Fall of Night

CHAPTER ONE

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

The car sat in the middle of the road with the radio playing at full blast.

All four doors were open.

The windows were cracked and there was one small red handprint on the glass.

The voice on the radio was saying that this was the end of the world.

There was no one in the car, no one in the streets. No one in any of the houses or stores. There wasn’t a single living soul there to hear the reporter’s message.

It didn’t matter, though.

They already knew.

CHAPTER TWO

Stebbins County police officer JT Hammond pushed on the crash-bar and the door opened. There were bodies outside in the school parking lot. Scores of them, 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.

Adults and children.

Billy Trout and JT’s partner, Desdemona Fox, came last, each of them holding a small child in their arms.

The National Guardsmen popped several flares on the far side of the parking lot to attract the masses of living dead. On that side of the lot, behind the chain-link fence, all of the Guard trucks sent up a continuous wail with their sirens. The dead shuffled that way, drawn by light and noise.

One of the victims, a man who had been bitten by what had been his own wife and children, stared glassily at the stiffly moving bodies. Then he raised a weak arm and pointed to the soldiers.

“Are they coming to help us?” he asked.

“They’re coming,” said Dez, hating herself for the implied lie. 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 standing by the open door. More of them rounded the corner of the building. Perhaps drawn by a more powerful force.

The smell of fresh meat.

“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 Fox clung to the little girl in her arms.

“There’s more of them,” said Trout.

“Dez, come on…” murmured JT.

But Dez turned away as if protecting the little girl she held from him. “Please, Hoss…?”

“Dez.”

“I can’t!”

“Give her to me, honey,” JT said gently. “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 this open or they’ll get inside.”

Dez reluctantly moved toward the door, backing away from the child she had to abandon. Trout reached 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 glow 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.

He pushed his sleeve up.

That was when she saw it. A semicircular line of bruised punctures.

Dez whimpered something. A question. “How?”

“Upstairs, when those bastards tackled us. 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 yelled. “You can’t!”

The dead were closing in on JT. He unslung the shotgun. Across the parking lot the last flares were fading and the trucks turned off their sirens, one by one.

“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.

“No! No! No!” Dez kept repeating.

“I’m going to keep these bastards away from those kids as long as I can,” said JT. “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 eight hundred people inside the school, Dez. There are children 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.

JT 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.

Inside the school building, huddled together on the floor, Desdemona Fox and Billy Trout held each other as 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.

And then … silence.

Plaster dust drifted down on them as the roar of the helicopters’ rotors dwindled to faintness and then was 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 THREE

The gunship hung in the air like a monstrous insect. Except for the heavy beat of the rotors there was no sound, inside or out. Sergeant Hap Rollins, the door-gunner, crouched behind the M134 minigun, mouth acrid with the gun smoke he’d swallowed, his ears ringing with remembered thunder. Thousands of shell casings rolled around his feet, eddying like a brass tide as the Black Hawk and its crew waited.

Waited.

Rollins removed his hands from the minigun’s handles but his skin and bones still quivered from the vibrations of firing four thousand rounds per minute in a steady flow down into the parking lot. He reached up to his face and with clumsy fingers pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. His eyes burned from the smoke, but as he blinked he could feel wetness on his lashes. It wasn’t sweat and he knew it. Rollins wiped at his eyes with the backs of his trembling hands.

Below was a scene conjured in hell itself.

The parking lot of the elementary school was littered with the dead.

A few of them whole, most of them destroyed, torn apart by the relentless plunging fire from Rollins’s Black Hawk and the other gunships.

But what drew Rollins’s eyes and pulled tears from them was the figure that lay twisted into a scarecrow sprawl by the back door. It was a tall black man. Or it had been. A man dressed in the uniform of a police officer.

A man who had been infected; a man no one and no science could save.

But he hadn’t turned yet. That was clear to Rollins and probably to everyone. The man had come out of the school leading a staggering line of sick and injured people.

All infected, all dying. None of them dead yet.

Another cop, a woman, had tried to pull him back inside. Rollins could tell from her body language that she was screaming and fighting to pull the male officer to safety. However another man, a white man, dragged her away and forced her inside the school.

Two of the uninfected getting clear.

Leaving the others outside.

Leaving them to die.

The cop had stood his ground and as the zombies closed around him, he fired and fired and fired. It was the most heroic thing Hap Rollins had ever seen in twelve years as a combat vet.

The man had to know that there was no hope.

None.

So why did he fight?

The answer huddled behind him against the now closed door to the Stebbins Little School. A little girl. Other little kids.

The cop fought like a wild man to keep them safe from the monsters. To make sure that their last memory was not of being consumed. To protect them from that while he waited for the big black insects in the sky to end it all with bullets.

Rollins had been in the best position to fire on the black cop.

And the kids.

The orders came.

The killing began.

The dying began.

And the tears.

