Fall of Night

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“If you’re just joining us, folks, it has become a wild, wild night in western Pennsylvania. There are unconfirmed reports of military activity in the vicinity of Stebbins County. That is correct, you heard me when I said it. Military activity. So, what does the Finke think about that? Well, we know that the National Guard is on call for flood control and disaster aid, and FEMA has also announced its presence. The president of the United States made a rather vague statement earlier in which he talked about natural disasters and cyber-terrorism. Every word of that speech has already been dissected by the brain trusts on MSNBC and FOX, both of whom need a GPS and Sherpas to find a clue. FOX is talking about zombies. MSNBC is spouting some socialist claptrap about military helicopters firing at a school in order to stifle the live broadcasts of some whack job who claims to be reporting live from the apocalypse … and unfortunately that whack job is a longtime friend of the show, Billy Trout of Regional Satellite News. We tried to contact Billy to get him to tell us his side of the story — or to find out what he’s smoking — but it looks like Superstorm Zelda has knocked out more than the lights. There’s no cell reception at all in or out of Stebbins County and large parts of Fayette County.”

Gavin paused to light a cigarette.

“So, again you ask me, what does the Finke think?”

He laughed.

“For once, my friends, the ol’ Gav has to admit that I don’t have a clue. Not tonight. This one has me stumped. So, help Uncle Gavin out and call in to tell me what you think is happening on this dark and stormy night.”

Once more all the call lights lit up.

Gavin Finke took a long drag, blew smoke into the air, and took the next call.

CHAPTER FIFTY

“How bad is it?”

The president fired the question off as he hurried into the Situation Room. It was the tenth time he’d asked the question, but so far no one had been able to give him a definitive answer. Even now each of the faces that looked up from the table gave mixed signals — doubt, anger, frustration, determination, and naked fear.

“Sir,” said Scott Blair as he came to intercept the president, “here’s what we know. The—”

“I was told there was an attack on one of our checkpoints.”

“There was,” said Blair, “and we lost a soldier, but the other man on that post eliminated the infected and, ah, resolved the resulting infection.”

It took the president a beat to understand what that meant. He blanched. “Jesus Christ.”

“The checkpoint has been reinforced and all checkpoints are on high alert,” said Blair, but he was shaking his head as he said it. “The problem, however, is elsewhere.”

A map of Stebbins County filled one window on the big plasma screen. A red dot glowed beside one of the major highways.

“There was an attack at a Starbucks on Route 653.”

“How many casualties?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Blair.

“How the Christ can it not—?”

“Sir, the victims of that attack were able to leave the Starbucks and they wandered into traffic. Their presence resulted in multicar pileups. Both directions.” Blair pointed to a second screen, which showed an aerial view of a terrible traffic accident and what appeared to be a riot. Helicopter spotlights ranged over the crumpled wrecks of dozens of cars and trucks. Bodies lay in the road, some of them clearly crushed under or between the vehicles. The president walked numbly over to the screen to study the scene more closely. The pileups completely blocked the highway in both directions and even spilled over into the Starbucks parking lot, which was positioned on a wide spot in the median. Behind the roadblocks, lines of cars stretched for miles in bumper-to-bumper traffic, headlights on, windshield wipers slashing back and forth. And everywhere — everywhere — running between the cars, crawling over the wrecks, moving along the lines of stopped cars, filling the median, were people.

Fighting.

Struggling.

Rolling over and over in the mud or on the slick streets.

Punching and kicking.

Biting.

Biting.

Biting.

The president tried to say something. His mouth worked, but there was no breath in his lungs, no air in the room.

No words.

General Zetter’s voice croaked from the speakers. “Mr. President … my God, Mr. President. Permission to engage. Permission to engage.”

He said it over and over again as on the screen hundreds — no, thousands — of people fought, and screamed, and died.

And came back.

To kill.

To eat.

To …

Scott Blair touched the president’s arm. Lightly, almost gently. A gesture of pleading.

“Mr. President,” he said in a ragged whisper, “give the order.”

The president looked at him with eyes that were filled with so much confusion that it was clear the man teetered on the edge of collapse.

“Mr. President … please.”

“Congress,” muttered the president. “I need to inform them. I need approval for this. I can’t … I can’t … the nation…”

“There isn’t time, Mr. President. If we don’t act now there won’t be a nation to save.”

The president’s staring eyes blinked, blinked again, and then suddenly filled with a measure of understanding.

“Do it,” he whispered.

It was the loudest sound in the room.

Blair wheeled around. “General Zetter, the president has authorized you to go weapons hot. Engage the enemy with all resources.”

“Acknowledged,” said Zetter breathlessly, “going weapons hot.”

The guns on the helicopters opened up and instantly the screams of the dying were drowned out by the heavy growl of machine guns. The running figures began juddering and dancing as the rounds punched into them. Other helicopters — Apaches and Black Hawks — moved down out of the storm, flying awkwardly in the high winds. The pilots kept as much distance from each other as they could, but this was worst-case scenario for any pilot. High winds, heavy rain, enemies who looked like civilians, and no clear set of targets.

“Some of the pilots are not engaging,” said one of the officers in the room.

“General Zetter,” growled Blair, “half of your pilots have not engaged.”

There was the sound of arguing and shouting from the speakers and they heard Zetter yell, “There are no civilians, goddamn it. This is a target-rich environment. Fire at will. Anything moving is designated an enemy combatant.”

Even with that some of the pilots repeated requests to verify those orders. Finally the president himself had to yell into the mike, repeating the same words Zetter had used.

Blair thought about how clinical and detached those words were. Target-rich environment.

Enemy combatants.

No civilians.

Zetter was, finally, with the program. Finally getting it right, but it was still so insanely wrong.

On the screen, one by one the helicopters began to fire on the crowds.

General Armistad Burroughs growled, “All pilots, you are cleared to deploy all weapons. Deploy all rockets, all missiles.”

Once more there was a lag in obeying those orders.

Once more the president had to repeat the orders.

And once more the helicopters obeyed, one by one, slowly at first, and then with the kind of wild aggression Blair knew was only born from panic and despair.

The helicopters rained fire down on the road. Rockets struck pockets of shambling dead and exploded like parodies of big-budget movie special effects. In the movies, though, people flew away from explosions, pulled by wires or digitally added as computer graphics. Here, the people burst apart in ragged pieces that lacked art or style. And though real explosions are always less dynamic than movie special effects, they were far more horrible in their understated destruction.

Automobile gas tanks exploded one after the other, lifting the tail ends of Toyotas and Fords and Coopers and Hyundais with equal indifference and efficiency. Chain guns stitched endless lines of holes along pavements, through automobile skin, and through flesh and bone. The living and the living dead crumpled under the cudgel blows of rapid-fire lead. The living died and stayed down. The dead, those with no traumatic damage to their brains or brain stems, rose again; less whole, less human-looking, but infinitely more monstrous. The living tried to hide from the dead and from the rain of fire; the dead were indifferent to it, walking or running or crawling after the fresh meat, stopping only when the spark of life was blown from their central nervous systems.

Blair and the president stood together, their eyes open and mouths slack at the hell unfolding on the screen.

Then Blair forced his mouth to speak. He turned to the Air Force general. “General Susco, where are we with the fuel-air bombs?”

“We have four MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones fitted out and on deck. We can have them in the air in—”

“ETA?” interrupted Blair. “What’s the flight time?”

Susco didn’t even pause. “Twenty-two minutes and change and that includes launch time.”

“Shit.”

“And we have four A-10 Thunderbolt II’s from the 104th Fighter Squadron at the Warfield Air National Guard Base in Maryland. Fires are lit and all they need is the word.”

Blair again touched the president. “Sir, we have to order them in now.”

The president’s entire attention was locked on the screen.

Blair wanted to punch him. He had never in his entire life wanted to beat anyone as badly or as brutally as he did this man. Before he even knew he was going to do it, he grabbed the president’s sleeve, spun him around, and backhanded him across the mouth. Blair was not a big man but there was so much rage, so much fear in every ounce of his body that the blow sent the president crashing sideways against the edge of the big table. Blood burst from torn lips.

And a split second later Blair was on the floor, his body exploding from sudden agony in his back and the after-impression of a Secret Service agent kidney-punching him. He was slammed to the carpet with a knee on his cheek and a pistol barrel screwed into his ear. Someone clicked cuffs onto his wrist, cinching them painfully tight.

“No … no!” bellowed someone, and through the pain Blair realized that it was the president’s voice. From the corner of his eye, past the knee of the Secret Service agent kneeling on his face, Blair could see an agent and General Burroughs helping the president to his feet. Blood streamed down onto the president’s chest, staining his white shirt, dripping onto his shoes. “Leave him alone, goddamn it. Let him up. I am ordering you to uncuff him and let him up. Christ, someone get me a cloth.”

The agents hauled Blair roughly to his feet and took the cuffs off, but they weren’t gentle with either task. He stood there, legs weak and trembling, his right hand beginning to swell from where his knuckles clipped the president’s cheek. The president gave him a look of savage intensity, but for the first time since the crisis began there was that old spark in POTUS’s eyes. That old fire. The fuck-you blaze that had won him the primaries and enabled him to bully his way through brutal debates and a nail-biter of an election. The fires that had allowed this man to play hardball with Iran and North Korea, to refuse to be bent over a barrel by the Chinese.

