a lot more are going to die. I repeat … this is not a joke. This is not a hoax. This is real and it’s happening right now.”

He took a breath. His hands were shaking.

“This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse…”

CHAPTER NINETY

It seemed to take forever, but the call finally came through on Goat’s Skype account. Routing it through the main RSN satellite was a firing offense and almost certainly illegal. Fuck it. So was turning people into zombies.

Trout sent him three videos. One was for immediate release, the other two were to sit in their chambers until Billy told him to pull the trigger.

Goat used his earphones so no one else could hear the call, and he set Skype to record everything as a backup to the straight satellite feed, which was automatically recorded on the RSN server, which was in Pittsburgh not Stebbins. Goat copied the whole thing on his hard drive, too. Then, as soon as it was done, he e-mailed it to himself at three different accounts. That would give him copies in his sent folder as well as the three in-boxes. All of this took a few seconds and now there were copies in places the government could not easily block, access, or confiscate.

After the broadcast was done, Goat got a private Skype call from Trout.

“Did you get them?”

“Yes I did, Billy, and I’m sweating high-caliber bullets right now. Tell me this is all true. The National Guard’s actually shooting people?”

“They’re shooting everyone.”

“Aren’t they testing them first?”

“No.”

“Then how do they know who’s infected or—”

“Goat — they’re shooting everyone. No questions asked.”

“Oh, man…” Goat felt the room beginning to spin. “How safe are you going to be in that school?”

Trout was a long time answering.

“Billy?”

“You got to get this out. Listen, kid, this is a million times worse than anything Volker said it would be. Goat … everyone’s dead. Marcia, Gino … everyone.”

“Marcia…?” Goat asked hollowly.

Trout told him what he’d seen and done … and been forced to do. When he described the encounter with Marcia, Trout broke into tears.

“Oh, shit, man…” said Goat in a voice choked with his own tears. He looked around the Starbucks, but the place was so deserted that there was no one near, no one to see or hear. “Those fuckers. Marcia? Goddamn it, Billy, we can’t let them get away with this.”

“I have no intention of letting them skate, kid. We’re going to ram this up their asses.”

Goat wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve. “What do you want me to do?”

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

“Watch out!” yelled Trout, and Dez whirled around as a zombie came at her from the shadows of the top landing. Dez fired three shots, one to the chest and two to the head, and the dead woman spun into the wall, then slid bonelessly to the floor.

“I don’t know her,” murmured Trout. Dez glanced down.

“Peggy Sullivan,” she said. “Secretary here at the school.”

“Peggy Sullivan,” echoed Trout. He nodded and they moved on.

They were a few steps from the second floor landing. Dez was on point, but she had turned to look down at the small body of a little boy who lay twisted on the midpoint landing. The child had been shot, but it was clear that he had been infected before he’d been put down. Dez was only distracted for a second, but it was enough for the other zombie to blindside her. This impact knocked her sideways, but she twisted around and put two rounds into the creature’s face.

“You okay?” JT asked from the bottom of the stairs. He was watching their back trail and carrying the heavy duffle of weapons. Trout was in the middle, unarmed and hypervigilant.

“Yeah,” Dez breathed. She took her pistol in both hands and went up the last few steps, checking the corners. “Clear.”

They followed her up and waited for her to check the hallway.

“I thought you cleared these things out of here.”

“We locked some of those things in the first two rooms,” said JT. “More upstairs.”

Dez moved cautiously forward. The classroom doors had frosted windows, but she could see awkward shapes shift and move behind the heavy glass. When she bent to listen should she could hear the low, hungry moans.

“How many are in there?”

JT came up beside her. “Six in that room, two in the other.” He nodded down the long, dark hallway.

“Can’t leave them here,” said Dez. “They’ll get out one way or another.”

He drew in a ragged breath. “Damn,” he said, but he nodded.

“Wait,” said Trout, “what are you going to—”

Before he could finish, Dez kicked open the door and she and JT rushed inside. All Trout could see from the hallway were shadows and bright flashes, and all he heard was the thunder as Dez and JT emptied their guns into the living dead.

When they emerged, their faces were wooden.

“Dez, I—” Trout began, but Dez pushed past him to the door on the other side. She and JT paused to reload, then they nodded to each other, kicked open the door, and went in shooting.

Trout stared in horror. Not because they were doing so much killing, but because so much was necessary. When JT pushed open the door and stepped into the hallway he looked ten years older. So did Dez. They stood there, faces dirty with gun smoke, reloading their weapons, their eyes fixed onto the middle distance and empty of all life. Like the eyes of the dead things they had just slaughtered.

Dez dropped a bullet and Trout saw that her fingers were trembling. He knelt to pick it up, and when he handed it to her she closed her fingers around his for a moment. She squeezed her eyelids shut and fought to keep her mouth from twisting with barely suppressed sobs. Then she released him, took the bullet, and finished reloading.

“The auditorium’s down and around the corner,” said JT gently, but Dez pushed past him.

She knew every inch of this old school. These drafty corridors and echoing fire towers were part of her childhood. She’d been a lonely girl who loved playing in her imagination, and the school was a castle under siege or a grand palace filled with knights and ladies, an old haunted house or the lair of a crafty wizard. She could walk the halls blindfolded. She hurried along, her gum-rubber soles making almost no sound. JT was as quiet on his feet, but after two flights of stone stairs he was huffing like a dragon; behind him, Billy Trout limped along. With each step, the sciatic pain was worse and his pace slower. It made him feel old and intensely vulnerable.

JT had grown up in Fayette County and his family had not moved to Stebbins until he was in high school, but Trout knew this old place every bit as well as Dez. He remembered the lonely, lovely little blond-haired girl, and he had loved her from afar even then.

He thought about that as they hurried through the pale glow of the emergency lights. All this time and I’m still no closer to having her, he thought. Or, maybe I’m further away.

It saddened him as much as the tragedy in town, and he could totally understand — now more than ever — Dez’s feelings of being abandoned by those she loved and trusted.

“Ah, Dez,” he whispered in a voice he knew could not carry to her ears. “You’re crazy but I do love you so. How sane does that make me?”

Up ahead, Dez paused by the double doors that led to the auditorium, looking back over her shoulder almost as if she had heard him after all. Their eyes met and she gave him a brief, sad smile.

What does that mean, he wondered. Was it an acknowledgment of feelings as viewed from two sides of an uncrossable field of wreckage? Possibly. Or, was it a good-bye? Did Dez believe that they were all going to die here? Neither she nor JT had shown much faith or enthusiasm for the videos he’d sent. Though they did not say so, it was clear that they did not think Trout could make his plan work.

He wasn’t entirely sure himself. Nor was Goat. It was a gamble of a kind he had never imagined making before, not even in his wildest Hollywood dreams.

Trout held eye contact with Dez, wanting to preserve the moment, to make this communication, however tenuous, last. But timing was against them and that connection was too fragile to support it. Dez turned away and reached for the door handles.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

Goat was quickly going crazy.

He kept nervously toggling back and forth between Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, watching the hits, the retweets, and reposts of Billy’s video. In the first hour it was on YouTube it had fewer than a hundred hits, and most of the comments posted by viewers were cynical and mocking. They did not believe the video was real. Then something happened a few minutes into the second hour. There was a significant jump in hits. Goat backtracked and saw that the new rush was being driven by Twitter. A couple of key players had retweeted the URL. Some of these were conspiracy theory nuts who thought this was an early Christmas present, some were anarchists of the kind who thought Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks posts in 2010 were holy writ, but a lot of them were serious players in the media. Goat had posted the link everywhere and had sent it in mass e-mails to everyone in his media listservs. Thousands upon thousands of people in print, broadcast, and digital media. Some of them apparently knew Billy Trout, and that’s where the traction started. They reposted the link to their contacts and included personal endorsements of Trout. The secondary wave of posts went out in a massive ripple. Someone who knew Billy also knew a producer on CNN and that person included the link in a news update. That sort of thing happened again and again. By the time ninety minutes had passed, the spread was viral.

Viral marketing. Goat considered that, and for a moment he thought that it was an unfortunate choice of words; then he looked at it from a different perspective. It had a flavor of poetic justice to it.

By the end of the second hour the number of hits on YouTube had climbed to the high five figures and every time Goat refreshed the page the number jumped by hundreds. And then by thousands. The spread was geometric.

But Billy Trout did not call back.

Even though Goat’s system could accept a satellite call via his Skype, the connection did not work in reverse. Goat could not reach Trout.

Goat licked his lips and drummed his fingers and drank too much coffee. And felt his nerves burning down to the gunpowder.

Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and he posted the second video. This was the one where Billy was videotaping Dez Fox while she argued with the National Guard Colonel on the walkie-talkie. If the first video was a slap in the face, then this was going to be a full swing-of-the-leg kick in the nuts.

He kept glancing at the door as if expecting federal agents to come busting in any second. Well, he thought, too bad if they do … but it’s already out there. So, fuck you.

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

The president of the United States watched the monitors on the wall. The rain and wind had diminished significantly. Two minutes ago he gave permission for the six Apache helicopters to take off, with four Blackhawks flying close support. The Apaches each carried fuel-air bombs as well as their usual complement of Hellfire missiles, machine guns, and rocket pods. There was enough firepower aboard those helos to destroy an average-size American city. Far more than was necessary to wipe Stebbins off the face of the earth.

The order he had given was to fly to Stebbins. Nothing more. Not yet. He couldn’t imagine how he could shape his mouth to give the kill order for this.

Scott Blair, the National Security Advisor, came hurrying into the Situation Room. He waved away the staff members sitting closest to the president and then bent to speak in a confidential tone. “Mr. President? We’ve just learned that someone in Stebbins is sending out messages.”

“What kind of messages, Blair? And to whom?”

“The wrong kind, Mr. President,” said Blair. “What’s worse is that they’re being posted on the Internet. YouTube, mostly; fed by links on Twitter, and other social media sites. We’re working to control those sites … but the Internet is volatile. The National Guard units in Stebbins are attempting to locate the sender and shut him down.”

“What’s he saying?”

“I can play it for you, sir. Do you want me to clear the room?”

“If it’s already on the Internet, there’s no point. Play it.”

Blair nodded and punched some buttons on a computer built into the table. The screen switched from the weather report to a page of the YouTube Web site. Blair pressed Play and a good looking white man with blond hair and a pinstripe shirt appeared. The man was soaked and his face was lined with stress. His eyes, which were robin’s egg blue, stared into the camera with laserlike intensity.

“My name is Billy Trout…”

Everyone in the room stopped to watch and within seconds there wasn’t a sound. Not a murmur or side comment. The president felt his throat constrict as he watched the video. The video included footage of infected bodies, mangled and partially consumed, torn by bullets, splashed with black mucus. There were two other people in the video, both police officers, both showing signs of injury and stress. A white woman and a black man. Trout named them and gave their badge numbers. The last few lines of the video hit the hardest.

“… this is not a natural disaster and this is not a terrorist attack. This is a man-made disaster, and I know who is responsible and how this occurred. Please post the link to this video. The only thing that can save the lives of all these people, all of these children, is the truth. Call your local papers, call the news services. Contact your local congressperson. This is not a local problem. This is not Pennsylvania’s problem. This is a threat to the entire country, if not the entire world. Please … we are alive in Stebbins and the devil is at the door. Do not let them commit mass murder. Save the children of Stebbins County.”

The video ended but the room remained absolutely silent. All eyes were on the president.

“You’re sure this isn’t a hoax?” he asked.

Blair shook his head. “Billy Trout is a reporter for Regional Satellite News. Small time but well respected. Officers Desdemona Fox and JT Hammond are with the Stebbins police. She’s former army. DMV searches match them to their photo IDs. This is real.”

“Several hundred people? That’s great news! I want the Guard to get to those children. Protect them and get them out of—”

“Mr. President … I don’t think you appreciate the complexity of this. Our Wildfire containment protocols have six different response models for suburban outbreaks. All of them offer options for many aspects of the problem, but on one point they all agree. If hard containment is possible, then that is the only safe and reliable course of action.”

The president stared at him. “No way, Blair. I can’t accept that. You’re saying that a Red Wall response is our only response?”

“Regrettably, sir, that is correct.”

“No. That is unacceptable.”

“Sir … you’ve seen the reports, you know that we can’t let a single infected host out of the Q-zone. Not one. This isn’t cholera or typhus. We can’t inoculate against this. No one has a natural immunity to these parasites. Each host is one hundred percent infectious. One drop of blood contains enough larvae to—”

“I know, damn it.”

Blair adjusted his glasses. “Then, sir, you have to understand the severity of this. We don’t have diagnostic protocols for this. We don’t have prophylactic measures beyond sterilization.”

“So, what would you have me do? Drop fire bombs on that town while someone is broadcasting it to the world? There are seven thousand people in Stebbins County. I don’t think I want to go down in history as the president who slaughtered more people than were killed in the entire war in Afghanistan! Twice as many as died on 9-11.”

Blair sighed and shook his head. “Given the field reports we’ve received, Mr. President, I doubt as many as ten percent of those people are still alive.”

“Those are estimates, Blair, not hard numbers, and you damn well know it. There could be four or five thousand people still alive. I won’t authorize a strike unless we have exhausted all other possible options.”

“Well, sir … whether we drop bombs or not, sir, we have to stop the sender. So far nothing he’s said is damaging to your administration, Mr. President, but we can’t take any chances.”

“How would you suggest we stop him?”

Blair did not have to spell it out; his look was eloquent enough.

“Christ,” growled the President. “Is that the best we can do? React like thugs?”

“This is a commanding response to a very real threat to this country, Mr. President. This isn’t a hurricane or broken levies. If we drop the ball on this, or if we’re too cautious in our response, then we could be looking at a pandemic that would make the Black Death look like—”

“Skip the dramatics,” snapped the president.

“Your pardon, but I’m not being dramatic. If anything I’m understating the nature of this threat.”

The president shook his head. “I’m not going to authorize a sanction against someone who is trying to save American lives. I’ve compromised a lot since taking office, Blair, but I haven’t slipped that far.”

Blair took a breath. “I understand your concerns, Mr. President, but our scientific advisors are in a panic over this. They are urging us to implement Red Wall. Urging, sir.”

“I understand,” said the president wearily, “I’ve ordered the choppers in. Once they’re over Stebbins airspace, we’ll see where we are.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

Dez Fox looked out at a sea of faces. Hundreds of them, young and old. More young than old. All turned toward the open doors, their faces pale with fear and their eyes bright with hope.

They must have heard the gunshots, Dez thought. God … look at all the little ones. In here. Thinking they’re safe.

She wanted to find the two teachers JT had left to guard the door. Find them and kick the living shit out of them for abandoning their posts, and for abandoning these kids.

She felt JT and Trout move up to flank her, filling the doorway.

The kids looked at them and at the guns they carried, and at the uniforms they wore. Suddenly, and all together, they jumped to their feet, screaming and applauding. Dez felt her lips part into a silent “oh” of surprise. She turned to JT in confusion.

Trout leaned close and whispered in her ear. “They’re applauding because the cavalry has just arrived.”

“But,” she said, “but … we’re not…”

“Smile and wave, Dez. That’s what they’re looking for. Smile and wave. Be the hero. Let them know you’re here for them. After all, it’s the truth, right? So let them know it. Let them know that you’re here for them, to protect them, and that you won’t abandon them. That you won’t let the monsters get them.”

Dez looked into Trout’s eyes for a long time even as the applause rolled like thunder around the big hall. She looked for the mockery, the joke in his eyes. And she did not find it.

She slowly raised her pistol over her head and forced a smile onto her face.

The applause rose in intensity. Teachers and parents made their way through the sea of kids, and they shook Dez’s hand, and Billy’s, and even JT’s.

“Are we getting out now?” asked a woman who held a two-month-old baby in her arms.

“Soon,” Dez lied. “The … um, National Guard is still clearing things up outside. We have to sit tight for a bit. Might be a few hours, might be all night, but help is on the way. They need us to cooperate as best we can.”

Her use of key words like “National Guard” and “they” worked their magic. They promised order and answers.

A woman — the stick-thin school principal, Mrs. Madison — came hurrying through the crowd and gave Dez a fierce hug. That got applause, too. The crowd gradually settled down as teachers and some adults quieted the sections near them. It looked orderly, and Dez guessed that Mrs. Madison had appointed these adults as section leaders. Good call.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Madison. “God, thank you. Do we know what’s happening?

Dez held up her hands to stop the flow of questions. Then she gently pulled Mrs. Madison into the hall and away from the other adults. “Listen, we don’t have a lot of time, so please pay attention. We’re not leading a cavalry charge right here. And the National Guard are not our friends at the moment. They think we’re all infected in here, and until we clear the real infected out of here we can’t prove that it’s safe for the Guard to come in and rescue us. That means we have to make sure that anyone who’s been bitten is secured.”

Mrs. Madison frowned. “Secured?”

Dez gave her a brief explanation of Lucifer 113 and how it worked. “Anyone who has been contaminated — no matter how, and no matter if they don’t look sick yet — will become like those things out there. Everyone who has this thing is going to have to be put down.”