Now the infected were dead. All of them. The dying and the risen dead. All of them littered on the pavement and splashed against the walls of the school. Against the building designated as the town emergency shelter.

Rollins was not a deeply educated man, but he understood the concepts of irony and farce.

And tragedy.

He wanted to look away from the torn body of the cop and the smaller rag doll figure of the little girl. Wanted to.

Couldn’t.

On some level Sergeant Rollins felt that it would have been a sinful thing to do. Disrespectful.

Then the helicopter began moving, rising and turning, pulling him away from the evidence of such hurt and harm. As it went, Hap Rollins hung his head and prayed to a God he was absolutely certain had turned His back on this world.

CHAPTER FOUR

Major General Simeon Zetter watched the live feeds on the screens of four laptops set side by side on the big table. Around him the other officers under his command watched in utter silence. No one spoke. All Zetter could hear was the tinny sound of helicopter rotors from the laptop speakers and the labored exhalations of the men and women around him. Everyone was panting as if they’d all run up a steep hill even though all they had done was watch.

The voice of a Black Hawk pilot suddenly cut through the stillness.

“Zero movement,” he said. “Spotters observe zero movement on all sides of the target.”

The target was the school.

On the screen, four M1117 armored security vehicles entered through the main gate as machine gunners behind the fence kept watch. The M1117s split and each one began rolling along one side of the school. The vehicles bounced over ragged pieces of the dead.

“Confirmed,” said the same voice. “Zero movement.”

Zetter heard several of the officers let out deep sighs.

He reached for a microphone and gave a string of orders for his people to expand the ground search using the modified Desert Patrol Vehicles. Lines of these dune buggy — like, two-man vehicles vanished into the surrounding woods and neighborhoods, going where the heavier and clumsier Humvees couldn’t.

Then Zetter sat back and let out his own sigh. He got to his feet and turned to the gathered officers, all of whom fell silent.

“This is a tragic and terrible day in American history,” he said. “We have all been asked to make hard decisions and to carry them out with professionalism and efficiency.”

The officers nodded.

“You are all aware of the political delicacy of what has happened today.”

More nods, but now they were careful. There were three huge elephants in the room with them, and nobody wanted to talk about any of them except the infection. That was safe ground because it was why they were there. The president and the governor of Pennsylvania had mobilized the Guard to stop the spread of an old Cold War bioweapon that had been released accidentally by a former Soviet scientist. That was, by strict military parlance, a clusterfuck. And the pathogen’s virulence was such that it spread throughout the town, infecting virtually everyone. Killing them. And then in a twist of mad science that even Zetter found hard to accept, it brought the dead back as aggressive disease vectors. The risen dead, driven by the genetically engineered parasites that made up the substance of the pathogen, attacked like sharks — mindless, endlessly hungry, and vicious.

That resulted in the second elephant in the room, the one each of them knew would haunt their lives and taint the military here on the ground and the administration in Washington. Acting under orders to sterilize the town in order to stop the spread of the infection, Zetter’s command predecessor, Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich, had ordered the town’s emergency shelter — the Stebbins Little School — to be destroyed. It was filled with people, many of who were infected. Every officer understood the necessity for that kill order; most of them even agreed with it.

However, a reporter, Billy Trout from Regional Satellite News, was inside the school. Inside, but connected to the outside world via a live news feed. As the gunships opened up on the building, Trout made an impassioned plea to the world to save the uninfected children. The plea hit every single news service. The media and public outcry was immediate and massive.

Massive.

And that directly led to the ugliest part of this — at least for the officers in that command center. The reporter’s plea was broadcast to the troops outside the building via the school’s public address system.

The result?

One by one the soldiers at the fence stood up and refused to follow orders. They would not kill the children.

It was mutiny, and one officer — a young lieutenant — tried to nip it in the bud, but he was overwhelmed and, eventually, outranked as a more senior officer — Captain Rice — went to stand with the mutineers.

The president had immediately ordered General Zetter to relieve Dietrich of his post and assume overall command of the situation. Every officer there knew that it was unfair to put the blame on Dietrich, just as it was unfair that the public and the media would demonize them for their actions in Stebbins County.

Actions that, had they not been taken, would have opened the door to a massive and perhaps unstoppable pandemic.

That was the biggest elephant in the room, and nobody there dared talk about it.

Now, another chapter had been completed. Zetter had contacted the reporter and two police officers inside the school and made them a deal. If they sent out every infected person then the school would be spared.

It was a bad deal and everyone — inside and outside the school — hated it.

But it would play well in the media. As well as something like this could play.

Zetter looked at each of his officers and read variations on this story in each pair of eyes. He grunted softly and nodded.

“You all have your assignments,” he said. “Let’s finish the cleanup so we can all go home.”