This was his president.

The president pointed a finger at General Susco. “Scramble the jets. Launch the drones. Stop this.”

The general began shouting orders into a phone.

Blair sagged with relief and fatigue.

But then the president grabbed a fistful of his necktie and pulled Blair so close they were breathing the same air. Secret Service men closed in on both sides but the president growled them back. He tightened his hold on Blair and in the coldest, most dangerous voice Blair had ever heard the president use, said, “Call Sam Imura and tell him to get me those flash drives. Now.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“This does not look good,” said Trout. Beside him, Dez simply shook her head.

They stared out the window, stunned, mystified, and deeply frightened by what they saw. The soldiers were scrambling to get into their gear and climb into vehicles. The roads leading away from the school were choked with Humvees and Strykers and an assortment of smaller and lighter armored vehicles. Then one of the big eight-wheeled M1135 Stryker Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconnaissance Vehicles rumbled through the gates, the decks crowded with armed men in hazmat suits. Its fifteen-ton mass made the windows rattle.

“Damn, it looks like they’re all going,” said Dez.

She snatched up the walkie-talkie and tried to raise General Zetter, but all she got was static. Trout tried the sat phone, and it was as dead as it had been all night.

“Something really bad’s happening,” muttered Dez.

Then the whole building seemed to rumble and they craned their necks to look up. A phalanx of helicopters flew over. Black Hawks and Apaches.

Trout counted thirty of them before the rain obscured his vision.

They were not coming to attack the school. They were not headed toward the center of Stebbins. They were all headed northwest.

Toward Bordentown.

Toward the edge of the Q-zone.

“Oh shit,” said Dez.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Boxer turned off the farm roads and drove along the stretch of Mason Street, heading toward the center of Stebbins. According to the GPS, they needed to turn onto Doll Factory Road, and then veer off of that to follow a secondary road to the Stebbins Little School. The rain slowed to a desultory drizzle for a few minutes, but the thunder was closer and louder, and the lightning flashed like artillery fire.

“What’s that?” asked Gypsy, leaning forward from the backseat to point at something on the road ahead.

Boxer slowed as they approached a pair of wrecked cars that were little more than burned-out shells. The blacktop around the vehicles was littered with shell casings. Sam Imura rolled down his window to get a better look. A hunting rifle lay on the hood of one car. Beside it, its shape slowly distorting to pulp in the rain, was a box of .30–30 cartridges. A second gun, a military M4, lay sideways across the yellow line down the center of the two-lane. Near it was a Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap, and a dozen feet away was a blue wool women’s sweater.

“No bodies,” murmured Shortstop.

No one commented on that.

“Keep going,” said Sam, and Boxer gave the wrecks a wide berth.

They passed other cars, and once they saw a big eighteen-wheel Peterbilt that had gone off the highway and smashed its way through the young maples that grew wild beside the road, until it crashed itself to silence against a massive old oak. The driver’s door stood open, the cab empty.

And that was the pattern of it. Wrecked cars and trucks with open doors and broken windows, houses and buildings with doors standing ajar, and miscellaneous debris, but no trace at all of the people of the destroyed little town.

No living people.

Several times they found bodies sprawled haphazardly on the road, on the verge, on porch steps, in parking lots. Every single one of them showed evidence of traumatic injury to their heads. A few lay with their heads hacked off.

“Somebody put up a hell of a fight,” said Boxer.

“Doesn’t look like they won.”

They reached a deserted gas station and made the turn onto Doll Factory.

And stopped before they went two blocks.

Slowly, all five of them got out of the Humvee and stood looking at the monstrous thing before them.

A Stryker armored combat vehicle sat at an angle in the middle of the street. It was a brute. Eight feet wide and twenty-two feet long, sitting on eight fat tires, with a big Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the top — the same model as the one mounted on the deck of their Humvee. Thousands of empty brass shell casings littered the top of the vehicle and their curved sides peeked out from puddles. At least three hundred bodies clogged the street, many of them civilians, but there were uniforms of local and state police and even some soldiers.

Dead.

All dead.

Sam had seen the Browning in action, had fired one himself. He could easily — too easily — visualize the moment of slaughter as the living dead shambled into the storm of lead.

But what puzzled Sam was how the soldiers lost this fight.

The Stryker was abandoned here in the rain, the gun silent.

How many of the dead had the Guardsmen faced? Had it been overwhelming odds? Had they run out of ammunition? Or had they been caught in one of those terrifying moments when a gun jams or reloading takes one second too long?

He would probably never know, but looking at the scene sent a chill up Sam’s spine. It felt like the icy breath exhaled against trembling flesh during a moment of precognition. Or, perhaps it was an icy touch not of revelation but of realization as he saw, here on this battleground street, what was coming. Soldiers were more than a match for the dead in any kind of fair fight. Even five to one, ten to one.

But there were at very least seven thousand infected in Stebbins, and possibly many more.

When a crowd attacks, the front ranks take the bullets so the ranks behind them can advance. Given sufficient numbers the defenders simply run out of time or ammunition or both, and the wave passes over them. It was something used on battlefields ever since armies went to war. The foot soldiers of Alexander and Napoleon knew it, the riders of Genghis Khan and Santa Ana, and the marching lines of the Romans and the Confederate boys in butternut brown. Cannon fodder. A forlorn hope.

Only here it was no more planned or orchestrated than the thousands of worker ants that die when the entire nest goes to war, or the millions that fall when locusts swarm. In the end, all that matters is that the main host survives. The hive.

This was what Sam was seeing, he was positive. This was the real terror of this infection. The parasitic impulse to procreate through infection and to sustain itself through feeding was matched with a ferocious aggression that had no parallel in nature because it was not natural. Volker had made this, building it on the bones of Cold War bioweapons madness.

He heard the shallow breathing of the rest of his team, but realized he was holding his own breath. Sam let it out slowly.

“We are so fucked,” said Moonshiner.

No one disputed him.

They heard the crunch of glass and they all wheeled around at the same time, bringing their guns up. Across the street was a diner with a gaping hole where a big picture window should be. The entire frame, and all of the building, was covered by so many bullet holes that it looked like polka dots, except there was nothing fun or festive here. The rifle-mounted flashlights of the five soldiers painted the front of the store in pale yellow light.

A figure moved in the gloom just inside the diner.

“Inside the store,” called Sam. “United States Special Forces. I need you to step out of the building with your hands raised. If you have a weapon I need to you drop it now.”

The figure came out of the shadows and into the glare of the overlapping flashlight beams.

It was a man.

He wore only ragged boxer shorts. The rest of his clothes were gone. Much of his flesh was as well.

He raised his hands toward the five people standing near the Humvee.

It tried to moan, but there was not enough of its face left for that. No jaw, no tongue. Just a gaping red horror below the stumps of its broken upper teeth.

“I got this,” said Shortstop and he fired a single round, the report crisp in the wet air. The zombie’s head snapped back and it fell into the store. But then it seemed to hover there, not quite hitting the ground, and for a bizarre moment Sam thought that it was somehow fighting for its balance even though it was bent so far backward. Then the body shuddered and tumbled to one side as something else came into view.

Another of the infected.

This one was crawling, and its humped body was what kept the first one from hitting the floor. The dead thing’s face was smeared with red and its mouth still worked, still chewed on some piece of something that dangled from between its lips.

The creature looked at them and bared its teeth.

Sam heard Boxer gag.

Not because of the horrible thing on the floor or what it was clearly eating.

He gagged because the zombie was dressed in the woodland camouflage of the Pennsylvania National Guard.

It was a soldier.

Behind it, other shapes moved in the gloom of the diner. And these figures sent up the moan that the first zombie could not. A haunting, wretched cry for something to staunch the dreadful hungers that drove them. They began moving through the shattered window frame.

So many of them.

So many soldiers among them, their battle dress uniforms torn, helmets lost or askew, bodies opened by teeth and nails, souls lost, eyes vacant. Black blood dribbled from their mouths.

“Oh, fuck me,” breathed Boxer. “Fuck me, fuck me.”

“Keep it steady, kid,” said Moonshiner.

A scuff of a clumsy foot made them turn and they saw more of the infected coming out of the open doors of the bank, the feed store, the craft shop, and the county assessor’s office.

Fifty at least.

“I thought General Zetter said they had this shit under control,” growled Gypsy.

“Fuck me,” said Boxer.

“This is some evil shit right here,” agreed Moonshiner.

“Stand or fight, boss? And I’m really okay with hauling ass,” said Shortstop, but for once even his pragmatic cool seemed to be crumbling away.

“There’s so many of them,” said Boxer, and as he said it more of them rounded the corner of the next block. There were children mixed in with the adults. Their faces and limbs turned worm-white from blood loss, mouths black as bottomless holes.

All of them torn. All of them ragged.

That’s how it stuck in Sam’s mind, and somehow he knew that’s how it would always be.

The Ragged People.

As if they were all members of some secret fraternity, bound together in death. Or from some far country where the sun never shines and all there will ever be is the hunger.

“Boss?” urged Gypsy.

“No,” said Sam, turning. “Everyone back in the Hummer. This isn’t what they sent us to do.”