Mrs. Madison blanched. “Officer Fox … we have kids with bites. Surely you can’t expect us to shoot children? That’s insane. It’s inhuman. We have them in classrooms. We’re giving them medical attention…”

“Then give me an alternative. If we allow the infection to stay inside the school we’ll all die. This is easy math.”

“God…”

“JT and I will take care of it,” snapped Dez. “Mrs. Madison, I need you to stay inside the auditorium. Once we leave, keep the doors locked until either JT or I tell you it’s safe to open the doors. Otherwise you do not open up to anyone, understood?”

The principal nodded. “Mr. Chestnut is somewhere in the building. He heard some sounds and he took two of the janitors with him to investigate.”

“Lucas Chestnut?” Dez asked. Chestnut had been a very young teacher when she had attended the school. He must be well into middle age by now. “How long ago?”

“Why, he left just after Sergeant Hammond did. I’m surprised you didn’t see him.”

“Shit,” said Dez. Mrs. Madison began to say something but didn’t; instead she sagged back with a hand to her throat.

“Stay here and don’t let anyone else leave,” ordered JT. “You understand me? No one. Now — go back inside and put a smile on your face and tell everyone to sit and wait until we get back. Don’t tell anyone else how things really are. Not yet. Got it?”

The principal nodded, and JT led Dez out into the hallway. They listened at the open stairwell but heard nothing. “Let’s try the top floor,” said JT. “It needs to be checked anyway.”

Dez looked up at him. “You be careful, Hoss. No heroics.”

He snorted. “I’m fresh out of heroics, girl.”

They smiled at one another and were about to enter the stairwell when Trout came running out of the auditorium.

“Hey! Dez!”

She wheeled on him. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“With you. But I need a gun.”

“Not a chance, Billy. Stay here with the kids. I don’t trust you.”

“What? How the hell can you say—”

“With a gun, dumb-ass. You don’t know how to shoot, remember? Go find a baseball bat or something and stay the hell in there.”

“Dez, I—”

She got up in his face, and though her mouth was hard, her eyes were pleading. “Billy … stay with the kids. Please.”

“Ah … fuck,” he said, but he nodded. “Okay, Dez.”

There was a brief look of relief in her eyes as she turned away and hurried down the hall with JT. For just a moment, and despite all of his conscious reasoning to the contrary, it felt to Trout that Dez was not running off to a fight, but that she was running away from him. It made no sense, but it opened a little door of insight in his head.

He turned away and Dez watched as the auditorium doors closed behind him.

Dez watched him go and she had to smile. At his willingness to help. At the courage he’d shown in coming back to town. At his ass. He had a great ass, she decided. She sighed and turned away, aware that the members of her “team” were watching her.

JT murmured, “I thought you were done with that boy.”

“I am.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me.”

“Yeah, well I thought you didn’t walk with a limp,” Dez said.

“I don’t.”

She got up in his face. “Want that to change?”

“Um … no, I don’t.”

Dez nodded. “All right then, end of discussion.”

If JT planned to say more it was cut short by a piercing scream of terrible pain that floated on the sluggish air from the darkened stairwell.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

Homer Gibbon heard the sound before he saw them. It was a big, deep, bass sound that filtered through the rain and the radio and the sound of his wipers. The throp-throp-throp of helicopter rotors. He pulled to the side of the road, rolled down his window, and leaned out to look.

They came over the treeline like a flight of giant insects from some old monster movie. Homer had never been in the military, but he knew everything related to war. From movies, from books and magazines, from endless jailhouse conversations. These were Apache Longbows, and he was pretty sure they were outfitted with 30mm chain guns, Hellfire, Hydra, Stinger, and Sidewinder missiles. At least that’s what he remembered.

Homer smiled.

Nice.

He turned up the radio. Jason Aldean was singing “My Kinda Party.”

“Yes, sirree,” he said to the radio. Homer put the car back into drive and kept going.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

“We have another video from Billy Trout,” said Scott Blair.

The president swiveled his chair to face the monitors. “Let me see it.”

Blair hesitated. “Sir, this is pretty delicate stuff. This is going to be a political nightmare.”

“Run it,” said the president firmly.

The YouTube video played. It showed the same female officer standing in a hallway filled with corpses of the infected.

“She obtained a walkie-talkie from a National Guardsman that she attacked.”

“Did she kill him?”

“No-o-o,” Blair said, dragging it out. “Three soldiers required medical treatment and she wrecked their Humvee.”

The president shushed him as the audio played. They sat and watched the one-sided conversation Dez Fox had with Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich.

Colonel Dietrich, you are incorrect, sir, when you say that we are unaware of the nature of this event. We are very goddamn aware. And we are asking how you intend to help.

There’s nothing we can do. If you’re in the thick of this then you should be able to comprehend that.

I comprehend some of it, Colonel. What I don’t comprehend is why you’re not even trying to rescue or protect the uninfected. This isn’t an airborne disease. It’s spread through spit or a bite or some other fluid contact.

Blair leaned closed. “This is the crucial bit.”

I’m asking you — telling you — to get in touch with your boss and tell him to get in touch with his, as far up the line as you have to go. Tell them that we know who let this monster off the chain and who’s responsible for killing an entire town … and who now wants to try and cover it all up by pretending that the surviving witnesses are infected just so you can slaughter us all. You tell them that.

There was a few seconds more silence as Fox waited for a reply that was not going to come. Then she looked straight into the camera and said:

They’re going to let us die here. God … they’re going to murder all these kids.

Tears broke and rolled down her cheeks, and the tape ended.

Blair flapped his arms. “This was just posted and it’s already burning up the Internet. It’s everywhere. It’s on CNN and FOX and everywhere.”

“God…”

“And I take it you heard that one line?”

“About her knowing who let the monster off the chain? Yes. Do you think they know about Lucifer 113?”

“I … don’t know, sir. I can’t see how they could know.”

An aide came hurrying into the room. “Excuse me, Mr. President … the helos have crossed into Stebbins airspace.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

They went up the stairs. Dez first, with her Glock held in both hands; JT was right behind her with a Mossberg 500 Bullpup with dual pistol grips, including one on the pump. Eight steps from the top they paused to listen.

“Oh, god! Help … oh, Christ…”

“That’s Lucas,” said JT. They took the last steps two at a time, swiveling their weapons around at each corner, expecting white faces to come lunging out of the shadows. They saw the blood first.

A footprint perfectly outlined in red. A heavy shoe, a Timberland or a good knockoff. Dez pointed with her Glock.

“I see it,” JT said quietly as they moved up the steps.

“… please … God…” Lucas Chestnut’s voice was faint, depleted. Dez already knew that they weren’t hurrying up the steps to save him. He sounded hurt, and the day they’d lived through had taught them that “hurt” was a death sentence. No matter how small a bite, it was as good as a bullet to the heart.

They rounded the last turn in the stairwell and found another footprint.

And a foot.

The shoe, ankle, and part of the shin stood on the top step. The rest of their owner was twenty feet down the hall, crawling along, inch by inch, toward a man who sat with his back to the door of the English room. A bloody fire ax lay across the man’s thigh, and his body was covered with bites. Dozens of them.

Two other figures crouched on either side of him. One held Lucas Chestnut’s arm in both of her hands, and as Dez watched she bent and sank her teeth into the flabby flesh on the inside of the teacher’s elbow. The other person, a teenage boy, knelt and worked at Chestnut’s abdomen, biting and tearing to get through the tough abdominal wall. The zombie with the missing leg crawled inexorably forward, moaning piteously at the meal it longed to share.

Chestnut was too weak to scream. He sobbed and shook his head over back and forth in a permanent denial of what was happening. Then, as Dez and JT stepped out of the stairwell, Chestnut turned his streaming eyes toward them.

“Please…” he begged weakly. “For the love of God … please stop this…”

Not stop them. Stop this.

Dez heard JT inhale with a hiss.

“Steady on, Hoss,” she said softly and stepped past him. The maimed zombie heard her first and he turned and snarled. Black saliva dripped from his lips. Dez recognized him as one of the janitors. Roger somethingorother.

She raised the Glock and fired. The bullet caught Roger in the temple and the force blew one of his eyes out of the socket. He collapsed forward, the bones of his face crunching onto the hard floor. Behind her, Dez heard JT gag.

Dez did not look. She shifted the barrel of the Glock to the teenage boy.

Bang.

Then the woman, a stranger.

Bang.

Lucas Chestnut raised his eyes to her. Blood bubbled from between his lips.

“Please…” he begged.

Bang.

Dez lowered the gun and closed her eyes.

Behind her a door creaked and she whirled just as JT bellowed in surprise, his cry mingling with moans as the dead poured out into the hall. Five of them. No, more. Eight or nine!

“JT, look out!”