The officers stood to attention — crisply, silently, and with absolutely no trace of expression or emotion on their faces. Zetter couldn’t blame them for not wanting to show anything to him. He was the hatchet man for the administration, and that administration would be looking for more scapegoats to sacrifice on the altar of public outrage. It was how the politics of warfare worked, and it was how that worked probably going back to Alexander the Great.

When he was alone, Zetter sat down and sagged into his chair, feeling all of his years and more that he hadn’t earned. He knew that once this was over he was as done as Dietrich. Done and gone.

He wasn’t even sure he minded.

Not after a day like today.

He reached for his phone and punched in the number that direct-dialed the White House Situation Room.

The chief of staff, Sylvia Ruddy, answered the phone and then put it on speaker.

“Mr. President,” said General Zetter, “we have contained the outbreak. It’s over.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Dr. Herman Volker parked his car in one of the vacant slips outside of the small motel. He turned off the engine and sat for nearly ten minutes watching the rain hammer down on the windshield. The sluicing water blurred the glass and transformed the neon sign above the office into an impressionist painting. All pinks and greens.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and then tossed it onto the seat.

Then he opened the door and stepped into the downpour. He wore trousers, a dress shirt, tennis shoes, and a blue sweater, and he looked like the tired, defeated, sad old man that he was. His feet barely lifted from the ground as he shuffled toward the door, pulled it open, and went inside. He carried no suitcase or overnight bag. The only thing he brought with him was his wallet, and it took him a long time to organize his thoughts well enough to fill out the information sheet given to him by the bored night clerk. He paid for the room with his credit card, took the key, and walked outside again. His room was on the same strip where he’d parked.

Volker used the keycard to open the door, went inside, closed the door.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the ugly painting on the wall. An artless mess that was supposed to remind people of Joan Miró, but didn’t. Not in any way that lifted the soul.

The doctor stared at the painting for a long time.

CHAPTER SIX

At first they could only sit there, huddled against the wall, locked in each other’s arms, beaten mute by horror, wrapped in their cloak of shared grief.

Time was fractured and each second seemed to expand and stretch, refusing to end, refusing to pass.

Dez kept repeating JT’s name.

Over and over.

Was it a plea or a prayer? Trout couldn’t tell.

Then suddenly Trout felt a change in Dez. It was a subtle thing, but it was there. One moment she was empty of everything except her pain, and then he felt her body change. Her muscles tensed. No, that was wrong. It was more like they somehow remembered their strength. She straightened in his arms and her clutching hands gripped him and pushed him slowly but inexorably back. He resisted for a moment, then let her create that distance between them. A necessary distance for her, he was sure of it. And in that space Dez Fox reclaimed the personal power stolen from her by disease pathogens, guns, and betrayal.

There was a final moment of intimate contact, when their faces were inches apart. Dez was flushed, her face puffy from weeping, her eyes red and filled with pain. Then he saw the blue of those eyes become cold and hard. And unforgiving.

Her full lips compressed into a tight line with just a hint of a snarl. Trout knew that look, and he was fully aware of how dangerous she was when her mouth wore that shape and her eyes were filled with that much ice. So, he eased back, releasing his embrace, shifting his body toward the wall and away from her.

There was one heartbreaking moment, though, where he saw that she was aware of his allowance and acceptance of her power, and how he withheld his own. Dez gave him a single, tiny nod of shared awareness.

Then she got to her feet. It took effort and it took time, but when she was standing Dez towered over him, and he sat there in her shadow, looking up at her.

“We have to make sure the kids are okay,” she said in a voice from which all emotion had been banished. Trout wondered what it cost her to affect that much control.

“Yes,” he said.

“And we have to search the building again.”

“Okay.”

She began to turn.

“Dez—” he began but she held up a hand.

“No,” she said. Then she began climbing the stairs.

No.

Trout wondered if she thought he was going to say something about JT’s sacrifice. Something encouraging about how the kids inside were safe. Or something more personal. Something about what he felt.

He knew that what he’d planned to say was that he’d do whatever she needed him to do, to help however he could.

But he wondered if those were the words that would have actually come out of his mouth. Dez hadn’t thought so.

Maybe, he thought as he got heavily to his feet, she was right.

“Damn,” he said aloud.

He patted his pockets and realized that the satellite phone Goat had given him was somewhere upstairs. He needed to get it. To tell Goat what just happened. To have Goat tell the world.

This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse.

There was more truth to tell. More of the story he needed everyone to know.

Maybe it would help.

Trout was past knowing that, or anything, for certain.

Aching in body and heart, Billy Trout lumbered up the stairs after Dez.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Corporal Lonnie Silk was sure he was dying.

He could feel the warmth leave him, running in lines inside his trousers, down his legs, pooling in his shoes.

The bleeding wasn’t as bad now, but he didn’t think that was a good thing. As his daddy used to say, you can’t pour coffee from an empty cup.

And he felt so empty.

Of blood.

Of breath.