They held their weapons out and ready as they climbed in. The Humvee was armor plated and had reinforced glass windows, but Sam did not feel even a little safe as he shot the lock on his door. He knew the others didn’t either.

“Get us out of here, Boxer,” he said with a calm he did not feel, but the younger soldier was already putting the car in gear.

He backed up and circled the Stryker, then stamped on the brakes as more of the pale figures moved through the downpour.

“Shit,” he said and spun the wheel.

“This is turning into a crowd scene,” said Moonshiner.

Despite everything he knew about the situation and everything they’d done so far this night, Sam hated the idea of opening fire on these ragged people. It felt like abuse to him. Like bullying.

But there were so damn many of them.

The flash drives, he told himself. Get the flash drives or this is the whole world.

All he had to say aloud was, “Shortstop.”

The man rolled open the top hatch of the Humvee and stood up into the fierce rain. He whipped the cover off the big Browning, yanked the bolt back, and began firing. The heavy bullets tore into a knot of zombies, knocking them backward with massive foot-pounds of impact, bursting apart joints, ripping loose connective tissue, splashing the Stryker and the other infected with black blood. Four of the creatures went down. Then another five.

“Go, go, go!” yelled Sam, and Boxer hit the gas again. The Humvee rolled over the fallen infected, heavy tires crunching bones. Shortstop pivoted and fired at the zombies closing in on the right. Twenty of them.

“Stop Sunday driving,” he bellowed. “Move this fucking thing.”

The Humvee kept rolling forward, but it was difficult to climb over the human debris while avoiding all of the wrecked and abandoned cars. The dead began closing like a fist around the vehicle.

“Little help up here,” called Shortstop. “This shit’s getting weird.”

“Windows,” ordered Sam, and except for Boxer, the others lowered their windows and stuck gun barrels into the rain. A moment later the inside of the truck was filled with ear-splitting thunder. Shell casings hit the ceiling and bounced off each other and stung like wasps where they hit bare flesh.

“Shortstop,” roared Sam, “grenade.”

Shortstop stopped firing, plucked a green ball from his rig and pulled the pin.

“Frag out!” he cried as he flung it into the midst of the dead closing on the front of the Humvee. He ducked down a split second before the grenade exploded. Everything in the blast radius was torn to ragged pieces and at the edges of the blast the concussion knocked the zombies off balance, leaving a rough opening that was clouded with blood-red mist.

Sam punched Boxer on the shoulder. “Punch it.”

Boxer gave it all the gas it would take and the Humvee leapt forward, smashing through the crippled dead, crushing others. Behind him the main mass of the infected closed like the waters of the Red Sea. They collided with one another in their desperate race to get to the living flesh. Gypsy and Moonshiner leaned out of the windows and fired back at them, shooting at legs to shatter thighbones and drop the pursuers into the path of the rest of them. Shortstop climbed back up and turned the Browning in a circle, not needing to aim. There were targets everywhere.

The Humvee shot through the bloody opening and there was clear street beyond it. Boxer kept his foot on the pedal all the way down to the floor and with every second the horde of the dead dropped behind. One by one the guns stopped firing, and after a full minute Sam touched Boxer on the shoulder.

“Okay, kid, ease it down.”

Boxer dropped the speed from seventy to fifty to forty and kept it there. They passed other zombies, but by the time the infected could turn and target them, the Humvee was past. No one fired at them.

Everyone sagged back, exhaling balls of burning air, their hands trembling with adrenaline and shock.

“Reload,” snapped Sam. “Do it now.”

They did it, and the orderliness of that action helped steady each of them. Not completely, but enough so they could reclaim themselves. Enough so they could dare look in each others’ eyes.

They drove on, no one speaking. There was nothing that needed to be said.

Then a soft purring buzz broke the silence. And Sam lunged for his satellite phone.

“Sir,” he said as soon as the connection was made, “Stebbins is not under control. There is extreme activity and—”

“Sam, to hell with that,” Blair snapped. “The Q-zone is compromised. I repeat, the devil is off the chain. The president has ordered the Air Force in. Drop everything else and get to the school. Get those flash drives. Do it now.”

“How bad is it?”

Blair paused for a shattered moment. “It’s bad, Sam. Volker is dead. We’re going to have to go big on this to try and stop the spread — but we need those drives. You are authorized to use all means and measures to secure them.”

Sam felt his throat tighten.

“Understood, sir,” he said. But the line was already dead.

The members of the Boy Scouts exchanged looks.

Then Boxer kicked down on the gas, the tires spun on the wet ground until smoke curled up behind the Humvee, and then they were rolling fast, gaining speed, heading toward the Stebbins Little School.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The president was surrounded by ghouls.

Every face of every person at the table looked like a death mask: pale, devoid of hope, sunken, and hollow-eyed.

On the screens the glowing icons that represented the jets were streaking toward Bordentown. Other dots indicated the movement of General Zetter’s National Guard forces and the reinforcements that had been ordered in to help hold the quarantine line. With that line broken, the troops were being deployed in a wide circle around the Starbucks.

The president took a long drink of water, but it did nothing to soothe his dry, raw throat. He set the glass down with a clunk that seemed absurdly loud in a room that was unusually quiet.

“What are our options?” he asked of the people around the table. The people whose job it was to always have answers.

General Amistad Burroughs said, “The jets will—”

“No,” interrupted the president. “I want to know what we need to do afterward. After the bombs.”

Sylvia Ruddy shared a look with Scott Blair. She said, “You’ll have to address the nation again.”

“And say what?” asked the president. Ruddy flinched. “No, I want you to tell me, what can I possibly say that will help the country understand this.”

“Sir, I—”

The president picked up a sheet of paper and shook it at her, at everyone. Everyone had a copy of the same report in front of them. None of them had touched the report after first reading it. The papers lay on the table, unwanted, feared, despised.

“These are casualty estimates. In just under five minutes we are going to kill thousands of American citizens. Thousands more are already dead. And we don’t yet know if this is the end of it. So, tell me … what exactly is it I’m supposed to tell the nation?”

The dead faces stared at him and said nothing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The last of the military vehicles rumbled out of the parking lot, leaving behind a scene of disorder and desolation.

“Now what?” asked Trout.

Dez nibbled thoughtfully on her lip. “If they’re really gone…”

“What?” he prompted.

“I can think of only three reasons they’d leave,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “It’s over and they’ve been told to stand down.”

“Is that likely?”

“No. They left too fast and left too much shit behind. They were told to drop and run. Question is whether they’re running from or running to.”

“Huh?”

“That’s choice two and tree. So, the second option is that there’s another problem. Maybe they found a bunch more of these zombies. Or, more likely, there’s a problem at the quarantine line.”

“What’s the third option?”

She gave him a flat stare. “Getting out of the line of fire.”

For emphasis she pointed up to the ceiling. Trout followed her finger as if they could both see a jet loaded with fuel-air bombs screaming its way across the skies of Stebbins County.

“Well,” Trout said slowly, “shit.”

“Yeah.”

“But … the flash drives … they want those. They won’t blow us up if they think we have them.”

“Sure. Unless they found Dr. Volker, in which case when this is over you are going to be one inconvenient motherfucker, Billy. Same goes for me and anyone you may have talked to in here. Which is everyone.”

Even after everything that happened, Trout was aghast at the thought of such cold-blooded murder. He kept shaking his head, but he wasn’t sure he actually disagreed.

“We have a window, Billy,” said Dez as she turned, hurried to the desk and began shoving the guns and ammunition back into the duffel bag. “We need to get the fuck out of here while there’s still a here to get out of.”

“What are you doing?” asked Trout.

She nodded to the windows. “Neither of us believe this is over, right? Not with the way they left. And maybe they’re not going to bomb us, but where does that leave us?”

“In a nice, safe building that we’re reinforcing,” he said. “With lots of food and supplies.”

“For a week, Billy. Now, think it through. If this is as big a disaster as Zetter said, as big as what Volker told you, then are you telling me that we might only be stuck here for a week?”

“No, but they said they’d airdrop supplies to us.”

“You want me to punch some stupid off of you?”

He rubbed his chest. “No thanks. What am I missing?”

“If the Guard had to run out of here like their dicks were on fire, then this thing is spreading. Which also means that there are so many of those dead fuckers out there that they had to take everyone including the cook. Does that sound like anything’s under control?”

“No,” he admitted sheepishly.

“No,” she agreed. “It sounds like big trouble. So, go big picture for a minute. Pull back and look at it. If you’re General Zetter and things are going to shit, do you give a crap about, as I said, inconvenient people trapped in a school, or do you go fight the fight?”

“You go fight the fight.”

“Right, now look at it from where we stand. Sure, we have a secure building and, yes, I think we could hold it against a million of those things.”

“Exactly.”

“Until we run out of bullets and bread. Until there’s no more gas for the generator, no more fresh water, and no more cans of Spam. Tell me, Billy, what happens then? And before you say something stupid like ‘but they’ll come for us by then,’ take a moment and think about how long people waited after Katrina. Weeks, in some cases. And that was without a bunch of dead sonsabitches trying to eat everyone.”

Trout used her words as a lens to stare into the future, and the things he saw were ugly and wrong.

“Jesus,” he murmured.