JT went down under a pile of them and the impact made him jerk his finger on the trigger. The blast hit one of the dead above the elbow and blew away her arm. She did not even pause as she flung herself at JT.

Dez fired three fast shots at the infected who were still standing, killing two and sending one staggering backward toward the top of the stairs. The creature fell and went tumbling and crashing down out of sight.

Under the pile, JT pivoted his big shoulders and smashed the shotgun across a zombie’s face, knocking the creature off of him. The dead man fell with a swatch of JT’s shirt between its teeth. Another of the dead immediately lunged into the opening and then Dez was there, kicking at them, slamming the steel toe of her shoe into the temple of one, stamping her heel down on another’s spine, using her free hand to grab one by the belt and pull him back. When that zombie hissed and turned toward her, she pistol-whipped his mouth away from her and then shot him through the ear. JT rammed the barrel of his shotgun under the chin of the closest infected and pulled the trigger, blowing the thing’s scalp and brains all the way to the ceiling.

Dez kicked one of the dead in the cheek and shot another through the eye. Then she grabbed JT and hauled. He kicked his way out and they flopped backward, both of them flat on their backs.

The dead came at them, and Dez took the Glock in both hands and fired, fired. JT blew the knee off of one, and, as it collapsed down, he put the next round through its forehead. He kicked that body back and fired at the one behind it, catching it in the chest and the shoulder and then the face.

The last zombie was an old woman, and Dez kicked her on the point of the jaw with all her strength. The woman’s head whipped up and back and her neck snapped.

Then it was over.

The two of them lay there, covered in blood and black muck and bits of flesh.

Dez recovered first. She saw the black mucus glistening on her thigh, and she screamed and scrambled over onto hands and knees and then shot to her feet. JT was up at once. He snatched the big steel fire extinguisher from the wall and turned it on her, using the compressed blast to whip the infectious goo off of her clothes. Then Dez tore it from his hands and did the same. Both of them were making small, almost feral whimpering sounds as they emptied the entire unit. Dez cursed and flung it away.

“We’re good,” JT said nervously, “we’re good, we’re good.”

But they were not good.

At the far end of the hall was a big set of windows that looked out over the parking lot. Until now that window was as black as the stormy night outside, but all at once it glowed with brilliant white intensity.

“Flares?” ventured Dez.

Then the whole building suddenly began to shake. Heavy vibrations rattled with the drone of huge machines. They bolted for the far end of the hallway and stared out the window as a line of Apache Longbow helicopters came tearing through the night sky over the line of pine trees, ghostly in the glow of the white phosphorous flares that drifted down on tiny parachutes. With them, flying close support, were four UH-60 Black Hawks.

The strain on JT’s face melted into a smile. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, “I think the cavalry just arrived!” He began waving to the choppers.

A moment later the side door on the lead Black Hawk rolled back to reveal the ugly multibarreled snout of a minigun.

“No!” screamed Dez as she grabbed JT and tore him away from the window a split second before hundreds of rounds chewed the whole wall into a storm cloud of flying glass, torn brick, and splintered wood.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

Trout reached out to Goat. “I’m sending you a lot of stuff,” he said. “Get it on the Net.”

“Okay, but we’re doing this the slow way, Billy.”

“What do you mean?”

“The way you’ve been doing your bits — you know, ‘Live from the apocalypse.’ That’s the key. We should be doing a live stream. We don’t need to edit anything. We’re not waiting for a broadcast time slot, man. This is raw and immediate, so let’s go reality show with it.”

“Will anyone watch it?”

“Billy, every-fucking-body is watching this. The whole world is watching, but I don’t know how long we have before the feds find me and shut us down. I’m running this through a real maze of off-site bounce-around servers, but they will find me…”

“Then let’s go live.”

Trout began doing interviews in the auditorium. Everyone was in shock, a few were absolutely catatonic with fear or grief. Trout could only imagine what some of them had seen. Family members torn apart by the zombies. Friends and schoolmates dragged out of the buses. Teachers slaughtered while trying to protect the kids. Or, as some people quietly suggested, a few teachers and parents simply running away, so wrapped up in their own immediate needs that they were willing to leave the innocent to their fate. Some of the people, adults and kids, were ebullient with a kind of excitement that was too big, too hopeful, and spoke of a fractured perception. Those were the ones, Trout knew, that would shatter if one more thing went bad.

One little girl stared blankly into the camera and asked, “Mommy?” She said that one word, uttered that single plea, over and over again. At the same time that Trout was aware that this was broadcast gold he was also aware that his heart was breaking. He knew that the little girl’s face would haunt his dreams the rest of his life … if there would be more life to live.

He kept going, interviewing everyone.

No one was grandstanding, no one was spinning a tale simply because they were on TV. These people were far too badly shaken, their hurt was far too present in their minds for any artifice, and Trout knew that this would be evident to anyone who watched the video. Anyone who was unmoved would have to be more dead inside than the creatures who were laying siege to the school.

A few of the adults he interviewed — a disheartening few — seemed to have found some measure of dignity and courage. On the other hand, many of the kids were displaying genuine courage that bordered on heroism. One eleven-year-old girl in particular, Bailey, had gathered the littlest kids into a corner and was entertaining them with stories. However, Trout saw a broken field hockey stick standing against her chair; it was jagged and covered with blood. He bet there was a story there, and he hoped he would have a chance to see it told.

Another kid, a hulking sixth-grade boy, whom puberty had hit like a runaway train, wore most of a set of football pads over his street clothes and carried an aluminum baseball bat. Trout interviewed the boy, Bryan, who told him about how he’d been chased into the gym by a couple of the dead and found five girls already there, hiding in the big wire cage where they stored the sports gear. Bryan had run into the cage, put on as many pads as he could, including a football helmet, then grabbed a baseball bat and left the cage to attack the zombies. It was a wild story, and Trout might have doubted Bryan’s word if not for the five girls who sat nearby giving the boy adoring stares.

Trout did as many short interviews as he could. Some were stories of combat and victory, some were narrow escapes, but most were about terror and loss. And in the case of many of the children, the stories were about abandonment — either by cowardice or, more often, because the parents and teachers had died during the fight. To a terrified child, though, it amounted to the same thing. And that made him think about Dez. She was the same age as most of these kids when her parents died, and even though she knew — with all of her considerable adult intelligence — that those deaths had been beyond the control of her parents, Dez was still caught up in abandonment issues to this day.

As he set up to interview a librarian who had been rescued by a cheerleader, the whole auditorium suddenly froze into a listening silence.

Trout spoke quietly into the mike. “We’re hearing gunshots. It sounds like … yes, they’re coming from upstairs. That’s the Stebbins police officers, Desdemona Fox and JT Hammond. They’re hunting the last of the infected in order to ensure that this building is safe and secure.”

He paused and aimed the mike at the ceiling. The shots continued and Trout wished that he felt as confident about what was happening up there as he sounded. But he needed to convey the message that the school was under control.

“The shooting has stopped,” he said and panned the camera to show that every one of the eight hundred faces in the auditorium was tilted upward, eyes wide, expressions showing mingled hope and dread.

The silence in the big room held and held, and then the whole building began to vibrate.

“Helicopters!” said one of the men in the back. “The army’s here!”

Wild cheers erupted throughout the hall. Trout goggled at this, but then considered that these people were here in the school long before he got here, so they may not have seen the ruthlessness of the National Guard.

“Listen to this,” he said in the mike. “People are cheering because they hear helicopters. They’re hoping that the military is coming to rescue them. I had that same hope when I crossed the quarantine zone. And, call me crazy, folks, I still hope that the guys in the white hats do come along and save our butts, because I’d love a happy ending here.”

He tilted the mike up again, and waited with the others, muttering, “Come on … come on … come on,” under his breath as the heavy throp-throp-throp of the rotors beat closer and closer.

And then the miniguns opened up.

The cheers instantly turned into a shrill chorus of screams as the windows exploded inward in storm clouds of glittering glass. The shards swept across the packed crowd, slashing and tearing. Children dove under the seats, adults tried to shield them with their own bodies. Bullets buzzed above the massed people like a swarm of furious hornets.

Billy Trout dove behind an upright piano used for school shows and the bullets coaxed a mad, disjointed tune as they ripped the instrument into kindling. Despite the madness raining down around him, Trout punched the Record and Send buttons and aimed the camera at the windows.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

The Black Hawk hovered in the air like a nightmare, the minigun growing like a dragon, spitting hundreds of rounds at the top floor of the school. A second helicopter coasted with monstrous slowness past the far side of the school, firing at the row of lighted windows. Below them, the living dead moaned and reached with aching fingers toward the sky, trying to tear the machines down to tear them open for the meat inside. But the choppers were too high and the dead could not reach them, and the intensity of need within those moans rose to a horrible shriek.