Of everything. Like God was rolling up the whole world to throw it in the crapper.

It was like that.

The rainswept street was all harsh whites and blacks in the stark illumination thrown by the headlights of abandoned cars and businesses with all the lights turned on but nobody there. The glow gave everything a harsh look, like crime scene photos in old newspapers. No soft edges, even with the rain.

Lonnie knew that he was a dead man. Would be a dead man soon. The captain had told everyone in his platoon about the infection. About how it worked. About what it did.

About how there was nothing anyone could do.

Nothing except die.

And how fucked up was that? How crazy? How impossible?

His legs needed to stop moving, and he collapsed against the corner of a burned-out store at the corner of Tunnel Hill and Doll Factory Road. Across the street was the hulking mannequin factory that had given the road its name. The windows were smashed out, the parking lot littered with the blackened shells of cars and bodies. A car stood alone in the middle of the intersection, its radio playing.

He moved on, stumbling down the long blocks, splashing through puddles. Some were filled with dirty rainwater; some were viscous pools of dark red.

There were so many bodies. All of them sprawled in a sea of black blood. Thousands of shell casings stood like tiny islands. Weak sunshine and dying firelight gleamed on the metal and winked on the rippling surface of that dark lake. No wind stirred the surface, though. Lonnie knew that for sure, and it was one of the things that made dying feel worse, more deeply terrifying.

The black blood was alive with worms. Tiny, white, threadlike. So small that they looked like thin slices carved from grains of rice. But there were so many of them.

From where he stood, Lonnie couldn’t see the worms, but he knew they were there. The worms were everywhere.

Everywhere.

He could feel them.

On him.

In him.

Wriggling through the ragged lips of the bite on his arm. Twisting and writhing inside the lines of blood that ran crookedly down his body.

He tried not to look at the wound. He could not bear to see the things that moved inside it, around it.

He could feel that wound, though. And even that was wrong.

The bite was deep. Skin and muscle were torn. It should hurt.

It should be screaming at him with the voices of all those torn nerve endings.

Instead it was nearly silent.

Cold.

Distant.

As if the skin around that bite was no longer connected to him. No longer belonged to him. As if it was on him but not of him.

Cold emptiness ran outward from the wound, tunneling through his body like threads of ice. Every minute he felt more of the cold and less of the warmth he needed to feel. With every step he knew that his desperate heart, his pounding heart, was pumping that infection throughout his body. Cold blossomed like small, ugly flowers all over him. Taking him away, stealing his awareness so that he wasn’t even sure he could feel himself dying.

Would he slip away completely and not be aware of it?

The captain had said something about that. And that guy on the radio, the reporter trapped inside the Stebbins Little School. What was his name? Billy Trout? He’d said something scary. Something that was crazy wrong.

That the self — the consciousness, the personality, the everything — of the victim didn’t die with the body. Instead it would be there. Hovering, floating, aware but no longer in control of the meat and bone that had been its home.

“Please,” said Lonnie, asking of the day. Of the moment. Of anyone or anything that could listen. “Please…”

He did not want to die like this. He didn’t want to become something sick and twisted. He didn’t want to be a ghost haunting that stolen home of flesh and blood.

Above him, somewhere up there, hidden by the buildings, he could hear helicopters. Black Hawks. Vipers. Apaches.

And way above them, the growl of jets carrying fuel-air bombs, waiting to turn the whole place, the whole town, into hot ash.

Forty minutes ago Lonnie Silk would have screamed and run at the thought of that fiery response to the plague.

Now he looked to the heavens, and prayed for it.

It was better to burn on earth than be damned here. Hell here, heaven later?

“Please,” he said to the sounds of salvation that flew in formation above the storm clouds. “Please.”

But there was no one and nothing to help him.

Lonnie turned and headed along a side street toward the edge of town.

Trying to go home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Scott Blair, the national security advisor, wanted a drink so bad his skin ached. He was not normally a drinking man. A few martinis at a State Department dinner, a beer after eighteen holes. But now he wanted to crawl into a closet with a bottle of bourbon and chug the entire thing.

Instead he opened a drawer, removed a bottle of Tums E-X, shook ten of them into his palm, and them shoved the entire handful into his mouth.

Everything was spinning. His head, the room, the media, and maybe the world.

The actual world.

All because of a tiny shithole town in an inbred part of Pennsylvania no one gave a damn about. Not in any strategic sense.

The devil is off the chain.

That was how it started. For Blair and for everyone.

The director of Central Intelligence called the president to forward an urgent message from a nonentity named Oscar Price, a CIA handler whose only job it was to babysit retired Soviet defectors. How hard could it be to keep tabs on a bunch of old men? Instead, one of Price’s charges, Dr. Herman Volker, a former Cold War scientist, had taken an old and classified bit of science and turned it into what could only be described as a “doomsday weapon.”

Doomsday.