“We’ve got our window. No one’s watching us and, for the moment, no living dead assholes are trying to bite us. I say we load all our supplies and all of us into those buses. We have more than enough of them. We load up and we get the hell out of Dodge.”

“And go where?”

She shrugged. “Pittsburgh’s nice this time of year. So’s Harrisburg. So’s Philly.” Then she paused. “Actually, if things are really hitting the fan, there’s Sapphire Distributors in Fayette.”

“What’s that?”

Dez smiled. “A food distribution warehouse. Big-ass brick building. No windows on the ground floor, truck bays where we can backup the buses, its own generator with probably a lot more fuel than we have here, plus enough food to replenish a dozen full supermarkets. We could survive there for months.”

“How do you know about it?”

Dez’s eyes slid away for a moment and she focused on packing the bag.

“Dez—?”

“I, um, dated a guy who works there. Head of security.”

“Who? Do I know him?”

“Maybe.”

“Who, Dez?”

“It doesn’t matter, damn it.”

Trout sighed. “What makes you think your boyfriend would even let you in?”

Dez colored.

“Dez?”

“He’s, um … still sweet on me.”

“Jesus H. Christ in a clown car.”

Dez glared at him. “Give me a better idea, then.”

Trout picked up a box of bullets, looked at the label without reading it, and shoved it into the bag.

“Is anything with you ever simple?” he muttered. “I mean ever?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Patrick Freivald knew that he was crazy to be out on a motorcycle in the middle of one of the worst storms in Pennsylvania history. Crazy and maybe a little suicidal. The problem was that his car — his nice, warm, dry car — was parked outside of his nice, warm, dry house way the hell up in the Finger Lakes region, on the far side of Canandaigua Lake, and that was a hell of a lot of miles from here.

He’d hit the road after a very good but very long couple of days bartering and dealing at Monster Madness, a small pop culture convention in Friendsville, Maryland. Patrick had traded some old Aurora monster model kits, including an absolutely pristine Forgotten Prisoner for some newer stuff, including the Vampirella, which was a new limited edition based on a Frank Frazetta painting. He’d made enough profit off the Aurora model to stock up on a bunch of lower-end but still cool PVC statues of classic Universal monsters. All of that was in UPS boxes on their way home, and like a lot of the conventioneers, he’d waited out the storm yesterday and hit the road when they said the worst of it was over.

The weatherman was dead wrong.

Big surprise.

He’d barely hit the Pennsylvania state line before the rains started again. Not the sluggish end-of-the-storm showers, but a real downpour. So bad a lot of cars were pulling off the road. Good for them, they could sit there and listen to Howard Stern on Sirius and stay dry. Can’t do that on a hog.

Outrunning the storm wasn’t going to happen, Patrick could tell that much without having to listen to the news. There was lightning so thick and frequent it looked like a neon forest stretched all the way to the horizon. To every horizon. Going back was for shit, too.

His only real option was to motor through until he hit the first town with a cheap motel. With a storm like this even a roach motel would be good. If it got any heavier, a barn out here in the sticks would be just fine.

Patrick wasn’t crazy enough to listen to an iPad while driving his bike, but he didn’t need the weatherman to tell him there was a storm. Everyone knew about Superstorm Zelda, Sandy’s country cousin. As the miles fell away, though, he began wishing he could hear a traffic report. Ahead of him he could see the double rows of red taillights thickening from a sparse few into tightly packed lines that vanished into the distant rainy darkness. Road speed, already down to forty because of the rain, was slowing more and more until he was barely making enough headway to balance his bike.

“Shit,” he muttered as the line of cars finally ground to a complete stop. Right out in the big dark, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The last sign he remembered seeing was for a twenty-four-hour Starbucks in someplace called Bordentown. He’d never heard of the town, and at that moment didn’t give a crap if it was a nice tourist spot or not. A coffee shop open all night was like a gift from God.

He roll-walked his Italian motorcycle out of his lane and saw that the shoulder was clear ahead. He gunned the bike and began moving again. The winds tried to knock him sideways into the line of stalled cars, but Patrick leaned forward to cut the resistance and kept moving. He cut quick looks at the people in the cars. Some of them ignored him, some flipped him off for doing what they hadn’t yet dared.

The first thing that troubled Patrick was the sudden sound of a helicopter overhead. With the helmet and the roar of the Moto Guzzi’s burly engine he couldn’t hear most sounds, but this was a roar, and he risked a look up as a big damn chopper flew right above him. It was huge, one of those bulky military machines, with stubby wings laden with what looked like missiles.

Missiles?

He was so surprised that he almost rear-ended a Civic that cut onto the shoulder right in front of him. The chopper moved slowly above him, heading farther up the road. The rotor wash took the rain and wind and churned them into a fresh and more intense miniature storm. Patrick had to really fight to keep from having those winds knock him down.

The second thing that bothered Patrick was how low the chopper was flying. It could not have been more than a hundred feet above the tops of the cars. Patrick had never even seen a news helicopter fly that low, especially in winds like this.

That’s when Patrick saw beams of light sweeping down from the storm clouds. Massive, bright searchlights. Intensely bright, but for a moment they did not appear to belong to anything. It was like a scene from that old movie Close Encounters, and for a brief, irrational moment Patrick thought that’s what he was seeing. UFOs. Aliens.

Then the helicopter above him switched on its light, and Patrick understood.

The stormy sky was filled with helicopters.

No.

That wasn’t exactly right.

The sky was filled with military helicopters.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Goat Weinman was pretty sure he was dead.

So why was he moving?

He tried to open his eyes but either the world was totally without light or he was blind.

Am I dead? He wondered.

Panic detonated in his mind as everything Volker had said about the Lucifer pathogen came sweeping back. When a person is infected, the physical body dies but the mind, the consciousness, lingers, trapped inside hijacked flesh, floating, observing, able to see and feel, connected to every nerve ending but totally unable to do anything.

Trapped.

Was that what was happening?

Was his body now a … a …

“Oh, God!” he cried out. “I’m one of them … please, God, no don’t—”

Then a voice said, “Wake the fuck up.”

That was immediately followed by a hard slap across his face and Goat felt himself reeling and then slamming into some hard. Metal. He began to fall and thrust his hands out to stop himself.

He.

Thrust.

His.

Hands.

He did it. Not some parasitic impulse over which he had no control.

Goat grabbed on to what had to be the fender of a car and he crouched there, sore, his face stinging, terror and doubt screaming at each other in his head. He could feel his hands on the wet metal of the car. He flexed his fingers and they obeyed.

He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t one of them.

Then he felt the wetness on his face. Not the rain. Something heavier, thicker. On his forehead. In his …

Eyes.

Suddenly he was pawing at his eyes and immediately there was faint light. Bad light, but there. He wasn’t blind after all. Not blind or dead. There was something in his eyes. He tilted his face to the rain and rubbed at his eyes until he could see. There was something black on his fingers.

Until the lighting flashed and then he saw that his black fingers were red.

Slick, glistening red.

It was blood. His eyes had been pasted shut with dried blood that was now washing away in the rain. And there in front of him, crumpled against a tree, was the ruin of a metallic green Nissan Cube.

And that’s when it all came back to him. Homer. Starbucks. The accident.

He turned sharply to see Homer Gibbon standing behind him. The killer stood there in the howling wind and pouring rain, bare-chested, wide-legged, with a monstrous grin of red delight on his face as the lightning burned the sky behind him.

“Don’t you go die on me,” he said with a wicked chuckle. “Not until I want you to.”

Traffic splashed by on both sides of the median, but the Cube was almost invisible in the copse of trees into which it had plowed. Goat looked at the car. It was totaled. Smoke curled up from the wheel wells and one tire had exploded.

“Never liked that faggoty little piece of shit,” grumbled Homer. “Now we need to shop for something better.” He pointed a finger at Goat. “Stay.”

He said it the way people do to dogs. Homer chuckled to himself and began walking toward the highway.

Goat stayed.

Then Goat realized that for some reason the traffic was completely stalled over there. Cars and trucks sat bumper to bumper under the pounding rain. The line stretched all the way to the west, far out of sight. On the other side of the road there was nothing. He tried to make sense of it, but his head was too sore and none of his thoughts worked the way they should.

You have a concussion, he told himself, but he couldn’t remember hitting his head. Could an airbag concuss a person? He thought he should know the answer to that, but couldn’t find it in the messy closets of his brain.

Homer was almost to the line of stalled cars now.

Run, jackass!

Goat tried to run. He had that much pride, that much clarity of thought left. But when he took his first step toward the opposite side of the highway, his left leg buckled and he went down hard into the mud. Like an old tape player slowly catching up to speed, Goat’s mind replayed the events of the crash. He remembered seeing the tree suddenly filling the view beyond the windshield, and then the windshield itself bursting inward in ten thousands pieces of gummed safety glass. He remembered the white balloon of the airbag and the numb shock as the dashboard seemed to reach in toward his knees, hitting one, missing the other.

Then blood and darkness and nothing.

He propped himself up on his elbows, spitting bloody water and mud from his mouth. How long had he been unconscious in the car? Long enough for the blood to dry to dense mud in his eyes.

For a moment — just a moment — Goat wished that the crash had been a little harder. Or that the blocky little Cube had been built with less care for the safety of its passengers.