“This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse!” he yelled. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but we are under attack. Please … if anyone can hear me, we need help!” He turned up the gain on the lavaliere mike clipped to his lapel so that his words could be heard over the din of screams and automatic gunfire. “We’ve been begging for help from the government … and this is how they respond!”

Dez was curled in a fetal crouch, her arms wrapped around her head, her body bleeding from dozens of cuts. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but her mouth was open as a continual, red-raw scream tore itself from the deepest part of her. A dozen feet away, JT Hammond was curled into a similar knot, trying to shrink into himself. He, too, screamed.

This is not an attack by a terrorist organization. These are not the infected that I’ve been telling you about.

Billy panned the camera to show the helicopter hovering outside, its cannons filling the air with fire and death.

That is a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. It is part of the Army National Guard detachment sent to contain the plague outbreak in Stebbins. It is not firing on the infected. There are no infected where I am. I’m in the auditorium of the Stebbins Little School … a regional elementary school. Most of the people in this room are children. There are also teachers and some citizens of Stebbins who were told by authorities to come to this place because it is the county emergency shelter. I repeat … the people here are not infected. There are mostly children and people directed here as an official shelter.

Mrs. Madison crawled off the stage and into the sound room. The bullets couldn’t reach her in there, and she began waving to people — adults and children — to follow her. It was a risk though. It meant running across the no-man’s-land of the stage. A few tried. Not everyone succeeded.

From the booth, Mrs. Madison could see Billy Trout huddled under the piano. She knew what he was doing and could hear snatches of it. Then she saw the big microphone on its silver stand, the one that was provided for the pianist when she sang along with the children. The wires snaked across the stage, and the leads were still socketed into place on the sound board. The auditorium, she knew, was part of the emergency services setup in the school. The backup generator that powered the lights also provided power to essential emergency equipment. Including the public address system.

Mrs. Madison flipped a row of switches and channeled the feed from the fallen microphone into the main public address system, then turned the volume all the way to the right. Suddenly Billy Trout’s voice boomed like thunder from every speaker mounted inside — and outside — the school. When Trout heard this, he grinned, reached out and pulled the mike closer.

This cult of secrecy and the military’s obsession with owning the worst weapons of destruction has brought us all to this moment. More than six thousand people have died today. They were murdered. Nearly the entire population of Stebbins County. These people are no less victims of terrorism than were the nearly three thousand people who died when the Twin Towers fell, or the two hundred and sixty-six people in the four hijacked planes used on 9-11. Or the one hundred and twenty-five people killed at the Pentagon that day. Or the thousands killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what makes it more tragic, more unforgiveable … is that the people of Stebbins were not killed by al-Qaeda or the Taliban. There are no terrorist cells operating in Stebbins county. These people were murdered by the U.S. government because some people believe that it is better to kill the innocent than to admit a mistake.

On the other side of the building, the children and teachers and parents and refugees from the storm crawled under the auditorium seats, screaming and crying out in fear and confusion. For many of them the light of hope was blasted out of their eyes, not through injury, but as they tried and failed to grasp the meaning of what was happening. First the infected attacking and slaughtering so many, and now the rescuers — the army—turning their haven into a killing ground of flying glass and blood.

We cannot allow ourselves to become a nation of fools and slaves. We cannot allow our own government to serve its own agendas at the expense of the people. I appeal to every true American, every patriot — whether you’re left or right — to stand up and say: “Stop!”

Outside the fence line, hundreds of National Guardsmen stood ready, waiting for the helicopters to do their work so that the next phase of the cleanup could start. Sergeant Polk sat among them, listening to the words that boomed from the speakers mounted outside the school. He smoked a cigarette, chain-lighting it from the last. Discarded butts lay in a puddle by his feet.

One of the men in his squad chortled. “Do you hear this bullcrap?”

Polk turned to him.

“What’s wrong, Sarge?”

Polk nodded toward the school. “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

“Geez, man, what’d that bitch cop do to you? You going all girlie on us?”

Polk drew in the smoke, held it in his lungs, and exhaled slowly. Then he abruptly got out of the vehicle and began walking toward the gate.

“Hey!” yelled the other soldier. “Polkie … what the shit are you doing?”

“Taking a goddamn stand.”

“What for?”

Polk whirled. “There are people alive in there. Haven’t you fucking been listening?”

He turned and kept walking.

A lieutenant started to run after him. “Sergeant Polk, get your ass back to the line right goddamn now.”

Polk turned again. “This is wrong! We’re supposed to be here to help.”

“We can’t help these people,” growled the lieutenant.

“We didn’t even fucking try!”

He reached the row of parked Humvees and climbed into one.

“Sergeant, I am ordering you to stand down.”

Polk started the engine and put the Humvee in gear.

The lieutenant drew his sidearm and pointed it at Polk. “Sergeant, stand down and step out of the vehicle or I will shoot.”

Polk took his foot off the brake and let the Humvee roll forward. The lieutenant ran to stand between him and the gate, and a lot of the Guardsmen swarmed with him. All around them was the roar of the choppers, the thunder of the machine-gun fire, and the amplified sound of Billy Trout’s voice. Polk pressed lightly on the gas and the Humvee began moving toward the gate.

Other soldiers raised their weapons and pointed them at the vehicle, but the soldiers were cutting looks back and forth between Polk and the lieutenant.

By now the complete file of how this plague started, including a complete confession by Dr. Herman Volker, will have been sent to every major news service in the country. There are no more secrets to defend. You kill us now, it will be act of revenge … and everyone will know it …

Polk revved the engine, then leaned out of the window. “Either unlock the gate and stand back or watch your ass because I’ll roll right over it.”

“Sergeant, you are buying yourself a world of hurt with this nonsense. Stand down before I put you down.”

Polk revved again.

And a single soldier stepped away from the massed soldiers and began walking toward the Humvee. The lieutenant yelled at him, too, but the soldier held up one fist, forefinger extended. Then he turned and walked backward, his rifle in hand but the barrel pointed to the ground.

“He’s right, loot,” the man yelled. “This is bullshit. This is wrong.”

The lieutenant shifted the barrel of his pistol to cover the second soldier. “Drop your weapon and stand down.”

“Sir, I respectfully decline to accept that order.”

“On what fucking grounds?” screeched the lieutenant, his face boiled red.

“On the grounds that I enlisted to protect my country and my fellow Americans. Haven’t you been listening to what that reporter’s been saying? They have proof that this was something of ours. Maybe it was a mistake, or maybe somebody went batshit and released it, but we started this. How the hell can killing Americans be a right and proper military response to that?”

“That’s not for you to decide.”

The man brought his weapon to port arms. “It is now.”

“Fucking right it is,” said another man, and the lieutenant turned in horror to see a third man step out of the line and walk toward Polk. Then a fourth. Then five more. Ten.

… so, please … stop the slaughter. Stop the killing. Save the children of Stebbins County. We’re here. We’re alive. We need your help … Please …

As the lieutenant stood there, his pistol still pointed at arm’s length, at least half of the men deserted his side of the parking lot and went to stand in a ragged line around Polk’s Humvee. Other Guardsmen were hurrying along the fence line to see what was happening.

Another officer, Captain Rice, came to stand beside the lieutenant.

“Eddy,” he said softly, “you’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life, and I can guarantee that no matter how this all plays out today, it’ll be the last one of your career.”

“They’re deserting during a time of crisis.”

“That’s one way to see it,” said Rice. “But, tell me, son … you ever heard of General George Custer?”

Then Captain Rice pushed the lieutenant’s gun arm down, turned, and walked across the concrete to stand with the others.

And then the guns stopped. Smoke whipped up out of the barrels to be threshed by the whipping rotor blades and scattered as mist into the rain. The choppers — those two and the others that hovered above the parking lot — still filled the air with thunder, but the madness of the gunfire had abruptly stopped.

Glass tinkled as pieces fell from the shattered window frames.

In the parking lot the dead moaned.

In the auditorium the wounded cried out.

Billy Trout crept cautiously out from under the sagging ruin of the piano, brushing glass from his hair and lacerating his hand without realizing it. He stared around at the damage. Everyone seemed hurt, but no one looked dead. He frowned, trying to understand it. He could see the Black Hawk holding station outside, the gun still pointed into the school.

Why have they stopped? he wondered.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

“Is it over…?”

Dez’s voice was tiny, a whisper from a raw throat.

The air thrummed with the sound of the rotors. Inside her head there was a more terrible thunder as her pulse hammered her brain. As she rolled onto her hands and knees, glass fell from her hair and clothes. She stayed there, unable to move, feeling the entire day burning in every bruised bone, every aching muscle, every fried nerve.