There was a time in Blair’s life when that concept was a ludicrous abstraction. A scenario to be considered with no more reality than something cooked up by a Dungeons & Dragons games master.

Except now this wasn’t a role-playing game for nerds. It was the most important issue to ever cross Blair’s desk. Perhaps the most important issue to ever cross the desk to fall under the umbrella of “national security.”

A doomsday weapon. Conceived by devious minds, funded by a desperate government, constructed in covert labs, and then brought to America by a defector who was long past the point of relevance.

And given a name that was far too appropriate.

Lucifer.

Blair wondered if that kind of name was too close to actually tempting fate. It felt like a challenge. Or an invitation.

All Price had to do was keep the old prick out of trouble until old age or the grace of a just God killed the son of a bitch.

But then that message came in.

The devil was off the chain.

That was how it started. A flurry of phone calls, teams of investigators put into the field, and the machinery of control and containment put into play. Except that nothing was controlled, and Blair did not share the president’s confidence in General Zetter that this thing was contained.

His desk was littered with intelligence reports. The latest on the storm. Satellite pictures and thermal scans of Stebbins County. Casualty estimates. And projections of how bad this could get if even a single infected person made it past the Q-zone. This wasn’t swine flu or bird flu or any other damn flu. It was a genetically engineered bioweapon driven by parasitic urges that were a million times more immediate and aggressive than those of a virus, though equally as encompassing and indifferent to suffering. Every infected person became a violent vector. Everyone exposed to the black blood was likely to become infected, even if they were not bitten. The larvae in the infected blood clung to the skin and would find an opening. Any opening. A scratch would do it.

There were response protocols. Of course there were. Politics floated on a sea of paper, so there were reports for everything. There were reams of notes on the Lucifer program. Tens of thousands of pages. And right now virologists and microbiologists and parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, and over a dozen bioweapons labs were poring over those protocols and the accompanying scientific research records. The protocols prepared after Volker’s defection were very specific. Coldly alarming, detailing in precise terms the consequences of inaction or insufficient action.

There was, in fact, only one possible outcome of a Lucifer outbreak.

Doomsday was no longer an abstraction.

Blair made a series of phone calls to get the latest on the hunt for Volker. With each call his heart sank lower in his chest.

The bastard had vanished. He’d walked out of his house, got in his car, and disappeared from the face of the earth, taking with him the greatest hopes of understanding his variation of the pathogen. Lucifer 113, the version loose in Stebbins, did not precisely match the profiles of the old Cold War version. It was much faster, much more aggressive, and the reanimation of the “dead” victims took place in seconds.

Seconds.

It would mean that in any confrontation with a group of infected, the newly bitten victim would become an aggressive vector — a combatant, in a twisted way — while the fight still raged. Apart from the obvious tactical disadvantages, that scenario created a devastating psychological component. When soldiers would be required to suddenly fire upon their fellow soldiers, doubt and hesitation would be born. And many more would die.

It was a nightmare.

It was surreal.

His secretary tapped on the door, poked her head in, and waggled a sheaf of papers at him. “Mr. Blair? The speechwriters have a draft of POTUS’s address. They want you to take a look at it.”

“Good, let me see it.”

She crossed to his desk and handed him the speech. “This is unusual. Asking for your input on a speech.”

“‘Usual’ was last week, Cindy.” He bent over the speech.

But Cindy lingered. “Sir … the word is that they stopped this thing. That’s true, right? I mean, this is just winding down now?”

Blair raised his head and looked at her for a long time, saying nothing. She finally retreated from him and fled. He wished he had something comforting to say to Cindy. However, he liked the woman and didn’t want to lie to her.

Blair read through the speech, making disgusted sounds at the end of nearly every paragraph. The speech — written by well-intentioned people who lacked a clear perspective on the problem — took the wrong tack, focusing on a response to Billy Trout’s impassioned and ill-considered Internet tirade. Blair felt the president needed to go in a radically different direction. And not only in terms of the speech. General Zetter in Pennsylvania kept trying to convince the president that the devil was back on the leash, that the situation was contained. Which, as Blair viewed it, was a criminally distorted view of the facts. He grabbed a red pencil and began hastily redrafting it.

CHAPTER NINE

Billy Trout went to the auditorium to find his camera. It lay on its side among the debris. Less than an hour ago the big multipane windows that lined the east wall had been obliterated by machine-gun fire as attack helicopters fired on the school.

Trout looked at the damage and shivered.

Tens of thousands of rounds had torn the window frames apart, showering the big hall with millions of fragments of glittering glass and jagged wood. The bullets had carved away at the bricks, leaving a gaping maw through which cold winds blew the relentless rain.

The kids were all gone now, moved to other rooms so their wounds could be tended to. It was a freak of happenstance — the only real luck Trout could remember in that long, bad day — that none of these kids had been shot. He couldn’t even work out a scenario that explained it. A quirk of physics, a bizarre collision of angle, the storm winds, uncertain targeting, the slanted floor with its rows of seats, and who knew what else.