It is a weird and dreadful thing to realize that death was far more desirable than being alive. Goat had never suffered through depression, never rode the Prozac and lithium highway. Never held a razor next to his wrists and wondered if the pain of the cut was worse than the pain of the next hour or next day. Never looked into the future and saw a world where he was absent. He was in love with life. With living it. With women and sex. With film and the complexities of filmmaking. With the tides and currents of social media. With being him.

But now …

Behind him he heard Homer calling out to the people in the cars.

“L’il help! L’il help now.”

Goat thought he heard a car door open. Then a man’s voice asked if Homer was hurt, if everyone was okay.

And then screams.

Such high, shrill, awful screams.

Goat closed his eyes and stared into the future and prayed, begged, pleaded for him not to be any part of what was happening or what was to come.

Like all of his prayers over the last twenty-four hours, it went unanswered.

And then suddenly the sky seemed to open and against all sanity and logic the morning sun rose in the middle of the night. Goat gaped at it, at the gorgeous, impossibly huge burning eye of morning.

“Oh … my … God…” he breathed and despite all of his lifelong agnosticism and cynical disapproval of organized religion, he believed that he beheld the fiery glory of a god revealing himself to His people at the moment of their greatest need.

He began to cry. He covered his head with his hands and wept, apologizing for everything he had ever done wrong, promising — swearing — that he would be a better man, that he would hone the grace of this moment. A part of his bruised mind could hear the shrill, hysterical note in his voice, but he didn’t care.

He was saved.

This is what people believed would happen. In the dark night of the soul. At the end of all hope.

The night became brighter and brighter and Goat looked up, truly expecting to see angels with fiery swords. Believing it in that moment.

A second sun rose above the horizon.

And a third.

Goat said, “Oh my God,” again. It meant something entirely different now.

This was not the rising of the sun any more than it was the shield of God’s protection to keep harm from His children.

They were fireballs rising from over the darkened hills.

“What—?” Goat asked the fire and the night and, perhaps, God.

His answer came in the form of a streak of light that arced across the sky and vanished behind the hill. Another ball of fire rose up, veined with red and black, expanding as it fought its way upward against the rain. Goat turned, following the backtrail of the streak and saw something massive and powerful tearing through the sky.

“God,” he said once more.

But it wasn’t what he meant.

The A-10 Thunderbolt II screamed through the storm above him. Others flew in a wide formation and they, too, spoke in voices of fire and thunder.

Goat’s brain, concussed and confused, now understood the difference between heaven come to earth and hell on earth.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Patrick Freivald slowed his bike, suddenly unsure of how badly he needed to get to Starbucks and get out of the rain.

The sky was filled with dozens of helicopters. Their searchlights cut back and forth to illuminate something on the far side of the hill three hundred yards ahead; and all around the helicopters there were smaller flashes as the beams struck illusionary sparks from the falling rain.

As he slowed and the roar of his motorcycle eased down, he could hear sounds from up ahead. The heavy beat of rotors, the blare of horns. And something else, something staccato and deep. For a moment Patrick through it was the base rhythm of some techno music played at incredible volume, or a drum solo by someone gone totally apeshit.

It was neither, and as he slowed to a stop, he heard it much more clearly; and it was at that moment that he realized the flickering lights in the sky were not searchlights reflecting on raindrops.

They were muzzle flashes.

Above him there was a sharp hiss, loud as a fire hose, and something streaked over the tops of the cars toward the hill a few thousand yards away. It left a trail of smoke that was quickly torn apart by the rain. Then the whole night turned to day as an immense cloud of yellow and orange light rose up over the hill. The deep-chested boom of an explosion rolled along the blacktop, rocking the cars and knocking Patrick to the side. He nearly crashed his bike but pushed his weight against it and fought it back upright; and he did that without thought because his mind was numb from what he was seeing.

A fireball rose into the air, defying the rains to extinguish it.

Patrick said, “Oh my—”

But the rest was struck from his mouth as a second explosion sent a competing fireball up into the night. And a third.

A fourth.

Soon all of the helicopters were firing missiles and rockets. And guns.

People began getting out of their cars. Despite the rain, despite the insanity of all of this. Patrick could hear them yelling. And screaming.

There was movement near the top of the hill and for a moment it looked like roaches boiling out of a sewer drain, but then he realized it was people — hundreds of people — their clothes dark and shiny with water, running from the helicopter attack. Running along the road, moving between the cars, climbing over them, and …

And …

Patrick stared, not sure of what he was seeing. He raised his visor and peered through the slanting rain. Some of the people seemed to be fighting with each other. Wrestling, falling to the ground, bending each other backward over the hoods of cars.

“What the fuck…?” he said.

The tide of violence swept along the row of stalled cars. Coming his way.

Coming fast.

He had no idea what was happening. A riot of some kind. People going nuts.

Either way, he wanted no part of it.

Patrick cut a look across the wide median and for the first time took note that it was empty, and he tried to recall if he’d seen a single car come that way since this began.

He was sure he hadn’t. Not one.

What the hell was happening over that hill?

The helicopters kept firing. Fireballs raced each other into the air. People were trying to turn their cars, and some of them managed to squeeze out of the press and U-turn on the shoulder. They blared their horns and there were dozens of fender benders as the panic to escape the moment overcame everything else.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

A wall of superheated gas came rolling down the highway, flattened wet grass, knocking people down, setting off the car alarms of those stopped vehicles their owners had turned off, bending the trees, turning the rain to steam.

It hit Goat as he struggled to his feet and flung him against the wrecked Cube. He hit hard, cracking the back of his head, his elbows, the middle of his back. His skin suddenly felt like it was covered with ants as the heat leached moisture from his flesh. Goat felt hot wind blowing into his screaming mouth and down his throat.

He collapsed on his knees, aware on some distant level that new pain exploded in his injured knee but not immediately able to care, then as the fiery shockwave passed he sagged over into mud that was no longer wet and cold.

Goat lay there, flash-burned and stunned, gasping for air in a world that no longer seemed to have any. Then …

Pulled into the vacuum created by the shockwave, fresh air buffeted him. He dragged in lungfuls of rainy air, sucking it down like a gasping fish returned to the healing waters of the stream.

People were screaming.

Screaming.

Horns blared and Goat heard gunshots. Spaced, erratic. Hunting rifles, he thought.

A moment later, the air above him was churned to pieces by the beat of helicopter blades, and a split second later heavier guns opened up. Goat wriggled painfully toward the back of the wrecked car and looked past the rear wheel to see something that made no immediate sense.

Five big military helicopters swayed in the air, their pilots fighting the harsh winds as door gunners fired miniguns at the lines of parked cars.

People were running in wild panic between the cars, racing out into the farm fields on the far side of the road, tearing cross the median toward the empty westbound lanes. Some had managed to get their cars going and were peeling out of the traffic jam, but most vehicles were too tightly packed. The driver of a Jeep Patriot rammed his vehicle forward, threw it into reverse and rammed backward, and went forward again, crushing bumpers until he’d forced open a hole big enough for him to turn off the road. But the car was blind, the headlights smashed, the grill punched in. It limped down the shoulder but stalled within a dozen yards. And everywhere Goat looked the panicking people were fighting.

Except that wasn’t what it was, and after staring for several long moments he understood what was happening. The firebombing. The attacks on the people in the cars. The violence unfolding before him.

He spoke a name.

Not Homer’s name.

He said, “Lucifer.”

Then headlights burned his eyes as a huge Escalade came tearing through the storm. The SUV slewed to a sideways stop, showering Goat with fresh mud and rainwater. The driver’s door swung open and a figure climbed out. Huge and powerful, but moving stiffly as if every muscle was cramped.

Goat said his name now.

“Homer.”

“The fuck you doing down there, boy?” laughed the killer. His face and chest glistened with bright, fresh blood. “Nap time’s over. We gots to go.”

He jerked open the Cube’s doors, grabbed Goat’s camera bag, laptop, and recorder, put them into the Escalade, then bent and grabbed Goat by the belt and hauled him out of the mud with a huge sucking sound. Homer stood Goat on his feet and gave him a shove toward the passenger door.

“Get in.” He had to shout to be heard over the continuous machine-gun fire and all those screams.

Goat obeyed and crawled into the SUV.

He even buckled up for safety.

Homer staggered around and climbed in behind the wheel, grunting with the effort of bending his body. Goat wanted to believe that the killer’s stiffness and pain were the result of the accident, but he knew better.

It’s rigor mortis, he whispered in his own thoughts, marveling that something as bizarre as that could be the truth.

There was a hiss in the air and then on the road three cars flew up into the air on a fireball.

“Rocket,” said Homer as casually as if he was commenting on a breed of dog walking down the street. “Let’s get some gone between us and that shit.”

He put it in drive and the Escalade lurched forward, wanting to run, but Homer did not race away from the battle. Instead he killed the headlights and angled toward the trees that filled the thirty-yard-wide median. Between explosions and the lightning there was just enough light to steer, and Homer drove with care.

“Don’t want to wreck this ride,” said the killer. “Always wanted me an Escalade. Never could afford it.” He paused, thinking. “Guess the ticket price don’t mean shit now.”

Goat said nothing. He jammed his good leg against the floor and clutched the dashboard, using his hands to brace himself against unexpected impacts. But the car hit nothing.

No trees, anyway.