JT Hammond crawled slowly to the wall, shedding debris and leaving a trail of bloody hand and knee prints. He grabbed the shattered sill and pulled himself up.

The two Black Hawks pulled back from the building. Beneath them the dead were massing into a huge crowd. The sound of the gunfire and the voice from the speakers drew them from every part of the parking lot. Thousands of bone white hands reached for the birds, thousands of mouths moaned and bit the air.

As the first two Black Hawks moved away, their machine-gun barrels trailing smoke, the other two flew out over the crowds of the living dead.

The cries of the dead rose into the cold drizzle of midnight.

“Is it over?” Dez asked again.

“No,” he said.

The guns swiveled up toward the window.

Then there was a mechanical squawk behind them. Dez and JT turned and looked down. The walkie-talkie lay there.

“… icer Desdemona Fox, please respond. Officer Desdemona Fox, please respond…” The call repeated and repeated. Dez did not recognize the voice.

“Well,” said Dez, “ain’t that interesting as shit?”

JT laughed. He turned around and slid down to sit with his back to the wall.

Dez climbed painfully to her feet and tottered over to where the communicator lay amid the rubble. She bent over with a groan and picked it up, keyed the Send button and spoke.

“This is Fox.”

“Desdemona Fox?”

“No, it’s Michael J., asshole.”

“Please verify your badge number and the last four digits of your social security number.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Dez complied.

The voice said, “Confirmed. Thank you, Officer Fox. Please hold the line.”

“Is this some kind of trick?” asked JT, but Dez didn’t reply.

Another voice spoke, one she hadn’t heard before. “Officer Fox?”

“This is Fox. Who’s this?”

“This is Major General Simeon Zetter, commander of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.”

A day ago she would have been impressed to the point of speechlessness. A lot had changed since then. “What can I do for you, General?”

“Is Mr. Trout with you?”

“He’s in the building. Why?”

“His videos have gotten quite a bit of attention.”

“Kind of the point, general. We’ve got more ready to roll.”

“No doubt; however, before you broadcast them I want you both to listen to me,” said Zetter. “I’m speaking frankly to you and I want to appeal to your integrity and your patriotism.”

“Save the recruiting speech,” barked Dez. “We’ve been playing fair. You fuckers haven’t.”

“Dez,” JT said softly.

Zetter said, “I understand your feelings, Officer Fox. I doubt apologies would carry much weight right now.”

“Not much, no.”

“I have just taken tactical command of this situation.”

“What happened to Dietrich?”

“He’s been relieved of his duties, Officer Fox. I am speaking to you now on the direct orders and behalf of the President of the United States.”

“I didn’t vote for him,” she said, just to be pissy.

“That doesn’t make him any less your president or any less my boss,” said Zetter. “I give you my personal word, for whatever you think that’s worth, that we are willing to listen to what you have to say.”

“That’s not enough, general,” she fired back. “I’m looking out the window at a bunch of gunships. If we hadn’t posted those videos we’d be dead right about now.”

“Yes,” agreed the general, “you would. And I make no apology for that. We are facing a terrible crisis and the nature of it has forced us to make some very hard choices.”

“Like slaughtering an entire town?”

The general paused only a moment, Dez had to give him that. “Yes,” he said. “As horrible, tragic, and regrettable as that is. The disease pathogen at large in Stebbins has no equal on earth. Though it will sound harsh to say it, I believe that it is because of God’s mercy that we had this hurricane, because without it the plague would doubtless have spread much farther than it has. That is not a fatuous comment, Officer Fox, and it is not as heartless as it sounds.”

“I’m sure we’re all touched by your concern.”

“The president wants me to assure you that everything that should and must be done will be done to bring those responsible for this disaster to justice.”

“That doesn’t do much for the people of Stebbins, General. And it doesn’t do much for the kids here in the school. I want to know what you’re going to do to resolve this situation.”

“The simple truth is that the best and safest way to protect the entire country would be to carpet bomb Stebbins with thermobaric weapons. That plan was approved prior to the posting of your second video.”

“That’s what you have in the Apaches?”

“Yes.”

“And now…?”

“Now this has become a different matter. Even as we speak the entire country is raising its voice in protest. Stebbins is on everyone’s tongue. The White House switchboard has been totally jammed for two hours. No one is talking about anything else.”

“So … does that mean you’re going to get us the hell out of here?”

“We are discussing options on how to do that,” said Zetter. “I need to know that you understand how serious this is.”

“We’re trapped in a school surrounded by zombies, General. Yeah, we get how fucking serious it is.”

“Then tell me … if you were in my shoes, knowing what you know about this disease, what would you do?”

“Nice try,” said Dez, “but I’m not a general, a scientist, or the president. We want you to solve this.”

“We can’t. The best we can do is either eradicate it or wait it out. The thermobaric option has a ninety-three percent estimated chance of success.”

“What are the odds on quarantine?”

“To be frank, fifty-fifty at best. I advised the president that it is a gamble not worth taking. I stand by my comment. If one infected person breaks quarantine then we are likely to be facing an apocalyptic plague. Those words are chosen with precision, Officer Fox. This would be a biological apocalypse.”

“Okay,” Dez said tersely, “So why are we talking? I’m still looking out the window at rockets and miniguns.”

“My scouts said that the back door of the school was open for a significant length of time, and they reported gunfire from inside the school. That suggests that some of the infected are inside the school.”

“All of the living dead have been taken care of,” said Dez.

“What about people with bites or exposure to the black blood? Do you know what that is?”

“Yes.”

“Anyone who has had contact with that is likely to be infected, even if they are not yet showing signs.”

“We have a few bite victims, but they’ve been quarantined in locked rooms. Everyone in the auditorium is uninfected.”

“That’s not good enough, Officer Fox. If you want us to help you, then you need to help us. There can’t be a single infected person in that building. There can’t be a single suspected case. Not one. Are we clear on that?”

Dez looked at JT, who was sitting with his head in his hands.

“Christ,” he said, “he’s talking about kids and friends of ours and—”

“JT,” she whispered, “what choice do we have?”

He shook his head. “You’re killing me here, Dez.”

Into the walkie-talkie she said, “We’ll do what has to be done.”

“Send the infected out of the building,” said the general.

“Are you going to quarantine them? Are you going to take them to a secure medical facility?”

Zetter paused. “I’m sorry, Officer Fox, but that is not possible. Not with this plague.”

Dez closed her eyes.

“And what about us?” she asked hoarsely.

“You will be under quarantine for an indefinite period. We are trying to determine the absolute outside range of the parasite’s life cycle. That means that you survivors are a community in there. We’ll air-drop food, weapons, medical supplies, hazmat suits, and other materials. None of my people will enter the building. Anyone who leaves the building before the quarantine is lifted will be terminated. No exceptions. That order comes down from the president of the United States, Officer Fox.”

“What about the rest of Stebbins? There may still be people out there … pockets of resistance?”

The general sighed. “Officer Fox … there is no ‘rest of Stebbins.’ Not anymore.”

Dez almost threw the walkie-talkie out of the window. Instead she walked over and sat down next to JT.

“Okay,” she said into the mike. “And goddamn you all to hell.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

Billy Trout was covered in blood. Some of it was his; a lot of it belonged to the children in the hall. After the shooting stopped, he and the other adults swarmed through the hall, coaxing children out from under chairs, herding them and carrying others onto the stage and into the dressing rooms and greenroom backstage. It disturbed Trout that so few of the children were crying. Right now even hysterical screams would be more normal than the drawn faces and empty eyes of these kids. He had seen this kind of thing before, mostly in newsreel footage and photos of children in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Chechnya, in war-ravaged places around the globe. The hollow stares of hollow children who have been emotionally and psychologically gutted by fear, horror, and the betrayal or abandonment of those who were supposed to be there to protect them.

The only relief, and it was a small one, is that there were no casualties. Despite injuries, some serious, to everyone in the room, no one had been killed. In Trout’s view, as far as miracles went this one was kind of left-handed.

He could hear the helicopters outside and wondered why they had stopped.

His camera was on a stool at the edge of the stage. The Record and Send buttons were still locked down. The images of bloody children crawling out from their marginal niches of safety did not need a narrator, and Trout was too busy anyway.

He thought about the diatribe he’d given during the attack. The phrasing was probably too colorful, a bit over the top. On the other hand, this whole thing had a “worst-case scenario” flavor to it.

There was a knock on the door and everyone froze. The teachers with guns rushed over, grimacing with impotent anger. Trout ran with them. If this was another attack, then Team Stebbins was going to rack up some points.

The knock came again. Three hits, then two, then three.

“It’s Dez!” Trout said as he shouldered his way past the armed teachers. He unlocked the doors and pulled them open.