But the kids were alive.

Not okay, not all right. Merely alive.

Trout skirted the main floor, which was nothing but bullet-pocked detritus, and made his way to the stage, where he’d left his camera and satellite phone. They were beaded with rain, but when he tested them they still worked.

Another stroke of luck, and it made him wonder about the perversity of whatever gods there were that small luck was afforded them while on the whole the fortunes of Stebbins County seemed to have gone bad in the worst possible way.

Shaking his head, he took his gear backstage and found a small office with a desk. Trout cleaned the camera lens, wiped off every last trace of moisture, and set the camera’s tripod on the desk. He tested the mike and the signal.

Then he called Goat to make sure that this message would go out as smoothly as the others. The satellite phone was routed directly to Goat’s Skype account.

The phone rang and rang.

Goat never answered.

Trout checked all of the connections. Everything seemed to be in order.

He called again.

Nothing, just the meaningless ring with no answer.

Screw it, he thought. He’d record an update anyway and send it to Goat. Maybe his friend was ordering a refill at that nice, warm, safe goddamn Starbucks. Or he was in the nice, warm, safe bathroom taking a leak.

“I am going to let Dez kick your bony ass,” Trout promised as he clipped on his lavaliere mike. He hit the record button and set himself in front of the camera.

“This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse,” he began, then shook his head. “I know how that must sound. If you’re anywhere but here it’s probably pretentious and corny. But not from where I’m sitting. Right now I’m in a small office near where the military fired on six hundred children a few minutes ago. Since then we’ve reached a kind of détente with the National Guard. They offered us a deal. We had to gather all of the sick and wounded people — anyone who showed any signs of infection from Lucifer 113—and we had to take them outside. That’s right, out where the monsters are. And we had to leave them there. Men and women, and children.” He paused and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Children. I … still can’t believe that we did it. Does that make me a war criminal, too? Did I help staunch the spread of a deadly pathogen or did I participate in a heinous act of brutality. I honestly don’t know. I don’t know.”

The camera kept recording, but Trout had to take a moment to collect himself.

“One of the people who went out there was a good man. A good friend. A Stebbins County police officer named JT Hammond. I want to tell you about him. I want you all to know about him. About how decent and kind he was; how strong he was. How courageous he was.”

Trout then told the camera about what JT did, about how he was infected and how he made a stand with the children. By the time he was done, tears were streaming down his face and there was a tremolo in his voice.

He sniffed and collected himself.

“And now what, America? We have eight hundred people in this building. Two hundred adults, the rest kids ranging from kindergarten through middle school. We have a few guns and some ammunition. Probably not enough. This place is the town’s emergency shelter, so we have food, water, cots and blankets, first-aid equipment, and other basic necessities. Enough to provide for three hundred people for two weeks. Yeah, stop for a moment and do the math.”

He had to control his anger because rage wanted to make him say the wrong things and Trout needed to get this right.

“I don’t know if this message will ever get out. I don’t know if the government is now coming clear about Lucifer 113 or not. All I know is that this plague is immoral and illegal and it’s killing people. I know how and why it was created. The man who invented this gave me all the science. The question now, I suppose, is what happens next. With us here in the Stebbins Little School. With what’s left of the Town of Stebbins and, really, all of Stebbins County. And with this monster that they’ve let loose. You tell me, folks … what now?”

He sighed, reached over and switched off the camera, then punched the buttons to send it to Goat. Technically, Goat should have been streaming it straight out to the Net, but Trout wasn’t sure. He tried calling him again and once more got nothing. He thumped the phone down in frustration.

And that’s when he saw her standing there.

Dez.

She was pale and ghostly in the shadowy hallway, her blond hair hanging in rattails, her uniform torn and dirty, her blue eyes filled with pain and tears.

But her mouth.

Despite everything, Dez was smiling.

“Thank you,” she said so softly that he almost didn’t hear her.

“For what? I don’t know if that even got out.”

Dez shook her head and stepped into the room. “I heard what you said about him. About JT.”

“I…” Trout began, then said simply, “He was my friend, too.”

Dez reached for him and he took her into his arms. They kissed for a long time. It was hot and wrong and her lips tasted of tears. But he absolutely did not want to let her go.

Then she leaned back and looked at him, studying his face with eyes that were filled with questions.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He did not dare ask for what. There was so much wreckage behind them. Years of trying to make a relationship work, and years of failure. Sometimes spectacular failures.

Like the last time.

For now, he didn’t care what she was sorry for, or if it really related to him at all. He nodded and kissed her again.

Then, after a long, sweet, oddly gentle time, Dez pushed him back, turned, and walked away.

Once she was gone, Trout leaned against the doorframe and stared at the empty hallway.