Several times Homer had to swerved to avoid running people, and twice he didn’t swerve fast enough. The dull thud of meat and bone against metal was horrifying.

“Slow as shit,” Homer said as one man went spinning off the left fender, his body twisting in ways it shouldn’t.

When the median thinned, Homer angled across the road to where the line of cars was now thinner. He bullied his way through the traffic and went right off the road again into a farm field.

With every second they were leaving the disaster farther behind.

Escaping.

Goat realized that he was watching the single most dangerous man in the world escape.

And he was too frightened to do a thing about it.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Trout heard the sound and thought it was more thunder. He and Dez whipped around toward the row of windows that faced the north. They saw the light and for a moment they thought it was more lightning.

Then the whole sky lit up and something monstrous rose up from behind the forests and rows of houses. A colossus that towered like a fire god from some pagan dream of Ragnarok, a titan of flame who reared above the town and raised a burning sword with such fury that the storm itself recoiled in terror.

Dez said, “What the—”

She got no further as a wall of furnace-hot air blew across the treetops, setting them ablaze, tearing the smaller ones down, shattering thousands of windows, whipping debris into the air and igniting it.

The reinforced windows of the school bowed inward, the glass fracturing into tens of thousands of tiny silver lines but the fragments held fast by the wire mesh. Tongues of flame licked in through those windows that were open, setting fire to curtains and shelves of books, and American flags on wooden poles.

Trout screamed as he fell backward, steam rising from his clothes. Dez screamed, too, and began slapping at his clothes, swatting out tiny fires that wanted to take hold.

The building shuddered as if it was being pummeled by giants.

And then it was over except for the fading echo of a dragon’s roar that rolled away from them into the night.

The space around the school seemed empty, devoid of air, as if they were suddenly on the surface of the moon. Then with a banshee shriek winds whipped out of the east and west with ferocity, attacking the vacuum left by the wave of heat. The winds brought with them the rains. The winds blew long and long and black.

Trout lay on the floor and Dez knelt over him, both of them gasping like runners, their eyes wide with terror, their faces flushed with residual heat.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” whispered Dez, “what was that?”

But they both knew.

In the distance the fireball still curled upward into the night. Silent now, but all the more frightening for its persistent reality.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Patrick Freivald’s mind was going into shock but he felt his body respond to a primal survival drive. Adrenaline slammed into his system and with a growl he wrestled his bike around, pointing the front wheel toward the verge. He gunned the engine and drove off the road. The verge slanted down and he sloshed through muddy water so deep it nearly stalled the engine, but Patrick kept it going, doing it right, steering well, keeping control.

He picked up speed, kicking up a fantail of mud forty feet high as he plowed through the rainy field, looping away from the madness and toward the line of cars that had been behind him. He was aware of other vehicles racing through the field, too, and they were all going so fast that he knew the drivers were in full-bore panic mode. That made them dangerous. A motorcycle in the rain was no match for even the smallest compact.

So he was forced to steer away from the road and deeper into the field, but it was ink-dark out there. His headlight couldn’t compete with the storm and rain. Far ahead, at the absolute outside range of his vision, he saw a small side road. A farm road. It was empty.

He thanked God and gunned the engine, racing to reach it and get the hell out of there.

Patrick never saw the big black Escalade that came bucketing across the field, headlights off, the driver pale and grinning; the passenger paler still, his mouth open in a silent scream. Patrick didn’t see any of that.

He did, however, feel it.

But only for a moment.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

There was a grinding crunch and suddenly the Escalade slewed sideways, fishtailing in the mud as Homer fought for control. Goat had a fleeting afterimage of a man and a motorcycle flying through the rain, but the SUV kept turning until it spun in a complete circle. As it came out of the turn, Homer gave it enough gas to reclaim the steering, and the machine lurched and bucked, but finally smoothed out. It shot forward across the field.

“Fucking fender’s all for shit, goddamn it,” complained Homer.

“We hit … we hit…” Goat tried to say, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“No, boy, we didn’t hit shit. Asshole on the bike hit us. Fuck him.”

Goat was trembling so bad that his teeth chattered. Homer cut him a quick look and then laughed.

They drove on.

Homer kept his speed under forty, and often a lot lower, even when he found a farm road and pulled onto it. The road was lined with huge oaks and elms. Homer lowered his window and squinted up through the falling rain.

“Good,” he said. “That’s real good.”

Goat understood what Homer meant. The helicopters were firing on the cars and on the people fighting between them and fleeing from the road. The infection was out and they were trying to keep it contained. But a black SUV driving slowly under the eaves of the trees was invisible in the storm, and with every minute they left the sounds of destruction farther behind. Homer kept driving with great care for nearly ten miles, long past the point where Goat, twisting around in his seat to look, could see the fireballs. All he could hear now was the rain and the wind.

Goat licked his lips, tasting mud and blood, and he dared ask a question.

“Where are we going?”

Homer took his time answering. He found a connecting road and turned onto the blacktop. There were other cars there, some heading to the turn-off to Route 653. Goat wanted to yell at them, to warn them; but that was impossible.

Eventually Homer flicked on his headlights as he brought the Escalade up to fifty-five miles an hour. They crossed the line into Fayette County and found another road that headed north.

“Where are we going?” Goat asked again.

Homer grinned at him with bloody teeth.

“Back to where I was raised,” he said.

That confused Goat for a moment. Homer had been born to an addict mother and given up for adoption. He’d been raised in a series of foster homes scattered all over western Pennsylvania.

No, he thought suddenly. He’s going home. To the place where he became a monster. To the foster home where he was first abused by a sadistic man and his wife. To a small apartment in a big city.

“Pittsburgh…?” said Goat in a small, frightened voice.

Home shot him a look, then grinned again. It was not a man’s smile. Maybe not even a zombie’s smile. It was the smile of the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. It was the smile of a monster.

Homer Gibbon drove on through the night.

“Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” he sang in a voice that was filled with such dark promise.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

They moved across the quarantine zone alone and in packs. Some of them wore rags that had once been coveralls and jeans of farmers. Some wore ordinary shopkeepers’ clothes. A few wore the blood-smeared battle dress uniform of the Pennsylvania National Guard.

There were whites and blacks, some Latinos, a few Asians. There were adults and children. There were men and women.

None of those professional, cultural, racial, or gender identifiers mattered anymore. They were all of a kind now. All of the same species, and they were all unified by a purpose which, though not actually shared, was the same for each of them.

Hunger.

Age didn’t matter anymore. They were all as old as they would ever be.

They walked as fast as broken bones and torn tendons would allow them to walk. Some moved with the stick-figure gait of rigor mortis. Others loped along, low and feral and fast.

Most of them were leaving Stebbins County.

Not that they understood or cared where the county line was. They lacked the capacity for that kind of perception. They left because they could not smell food anymore. It had moved.

And so they followed it.

But not all of them.

Some stayed because they could still smell the fully blooded meat of the living. Those were the ones closest to the town’s only high ground.

The ones closest to the Stebbins Little School.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

On the big screen, in ultra-high definition and perfect detail, thousands of people died.

The thermobaric bombs did terrible work.

Someone had the kindness or sanity, or perhaps cowardice, to mute the sound, and so the bombs detonated in ghastly silence. Flashes of light that seemed to halt the storm and repeal the dark rule of night.

The president of the United States watched his orders being carried out with the meticulous precision that is only possible at the highest level of military training. Everything was done exactly right. The jets reached their targets with rapidity, they released their payloads with great accuracy, and the weapons performed exactly according to design requirements and mechanical construction. It all happened without a hitch.

If the president had been a madman, he would have been able to enjoy such a level of craftsmanship and professionalism.

But because he was a sane man, he sat and witnessed and wept.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

When they could make their trembling legs move, Dez and Trout hurried downstairs. The children were screaming in panic. So were most of the adults. Small fires still burned, threatening to take hold on the old building. Dez beat and shoved and screamed at the teachers and parents, forcing them from shocked inaction into teams that attacked the flames with water, with fire extinguishers, with jackets they held in their hands and snapped at anything smoldering.

Seventy-two people had burns.

Eighteen of them were serious.

Mrs. Madison, whose hair was singed and whose eyes had begun to twitch, organized people into emergency care teams. When the first-aid supplies ran out they used Crisco as an unguent.

Trout limped along the hallways searching for children who had panicked and run during the explosion. He opened every door, looked into closets.

It was almost the same pattern as when they had looked for the infected.

On the ground floor, all the way in the back, he saw a door close as he approached it. He almost called out, but there was something odd about the way it closed. Soft. Almost furtive.

Or perhaps sneaky.

He slowed to a cautious walk and moved to the edge of the door, away from the smoked glass panel, not wishing to throw a shadow on it.

Inside he heard a sound that at first he couldn’t understand or identify.

A whispering voice. Male. Low.

And then snuffles.

A child.

No. Children.

Trout pressed his ear to the door to try and hear better. That’s when he heard the window.

It squeaked and rattled in the frame, and as it did the sound of rain became louder.

Someone inside was opening the window on the ground floor.

Panic flared in his chest and he grabbed the doorknob and turned it.

It only turned halfway and then stopped.

Locked.

“Hey!” Trout yelled, throwing caution away. “Who’s in there? What the hell are you doing?”

He pounded his fist on the door.