Dez Fox and JT Hammond stood there, bloody and shaken, looking as battered and abused as the people inside. Even though he had no invitation, no right, no permission to do so, Trout took Dez in his arms and pulled her into a fierce embrace. For a moment she tensed to push him back, but then wrapped her arms around him, and they held each other, feeling unuttered sobs tremble beneath each other’s skin.

“God, Dez,” Trout whispered, kissing her hair.

The teachers lowered their guns. And Trout slowly, reluctantly released Dez. She did not move away from him, and he was glad of that.

JT still stood in the hallway, apart and alone, his shotgun held in his bloody hands. The expression on his face was indescribable. It was a bottomless sadness mixed with a realization of the worst horrors.

“We heard from the National Guard,” he said. “They called Dez on her walkie-talkie. They offered us a deal.”

The crowd pressed close to listen.

“What kind of deal?” asked Trout cautiously.

“A bad one,” said Dez softly. “But it’s all we’re going to get.” Trout watched her eyes as she looked out at the sea of faces. Most of the little children were backstage now, but there were teenagers here, and babies in the arms of people who had probably rescued them from the things that had been their parents.

“Tell us,” said Mrs. Madison.

She told them.

That’s when the weeping began. Shock from the helicopter attack crumbled in the face of this new grief.

“How many bite victims do we have here?” asked Dez.

Mrs. Madison shook her head, refusing to say.

One of the other teachers put her hand on the principal’s shoulder but looked at Dez. “Fifteen adults. Three … children.”

Dez sagged back against Trout and he caught her.

“You can’t send the children out there,” insisted Mrs. Madison. “It’s inhuman.”

“It’s a plague,” snapped JT so harshly that it silenced everyone. “If the infected stay in here they will get sick and die, and then they will reanimate. Even if you keep them locked up, you can’t save them. All you can decide is whether they die a slow agonizing death or go … more quickly…”

His voice broke at the end, but his words hung in the air.

Mrs. Madison turned to the other teacher and buried her face in her shoulder and wept. Everyone stood there and watched her thin back hitch and buck with each terrible sob.

JT, Dez, and Trout went to do what had to be done. They asked for volunteers and got none. Not one.

The three of them closed the auditorium doors and walked down the hallway to the classrooms where the infected were being kept in isolation. Trout thought that it felt like walking that last mile from a jail cell to the execution chamber. It had the same sense of finality at the end of it, the same enormous dread of the unknown.

But what he said aloud was, “With everything that’s happened, we’ve kind of lost sight of how this started.”

“Volker?” asked JT.

“No … Homer Gibbon. Volker said that he’d be different than the other infected. That he might still have some conscious control over his body. I wonder … could he be out there now? Is he the reason this spread so fast? Is he going around like some monstrous Johnny Appleseed, spreading the plague?”

JT said nothing.

Dez shook her head. “If he is, then the Guard will have to hunt him down.”

“Right now,” JT said softly, “it’s hard to say who’s worse. Gibbon, Volker, or the people in the government who allowed anyone to work on the Lucifer thing. They’re all monsters.”

Dez nodded, and Trout agreed wholeheartedly.

The bite victims were in one room; those sick from the black mucus were in another.

“Billy,” said Dez, “you unlock the door and then get behind us. We’re going to have to go in guns out just in case they’re turned.”

Trout looked at her. “Would it be easier if they have?”

JT and Dez said it at the same time. “Yes.”

But none of them had. They were all there, still alive, but terribly sick. They sat slumped in chairs with their heads on the little desks; or they lay on the floor covered with coats and anything else that would keep them warm.

Trout looked around the room and then at JT and Dez. “We’re all going to hell for this.”

“Already there,” said JT. He knelt by a man who was a friend of his, Greg Schauer, who owned a little bookstore in town. He touched his shoulder and rocked him gently. “Hey, man … hey, Greg…”

Schauer opened his eyes like a sleeper after a long night, but his gaze remained vague and disconnected. “JT…? What’s going on, man?”

“C’mon, Greg,” said JT as he tucked his hands under Schauer’s armpits and pulled him to his feet. “Time to go, brother.”

Schauer peered at him with dreamy eyes. “Go? Go where?”

“Outside … they’re waiting for us.”

“Who?”

“The National Guard.”

Schauer managed a weak smile. “’Bout time the cavalry arrived.”

JT sniffed back tears. “Yeah. The good guys are here to take care of us.”

He shot a look of black hatred at Dez. It wasn’t meant for her, and she knew it; he was sharing what could not be expressed, and she met him with equal intensity.

The good guys.

The words were like a curse, or the punch line of a bad joke told in front of good people.

One by one they helped the sick people to their feet. Dez produced her last pairs of polyethylene gloves from the compartment on her utility belt. She gave one pair to Trout and dragged the others over her own lacerated hands.

There was no trouble, no resistance. The people were too sick and frightened, and those who had the energy to be involved in what was happening were guided along by the thought that they were walking toward rescue and medical treatment and safety. Even though none of them had been told that beyond JT’s cynical comment.

The good guys are here to take care of us.

When the infected were all out in the hall, Dez reached for the doorknob to the second quarantine room. That was where the three children were kept. Trout stepped up and pushed her hand away.

“No,” he said. “I’ll do this…”

It meant so much to Dez that Trout understood this about her, and she smiled through her tears. “No,” she said, and she opened the door.

The children were small. There were two boys of about kindergarten age and a girl who looked to be in second grade. All past-tense designations now. These little ones would never go back to school. They would never learn, never play, never grow up. They would always be remembered as children, if there was anyone among the survivors who knew them.

Despite the risk of infection, Trout bent and picked up one of the little boys. The child was on the edge of a fevered coma, but his eyes were still open. He looked despairingly at Dez, who nodded.

He understands, she thought.

JT picked up the other boy and cradled him in his big arms. The child had a bite on his arm that was already festering.

“We have to do this quick,” he said.

Dez went to the little girl. The child was as hot as a furnace, but her eyelids fluttered open as Dez gently picked her up.

“Are … we going home now?” the little girl asked.

A sob broke in Dez’s chest and for a moment she stood there, clutching the girl to her chest, her face crumpled into a knot of grief.

“Yes,” she whispered to the little girl. “Yeah, baby … we’re going home now.”

She led the way out of the room and down the hall. JT and Trout waited for the staggering adults to follow, and then they came last. A procession of the dying and the broken.

They walked to the stairwell and then down the cold tower that was no longer part of a knight’s castle or a princess’s glittering palace or a wizard’s lair. Now it was cold stone, as lifeless as the stones on the walls of a crypt.

They stopped at the back door and, still holding the girl, Dez unclipped the walkie-talkie and keyed the Send button.

“We’re bringing out the bite victims. Three of us are not sick. Two cops and a civilian in a blue shirt and khakis. Do not fire on us.”

“Roger that,” said a voice. Not Zetter.

“We don’t want to get overrun either. Can you draw the infected away from the door long enough to let us bring them out?”

“Yes, ma’am. You’ll hear it.”

Trout grinned at Dez. “‘Ma’am’? You’d have threatened to kneecap me if I ever called you that.”

“That still applies, so don’t get any ideas.”

Suddenly outside a siren began howling. Another joined it, and another. Dez leaned close to the door to listen. The sound began to move, to fade.

“They’re using sirens to draw them away.”

JT nodded approval. “First smart thing they’ve done.”

After a couple of minutes the walkie-talkie squawked.

“You’re clear, Officer Fox,” said the voice. “It’s a tight window, so hurry.”

JT pushed on the crash bar and the door opened. There were bodies outside, crumpled and broken. JT looked around for movement and saw none.

“It’s clear.”

He stepped outside and held the door as the line of infected people shambled out. Trout and Dez came last, still holding the children. The soldiers had popped more flares, but they were on the far side of the parking lot, and trucks with sirens were parked on the other side of the fence.

“Are they going to help us?” asked one of the bite victims.

“They’re coming,” said Dez, hating herself for the lie inside the truth. She told the wounded to sit down by the wall. Some of them immediately fell asleep; others stared with empty eyes at the glowing flares high in the sky.

For a moment it left Dez, JT, and Trout as the only ones standing, each of them holding a dying child. The tableau was horrific and surreal. They stared at each other, frozen into this moment because the next was too horrible to contemplate. Then they saw movement.

JT peered into the shadows. “They’re coming.”

“The Guard?” asked Dez, a last flicker of hope in her eyes.

“No,” he said.

They heard the moans. For whatever reason, pulled by some other aspect of their hunger, a few of the dead had not followed the flares and the sirens, and now they staggered toward the living who stood by the open door.

“We have to go,” said Trout.