“I love you,” he said to the shadows. “And I’m pretty damn sorry, too.”

CHAPTER TEN

No one spoke while Billy Trout talked about the slaughter of the infected, the devil’s bargain made with General Zetter, and the death of JT Hammond. When it was over, the president rubbed his hands over his face.

“Well, that should pretty much bury all of us,” he said.

“Actually,” said Scott Blair, “we’re the only people who have seen that video. The only ones who ever will.”

The president stared at him. “What?”

Blair cleared his throat. “We shut down the cell and landlines and are doing focused jamming operations on satellite phone service. Our guerrilla newsman isn’t talking to anyone anymore.”

“Did I authorize that?”

Blair spread his hands. “I believe it falls under the umbrella of national security, sir.”

The chief of staff, Sylvia Ruddy, leaned close to the president. “We’d better run this past the attorney general. We may be on thin constitutional ice here.”

“National security,” repeated Blair very slowly, focusing it on Ruddy so even she could grasp the concept.

“Cutting Trout off could backfire on us,” said Ruddy. “The public already thinks we’re killing citizens—”

“We are,” said the president.

“—but a blackout would heighten paranoia and throw gasoline on the public outcry.”

“Let it,” said Blair. “We’ve already been vilified. That damage is done and when the president addresses the nation we’ll be able to manage a great deal of what the public perceives. Without Trout being able to release fresh messages his veracity will collapse. We’ll make sure that happens. What we have to do now is manage the official information we need to release regarding Stebbins and regain the public’s trust.”

“There’s no trust left,” said Ruddy. “Trout pretty much killed it with his first ‘live from the apocalypse’ speech. And he has Dietrich on tape making threats.”

“Trust is fickle, Sylvia,” said Blair dismissively. “We’re in a crisis. We need control not friendly smiles.”

Ruddy leaned close to the president again. “A blackout now would drive the last nail into your credibility.”

The president drummed his fingers very slowly, one fingertip at a time, on the table. His presidency already teetered on the edge, and he doubted there was enough spin control left in the world to repair the damage done. If that was the case, then all he had left was his legacy. So, how did he want to be remembered?

He cleared his throat and glanced at Scott. “It’s my understanding that Trout was using a satellite to get his messages out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“To whom? Was he streaming directly to the Net or—”

“We believe he had outside help. Someone on the other side of the Q-zone. Whoever that person is, he’s very clever, and it’s likely he has either background as a hacker or has hacker friends.”

“What are we doing to find this person?”

Blair smiled. “Every agency in the alphabet is looking. We will find him. Or them.”

“And what about Dr. Volker? Trout mentioned that the doctor gave him the research notes.”

“Yes, sir. Dr. Volker confirmed that when he spoke with Oscar Price, his CIA handler. He put everything on a set of flash drives and gave them to Trout.”

“Jesus,” said Ruddy.

“As protocol blunders go,” said Blair, “it boggles the mind. Naturally we are looking for Dr. Volker. Forensics teams are tearing apart his office at the prison where he worked and his home.”

“Where is he?” asked the president. “Can’t we find the man?”

“We are looking, Mr. President. Every possible resource is in play.”

“Will we find him?”

“I have no doubt we’ll find him,” said Blair. “However, we should consider the obvious alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Getting those drives from Billy Trout,” said Blair. “By any means necessary.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Goat looked through the windows 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 real-time 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 in the morning. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this thing started. It felt like a year. The night had been so goddamn long.

As soon he’d gotten to the Starbucks, the first thing Goat did was to download the files from the flash drives Volker had given Billy and emailed the contents to himself at several accounts. He copied the email to Trout and their editor, Murray Klein. He wanted to send the stuff directly to the other media. Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, all the others. But Billy had suggested holding off on that. It was their only hole card in case the feds tried something.

Which they would inevitably do, mused Goat. He wondered what he would do if he was in their place. Would he kill to make the situation go away, to hide the blame. Would that protect the public and prevent a panic? Goat wasn’t sure. Ethical issues like that seemed clear until you were standing up close, then all perspective became skewed. He hoped he would have the moral courage to do the right thing, but that opened a door to concepts of “greater good” and what that might actually mean.

It was so hard to think it through and come up with a workable plan.

The president was scheduled to speak soon. Originally the word was that POTUS would address the nation at three thirty in the morning, but the speech was moved up to one thirty. On any other day that alone would be highly weird for a presidential address. A lot of people here on the East Coast would be asleep; the West Coast would be in the last hour of prime time. However Goat didn’t think anyone but the most abjectly stupid, indifferent, or uninformed would be sleeping or watching sitcoms. And it wasn’t just the nation watching this story. The Net proved that the whole world was watching.

A couple of hours ago most of the world — hell, most of the state — had never heard of Stebbins. Now Goat knew that it would become a part of the common language. You’d be able to say “Stebbins” the way you said “the Towers” or the “Boston Marathon” and everyone would know what you meant.