Inside a child cried out.

“Open the door, goddamn it…”

The cry of the child changed. Just like that.

It became a scream and overlaid with it was the low, hungry, unmistakable moan of the living dead.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

“We have Teddy on the line,” said Gavin. “Welcome aboard the crazyboat, Teddy. Tells the Finke what you think.”

“Hey, listen man, I got to make this quick.”

“Take all the time you need, Teddy.”

“No, seriously, I only have a minute, but I needed to get this out. I needed to tell someone what’s really going on out here.”

“And what is happening out there?”

“This whole thing, all the deaths, the stories about people attacking each other, about people going crazy and killing each other and eating each other? Those aren’t stories, man. That’s happening. It’s happening right now.”

“‘Eating each other,’ Teddy?”

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing,” said Gavin. “But I also don’t understand. Who’s eating whom?”

“The people who get this thing, this disease, they die, but then they come back right away. So it’s not like they’re really dead. They get up and start going crazy. You can’t talk to them. They don’t react the way people do. They’re really out of it. All they want to do is eat people.”

“And that’s what you say is happening in Stebbins County? People running around eating each other?”

“That’s definitely what’s happening.”

“And how do you know this, Teddy?”

“I’m here, man. I’m right here in Stebbins. My whole unit is here. And we’re under orders to hunt the infected down and … and shoot them.”

Before Gavin could ask for clarification and verification, the line went dead.

The producer grinned through the glass and twirled his finger by his temple. Another loony. Gavin had to agree, but it was loonies that paid the light bill. He punched another button.

“We have Samantha from Evans, Pennsylvania. Hi, Samantha, tell the Finke what you think.”

“It’s bigfoot…” she said.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Trout tried to kick the door in.

He stepped back, raised his knee to his chest, and snapped out with every ounce of strength he possessed. He knew where and how to kick in a door. He’d witnessed cops do it, written about it in news articles, seen it in movies. His heel hit the wood right beside the doorknob. Angle, placement, and leverage should have torn the lock out of its hinges and slammed the door inward.

There was only a tiny fragment of time for his brain to process a sudden and awful reality.

This door opened out into the hallway.

There was absolutely no way to stop that kick.

His foot hit and the door did not — could not — burst inward. Instead the force of the impact rebounded from the immovable object and shot through his heel, up his shin, and through dozens of muscular transfer points into the nerve clusters in his lower back that were already damaged.

He shrieked in pain and instantly fell onto his back on the hardwood floor, the shock knocking the air out of his lungs.

Beyond the door the screams rose to the ultrasonic, burying the sound of hungry moans.

Trout was absolutely incapable of movement.

Even when he saw the doorknob jiggle and turn. Even when he heard the lock click open. Even when the door began to swing outward.

The edge of the door struck him on the hip, but his sprawled body prevented it from opening beyond a few inches. A small, desperate hand suddenly thrust out through the crack, tiny fingers clawing at the air, trying to grab something. A lifeline, a hope. Anything.

Then the hall was filled with a dreadful roar of rage and horror.

Billy turned his dazed head and saw a demon running out of the shadows toward him. Beautiful and terrible, blue eyes blazing like lasers, teeth bared in an animal snarl.

“D — Dez…” he croaked.

She leapt over him and as she landed she planted a foot against his hip and shoved him away with ruthless force. He rolled over, fresh agony spearing through him. Dez tore open the door, grabbed the child — a little black girl with cornrowed hair decorated with pink dragonfly clips — and hauled her out of the room.

The child came staggering into the hall.

Covered in blood.

Trailing blood.

Streaming blood.

The sound that came from Dez Fox was more savage and far less human than anything Trout had heard from the mouths of the infected. It wasn’t a sane sound. It was bestial and horrible.

She whipped the door all the way open and ran into the room, and through that open door Trout could see the tableau and understand what had happened. One of the adults had tried to escape through a window, taking several children with him. But the dead had been outside. Without the soldiers to surround the school, the dead had come hunting for food. Three of them were already inside the room. More of them milled beyond the open window. All of them were blackened and burned, their skin cracked from the heat, their hair burned away, their clothes still smoking. The only color Trout could see was the white of their teeth, the milkiness of their dead eyes, and the red blood on the mouths of the zombies inside the school.

Trout saw all of this in a terrible flash. Then the storm outside seemed to enter the school as thunder and lightning tore the room apart. Dez had her gun out and she fired, fired. The booms of the Glock seemed impossibly loud. The muzzle flashes strobed images into Trout’s memory. A blackened face flying apart as hollow-point rounds exploded its skull.

Then Dez was moving, shoving her way past children who cringed back, hands clamped to bleeding wounds, voices raised in desperate pleas that Trout knew could never be answered. Not anymore.

Two of the burned infected were down, and the third lunged at Dez from her blindside.

“Watch!” cried Trout, but Dez was already turning, firing, blowing the hungry need from the eyes of the dead thing.

She raced to the window, gun out in front of her in two hands and emptied the rest of the magazine into the faces of the things that were fighting each other to climb inside. They fell backward. Dez swapped out the magazine, letting the empty one fall. She leaned out and began firing again, screaming at them to fall, to die, to fucking die.

And they died.

Feet pounded down the hallway and Trout turned to see a knot of adults racing toward him, guns and clubs in their hands. He saw them reach for the children and even though he hated himself for doing it, even though he knew it would earn him a sentence in hell, he yelled them back.

“They’re bitten!” he bellowed. “They’re infected.”

The adults stumbled to a halt, their fear and uncertainty warring with their basic humanity.

The little black girl with the pink clips had fallen down and she lay still and unmoving on the floor five feet away from Trout. Her wounds no longer bled, and as he stared the blood around the bite marks changed. At first the bright red seemed to fade to a paler pink, but that was an illusion created as thousands of tiny white worms seemed to explode within the mess. The process was so damned fast that it was like watching a movie speeded up. First there dots of white and then they expanded before his eyes before finally bursting open as worms. Then within seconds those newborn worms began seeding the blood with new eggs, which swelled and burst, continuing a cycle that seemed impossible. Except that it was going on, right there, right in front of his eyes. Volker’s monster at work.

The worms excreted an oily black substances whose nature Trout could not even guess, and soon the blood became as black as motor oil. Totally polluted, totally corrupted.

Then the little girl’s eyes opened.

She and Trout lay five feet apart. A child and a man. Both of them trapped inside a nightmare.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Back in the Humvee, Sam took the radio booster unit, removed a small cable, and plugged it into his cell phone.

“I thought everything was jammed,” said Boxer.

“Special line,” explained Sam. “For emergencies. Have to keep the conversation short, though, because it’s not all that secure.”

Sam punched a number and was not surprised when it was answered halfway through the first ring.

“Are you inside?” asked Scott Blair. The connection was very bad, but workable.

“Affirmative,” said Sam, “and I have two things to report. First, there are definitely Zees at large within the area. Does that match your latest intel?”

Boxer mouthed the word “Zees.”

Blair said, “On-site command reports that the last Zees are being dealt with.”

“That sounds like the bullshit it is, sir,” observed Sam. “We found three without even looking. That tells me there are more, and probably a lot more. Between terrain and the storm, no ground search can make reliable claims.”

“For what it’s worth, even S.Z. agrees,” said Blair, careful not to name General Zetter over an open line. “He has requested ten thousand additional units be shipped to his warehouse. ETA two hours.”

Ten thousand new troops. Sam whistled. “Not soon enough,” he said. “And that brings me to the second thing. The checkpoint we passed was manned by a couple of kids who couldn’t keep anyone out of anywhere. S.Z.’s using two-man teams on the roads, and the roving patrols between checkpoints are a joke. They couldn’t keep kids out of a candy store. If the whole area hasn’t already been breached, then it’s a matter of time.”

Blair cursed.

“Listen to me,” said Sam, “I don’t know or care what you have to do to convince the Big Man that the current response is inadequate. Seems to me that everyone is proceeding like this thing is over, but it’s not going to take much for this thing to go into the shitter. If it helps any put me on the phone to the president.”

“It’s worth a try,” said Blair. “But now I have something to tell you. H.V. is dead.”

It took Sam a second. H.V.

Dr. Herman Volker.

“Ah … shit. Tell me he at least left the accounts.” He leaned on the word.

“That is a negative. Zero accounts.”

Sam watched lightning fork in the sky. “Where does that leave us?”

“With a mission change,” said Blair. “I need you to scrap the science trip and proceed to the secondary source. It’s all riding on that. Do whatever you have to do.”

The line went dead and Sam put the phone away. He told the others what Blair had said, and explained that the secondary source of Volker’s information was in the possession of Billy Trout.

“Which means we have to infiltrate a school full of scared kids and force this Trout guy to pony up the flash drives?” asked Boxer.

“In a nutshell.”

No one looked happy.

“I volunteered for this gig, boss,” said Boxer, “but I didn’t sign on to kill civilians, and I sure as shit won’t cut my way through a bunch of kids.”

Sam Imura said nothing. Around them, the storm slapped against the windows of the Humvee and the night seemed to go several shades darker.