“And right now,” agreed JT. He kissed the little boy on the cheek and set him down on the ground between two sleeping infected. Trout sighed brokenly and did the same. “Dez, come on…,” murmured JT.

But Dez turned half away as if protecting the little girl she held from him.

“Please, Hoss…?”

“Dez.”

“I can’t!”

“Give her to me, honey. I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry.”

It took everything Dez had left to allow JT to take the sleeping girl from her arms. She shook her head, hating him, hating the world, hating everything.

“Better get inside,” JT warned. Some of the zombies were very close now. Twenty paces.

Trout ran to the door. “Dez, JT, come on. We have to go. We can’t leave the door open.”

Dez retreated toward the door, backing away from the child she had to abandon. Trout reached down and took her hand, and when she returned his squeeze it was crushingly painful. He pulled her toward the door as the first of the dead stepped into the pale light thrown by the emergency light.

“JT, come on, let’s go!” Trout yelled.

The big cop did not move. He held the little girl so gently, stroking her hair and murmuring to her.

“JT!” cried Dez. “We have to close the door!”

He smiled at her. “Yeah,” he said, “you do.”

They waited for him to come, but he stayed where he was.

“JT?” Dez asked in a small, frightened voice. “What’s wrong?”

JT kissed the little girl’s forehead and set her down with the others. Then he straightened and showed her his wrist. It was crisscrossed with glass cuts from the helicopter attack.

“What?” she asked.

Then she saw it.

A semicircular line of bruised punctures.

Dez whimpered something. A question. “How?”

“Upstairs, when those bastards tackled me. One of them got me … I didn’t see which one. Doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”

Then the full realization hit Dez. “NO!”

It was all Trout could do to hold her back. She struggled wildly and even punched him. The blow rocked him, but he did not let go. He would never let go. Never.

“No!” Dez screamed. “You can’t!”

The dead were closing in on JT. He unslung the shotgun. Across the parking lot the last flares were fading.

“Go on, honey,” JT said.

“No goddamn way, Hoss,” she growled, fighting with Trout, hitting him, hurting him. “We stand together and we fucking well go down together.”

“Not this time,” JT said, and he was smiling. Trout could see it even if Dez could not, that JT was at peace with this. “I’m going to keep these bastards away from those kids as long as I can. I need you to go inside. I need you to tell the National Guard to do what they have to do, but make sure they do it right. They got to wipe ’em all out. All of them.”

What he meant was as clear as it was horrible.

“JT — don’t leave me!”

He shook his head. “I won’t ever leave you, kid. Not in any way that matters. Now … go on. There are kids inside that building who need you. You can’t leave them.”

And there it was.

Dez sagged against Trout, and he pulled her inside and held her tight as the door swung shut with a clang.

They heard the first blasts of the shotgun. Trout didn’t hear the next one because Dez was screaming.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

JT Hammond stood with his back to the line of bite victims, holding the shotgun by its double pistol grips, firing, pumping, firing. There was almost no need to aim. There were so many and they were so close. He emptied the gun and used it as a club to kill as many as he could before his arms began to ache. Then he dropped the gun and pulled his Glock. He had one full magazine left.

He debated using the bullets on the wounded, but then he heard the whine of the helicopters’ rotors change, intensify, draw closer; and he knew what would happen next. He just had to keep the monsters away from the children until then. Soon … soon it would all be over, and it would happen fast.

He took the gun in both hands and fired.

And fired.

And fired.

Then one of the dead came at him from his left and JT turned to see that it was Doc Hartnup. He almost smiled.

“Sorry, Doc,” he said, and fired.

Doc Hartnup saw JT Hammond fighting for his life. He would have given everything to help this man, to save a single life. It would not repay all of the lives he’d taken … but it would give him at least a moment’s grace. However he had no control over the body. It staggered toward the officer, legs moving quickly as the hunger built to insane levels.

His white hands reached for JT, ready to grab, to rend and tear and expose all of that fresh meat.

Then JT turned toward him and raised the pistol.

Hartnup looked into the barrel of the black automatic. It was bottomless and as dark as forever.

“Sorry, Doc,” said JT Hammond.

There was a moment of intense white, brighter than the sun. Then everything went black. Hartnup felt his body falling.

Then he felt something else. Inside the hollow body he felt himself fall. Moving. Being pulled down into a well of darkness. He panicked and tried to fight it but it was like being pulled into the gravity well of a black hole. Hartnup fell and fell, and as he fell he could feel the connections to his stolen body snap and fall away, as if the scaffolding that kept him in position within the empty shell was collapsing.

He could not feel the body of the Hollow Man.

He could not feel anything. Not the hunger, not the pain. Nothing.

And soon, he could not think anything.

As his body fell to the bloody ground, Doc Hartnup fell into the black well of death and was truly and completely gone.

JT Hammond stood above the children, his smoking gun in his hand, the slide locked back, the gun empty. Searchlights swept across the sea of zombies and focused a burning ring around him. JT raised his arms out the side, letting the pistol fall. The living dead swarmed him.

The Black Hawks opened fire.

The heavy bullets tore into the zombies, punching through meat and shattering bone, knocking the dead backward and off their feet. Exploding skulls and tearing limbs from their sockets.

In the White House Situation Room, the president of the United States sat with his aides and Scott Blair, National Security Advisor, and watched the slaughter of the infected.

“What have we done?” whispered the president.

Blair took off his glasses and rubbed his face. “We did the right thing, Mr. President.”

The president shook his head. “No,” he said, “no we did not.”

Inside the school, huddled together on the floor, Dez and Trout held each other as the bullets hammered like cold rain on the walls. It seemed to go on forever. Pain and noise and death seemed to be the only things that mattered anymore. The barrage began chewing through the walls, showering them with debris.

And then … silence.

Plaster dust drifted down on them as the rotors of the helicopters dwindled to faintness and then were gone.

“It’s over,” Trout whispered. He stroked Dez’s hair and kissed her head and wept with her. “I won’t ever leave you, Dez. Never.”

Dez slowly raised her head. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears, and her eyes were filled with grief and hurt. She raised trembling fingers to his face. She touched his cheeks, his ear, his mouth.

“I know,” she said.

Dez wrapped her arms around Trout with crushing force. He allowed it, gathering her even closer. They clung to one another and sobbed hard enough to shatter the whole ugly world.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

Goat looked out at the storm. The night sky was still black, but the rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. From where he sat he could see the lines of red taillights and white headlights on the highway. He wondered how many of those travelers knew what was happening?

Probably all of them by now.

The story was everywhere. It was the only story on the news right now, and Goat suspected that half of those oncoming headlights were reporters trying to get to Stebbins while the story was still breaking. He had already seen ABC, CBS, and CNN vans come through.

He trolled the online news. FOX was the first to pull the word “zombie” out of the info dump of the Volker interview. “Zombie Plague in Pennsylvania.” Goat snorted. It sounded like an SNL skit. Wasn’t funny at all.

He looked down at the clock on his laptop. Ten minutes to one. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this thing started. It felt like a year.

The news feeds broke into the story to announce that the president was going to address the nation at 3:00 a.m. Goat wondered if he would pass the buck onto the previous administration, or to spooks within the intelligence community who still clung to the glory days of the Cold War. Or, would the president take the hit, be the captain of the ship? Either way, a lot of things were going to change.

Goat sipped his coffee and wondered when Billy would call. The last message from him said that they were going to take the infected outside. Since then … nothing.

Headlights flashed as a car pulled into the lot. Goat flicked a glance. A metallic green Cube. Ugly. Same make and color as the one in Aunt Selma’s front yard. It made him think of that, and how it all started.

Then his mind ground to a halt as the driver’s door opened up and a man got out.

A tall man. Bare-chested despite the cold.

A grinning man, with a tattoo of a black eye on each flat pectoral.

Goat wanted to scream but he had no voice at all. He wanted to run, but he was frozen in place.

The man walked the few steps between car and door in an awkward fashion, as if his knees and hip joints were unusually stiff.

Goat’s fingers were on the keyboard. Almost without thinking, his fingers moved, tapping keys as the bare-chested man pulled open the door and stepped into the Starbucks. The few remaining customers turned to look at him. The barista glanced up from the caramel macchiato she was making. She saw the bare chest and the tattoos. She saw the caked blood and the wicked smile.

The man stood blocking the door. Grinning with bloody teeth.

Goat’s fingers typed eight words.

The barista screamed.

Goat loaded the address of the press and media listserv into the address bar.

The customers screamed.

Goat hit Send.

Then he, too, screamed.

In Bordentown. Homer Gibbons. Quarantine failed.

It’s here …

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

This is how the world ends.

This is how the world ends.

This is how the world ends.

Not with a bang … but a bite.