Stories like this changed the world. If not in fact then in perception, by gouging a marker into a page of history. Days like this, events like this, were hinge-points on which history turned.

This story was about to blow up even bigger. The president and everyone in his circle had one chance to win this thing back and that was to own it, take the bullet, and while they were still in office do what they could to prevent further spread of Lucifer 113. Essentially, they could save the world without filtering that through their own political self-interest.

Goat didn’t believe in Bigfoot or the Easter Bunny, either, so he figured that wouldn’t be the way the White House would play it. It made him wonder where the line was between cynicism and clarity of vision.

Goat sipped his coffee and smiled at what was about to happen. Despite all of the pain and loss, and the deaths of so many people he knew, there was a dark and dirty part of Goat’s mind that murmured disappointment that things didn’t go completely south at the Stebbins Little School. Billy’s previous speech, which Goat had streamed live to all of the news services, had made it impossible for POTUS to allow the National Guard to destroy the school and sterilize the town with fuel-air bombs. From here on, the story would roll forward on wheels greased by the political blood of everyone whose head would roll, and on the public outpouring of grief over the thousands who’d died from the infection. But the story was becoming past tense. The kids at the school, now rescued, would become a symbol, a talking point, a voting influence at the next election. On the other hand, a couple of hundred kids being shot to death and then burned on national TV — that story would keep going, keep running, keep shouting for everyone to pay attention and react. And he, Goat, would be the conduit for that story to get out to the world. He was already part of the story, but if they wiped Stebbins off the map, then he would be the story. The only survivor. The fearless cameraman who’d gotten the truth out, getting footage while the world burned around him.

He would be the most famous journalist on earth. Immediately and irrevocably.

Had the story gone that way, gone that far.

Now it looked like it would break in a different way. There were already posts claiming that the Stebbins thing was another Internet hoax, that Billy Trout was a liar, that he was some kind of grandstanding fruitcake, and even that he was a cyber-terrorist.

Goat wondered how much of that was genuine disbelief or White House spin doctoring. Maybe a fifty-fifty split? Either way, this was brewing into a mother of a story. He murmured the words “impeachment” and “Pulitzer,” and he liked how each of them tasted on his tongue.

But then he felt a flash of guilt. He hated that he thought about this thing. That he wanted it, on some level. He’d wanted it then and he wanted it now. And there was a flicker of remorse nibbling at his soul that he knew he would always secretly regret the way it had played out.

Goat opened Skype and punched in the number for Billy’s satellite phone. But a message window popped up: NO SIGNAL.

He tried it again, making sure he got the number right.

Same message.

“Oh, shit…” he murmured.

The last message from Billy said they were going to take the infected outside. Since then … nothing. What was going on? Had they gotten to him? Had the helicopters come back?

Goat’s fears said yes, but his gut told him no. There was something wrong, but he didn’t think Billy was dead.

Not yet.

He was, however, absolutely positive that the government was screwing around. That it was responsible for this silence.

Cursing under his breath, Goat turned toward the counter to ask the barista if the router was down. Headlights flashed in his eyes as a car pulled into the lot. Goat flicked a glance through the window. A metallic green Nissan Cube. Ugly. Same make and color as the one he’d seen parked in front of the house of Homer Gibbon’s old Aunt Selma. It made him think of that, and how it all started.

Then his mind ground to a halt as the driver’s door opened 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.

This.

Was.

Impossible.

Goat wanted to scream but he suddenly 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.

He 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 Gibbon.

Quarantine failed.

It’s here …

CHAPTER TWELVE

“It’s working, sir,” said the radio specialist.

The captain in charge of communications for the National Guard detail on the eastern edge of Stebbins County was a small, fussy-looking man with the face of a geek. Even with the uniform he didn’t look like a soldier; and in his own heart he wasn’t. He was an electronics nerd who joined the Army to get free training and to play with more interesting toys than he could afford working at Best Buy.

The unit in which he sat cost more than thirty million dollars, and it was his.

More or less his.

The captain leaned over the specialist’s shoulder and looked at the gauges, dials, and meters, then down at the digital readout on the computer monitor. It was arcane to anyone who didn’t live and breathe electronics. To him it was a language he understood better than English. A language that was precise, without ambiguity.

The information on all those meters told him that no communication signal was getting into or out of Stebbins except those on very precisely fixed channels. The blackout was immediate and complete. Stebbins County went dark, taking with it the border towns of Portersville, Allegheny Falls, St. Johns, and Bordentown. All landlines, cell towers, and Wi-Fi were silent. No cell phone, no landline, and no damn satellite uplink.

Everything was being jammed.

He smiled.

“Good,” he said, as he reached for the phone to tell Scott Blair that Billy Trout wasn’t reaching anyone.

Not anymore.

And neither was anyone else.