Gypsy very quietly said, “If this thing gets out of the Q-zone it’s game over for the whole world. That’s not trash talk, Boxer. That’s not a bad line from a monster movie. That’s real shit and it’s what we’re here to stop. I don’t want to hurt anyone but bad guys, either, but if it’s a few civilians versus the rest of the fucking world … I mean, c’mon, is that even a discussion?”

No one answered that, not even Boxer.

“C’mon,” said Sam, “let’s go hunting.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Dez Fox knew she was losing it.

Or maybe she had already lost it.

She knew that as certainly as she knew that she should not — should absolutely not — climb out of the window of the Stebbins Little School. All she had to do was close the window. Close it, lock it. Then close and lock the door to that room.

That was all.

Something simple.

A smart and very sane choice.

Which she did not make.

Instead she hooked a leg over the sill, shifted her buttocks onto the ledge, ducked her head out of the dry room and into the rain. Hands reached out of the storm to claw at her. Fingers that were withered to black claws by heat. Soot-stained teeth clacked together as the dead came for her.

Behind her, Billy Trout was screaming her name.

“Fuck you!” she growled.

Dez was never sure if she meant that for Billy or for the dead.

It didn’t matter.

Her mind was filled with the immediate images of those children. Her children. The little ones under her protection. Bitten. Infected. Doomed.

She jammed the barrel of the Glock against a charred forehead and fired.

Did it again to another infected.

Two of the dead fell back, their suddenly limp bodies collapsing against the other zombies, hampering them, tangling up with them.

Dez jumped down, using the pistol to smash aside the reaching hands. She kicked at wobbly legs, shattering bones, causing jagged splinters of white to rip through the blackened skin. She fired and fired. Every shot was point-blank.

Every bullet hit a face, a forehead, a temple.

Every hollow-point round did what it was manufactured to do. It expanded and exploded through the brain matter. Blowing out the backs of skulls, spattering the other dead with pieces of bone and brain. More than once the bullets, fired from so close, punched through one skull and then struck another.

She fired every round in the magazine. Released it, let it fall, swept another magazine from her belt, slapped it into place. The process was absolutely automatic, as orderly and efficient as the functions of a machine. A robot.

The dead kept coming out of the rain.

Ten of them.

Fifteen.

Thirty.

The gun was heavy in her hands, the recoil sending jolts of pain into her palms and wrists, her trigger finger burning with overuse, her skin tingling with powder burns.

When she had come leaping out of the window Dez had been screaming. A primal war cry, something like a cave woman might have bellowed as predatory animals stalked toward her own mewling children in the dark of a prehistoric night. But as she fired and fired, the scream burned away, leaving only the rasp of her panting breath and the thunder of her gun. She could feel her face lose expression. It wasn’t a calmness settling in her muscles. It was a deadness, a nothingness.

The dead wore no expressions either, and the battle became strangely dreamlike.

Dez dropped an empty magazine and fished for her last one.

And did not find it.

Suddenly the deadness was gone.

Panic returned in a terrible rush as she realized that she had miscounted the number of magazines she’d carried. That she’d used every last bullet.

There were at least a dozen of the dead still on their feet, and four or five more crawling along, trailing broken legs behind them.

She turned toward the school and with a cry of horror realized that somehow she had moved away from it, that she had walked into the schoolyard, leaving the building fifty yards behind her.

She was trapped out in the storm, surrounded by the dead, and there was not even a bullet left to take her own life.

The dead closed around her.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Ross Cruickshank staggered away from his burning car and ran for the woods. Steam rose from his clothes and he could feel a dangerous heat spreading on his skin. His mind was filled with mad images that were fractured and strange. Pale-faced people with black mouths. Blood-splattered people reeling out of the storm and throwing themselves at the crowd that stood watching in numb horror as helicopters fired on the lines of stopped cars. And then something else.

A screech from above the dark clouds.

Streaks of bright yellow light.

And then fire.

Fire.

Everywhere.

Cars leapt into the air and exploded.

People ran screaming, their hair and clothes ablaze.

People flying apart; each separate piece of them igniting as the heat blooms spread out from the point of impact.

The shimmering wave of hot air moved across the road like an attacking mirage, surreal and deadly.

Ross was at the extreme edge of the blast zone. His car was more than two miles back from the Starbucks on Route 653, and until the blast he stood on the edge of the median, hands cupped around his eyes so he could see through the rain as he tried to make sense of what looked like a soccer riot there on a rural highway in Pennsylvania. The radio had been weird all night, with local news talking about virus outbreaks and rumors of people being killed in Stebbins.

Ross had never heard of Stebbins beyond it being a place on the map between his long drive from an uncle’s funeral in Akron to a friend’s wedding in Cape May, New Jersey. He’d taken the back roads because the news said the Pennsylvania turnpike was slowed to a crawl, even this late. Because of the storm and because of whatever the hell was happening in wherever the hell Stebbins was.

Then he hit the traffic jam on Route 653, totally blocked in, sitting there for forty minutes before finally getting out of the car to see what he could see. What he saw was the riot.

Or whatever it was.

Then the helicopters.

That made no sense to Ross.

Then the jets and the flashes of bright light.

And now he ran through the rain with steam hissing from his clothes and a mouth filled with hot ash and gritty debris. He coughed and gagged as he ran. He fell several times, dropping knees-first onto the highway, then falling off the asphalt into the rainwater that surged through the brimming run-off ditch. Falling into the cold water was like plunging into a river of knives. Ross screamed hoarsely, his burned throat seemingly filled with razor blades.

He scrambled up the other side and struggled weakly to his feet just as a second streak of fiery light arced out of the clouds and struck the line of stalled cars. Then Ross felt himself flying.

Flying.

He soared through the storm winds, wondering if this was real or a dream.

Ross did not remember landing.

His next conscious perception was pain.

And sickness.

He lay in the dark, legs and arms splayed, face turned to the sky as water filled his mouth. He coughed. Swallowed too much water and then rolled to his side and vomited. The insides of his mouth ached from the superheated air he’d inhaled and there was a burning line of scalded tissue running along the wall into his lungs, and down into his stomach. It hurt. And it itched.

He coughed again and spat something bitter and foul into the mud.

Ross pawed at the dribble on his lips and he thought, just for a strange little moment, that he could feel something wriggle between his fingertips. Something tiny. But the rain washed it away.

The itching in his throat continued.

Sickness sloshed like sewer water in his stomach.

He vomited again. And again, unsure of whether anything was coming up. It was too dark to see and his throat hurt too much to tell.

The darkness took him again.

When he was next aware of things, he was on his feet, walking. It wasn’t the median anymore, nor was it farmlands. When the lightning flashed it painted vertical lines all around him. Tree trunks. He was in the woods.

Ross did not know which woods. At night, in the dark, he hadn’t seen much of the landscape. This was rural Pennsylvania, though, and it was a green state. Lots of damn forests.

He knew, on some level, that he was in shock, and that he was hurt. Maybe badly hurt. But he didn’t seem able to care about it.

He did care about the sickness, though. His stomach felt like it was full of wriggling snakes, and his entire esophagus itched terribly. His skin did, too. He scratched his arms and chest, but it didn’t help; the itch was under the skin. Deep and painful.

I got to get home, he thought.

And while he understood what that meant, it felt somehow irrational and stupid. Home was hundreds of miles away from here and he didn’t even have a car.

Why didn’t he have a car? he wondered, but he couldn’t answer that question. It was so hard to think clearly.

The ground began to slant downward and he followed it because it was so much easier than climbing uphill. He staggered along, going in and out of awareness.

Then his foot caught on an exposed root and Ross was falling, falling.

He felt himself hit the ground chest-first, the shock driving the air out of his lungs, and then as he fell face-forward into the mud there was sharp metallic snap and a white-hot explosion of pain on both sides of his face. He could feel something like knives punching in through his jaw and cheeks and temples. Broken bits of teeth filled his mouth and he tried to spit them out so he could scream. But he could not scream. Not the way he wanted to, not the way he needed to. The teeth held his jaws shut, locked. Trapped.

Ross Cruickshank lay there in the dark with a heavy-grade steel bear trap locked around his face, the teeth buried deep, a chain anchoring it to the trunk of a tree.

It took nearly an hour for him to die from blood loss, shock, and burns.

It took less than a minute for him to come back.

But all through that night and for all the nights and days to follow, Ross lay facedown in the forest, caught in the jaws of the trap, chained to the tree, unable to rise, unable to hunt, unable to do anything about the awful, gnawing hunger.

All he could do was lay there and moan.

And rot.

Deborah Varas drove like hell.

And hell itself seemed to follow.

Mushroom clouds of burning gas billowed into the air, and the trees along both sides of the road burned like candles.

Her husband, Roger, was a silent, twitching hulk in the seat next to her. She tried not to look at him, tried not to smell the cooked meat stink of him. He’d stood between her and the first blast of superheated air. She would remember how it looked as he seemed to rise into the air, arms out to his side as if crucified against the night. And then flew back against her and they both went tumbling and crashing into the watery mud beside the road.

It was the mud that saved them, of that Deborah had no doubt.

If they were, in fact, safe.

It had been a screaming hell to pull him out of the mud and to support him as they staggered toward their car. The doors were still open from when they’d gotten out to see what was wrong, and Deborah pushed him in. She didn’t dare pull the seat belt around him. Too much of him looked blistered.

Instead she limped around to the driver’s side, got in, slammed her door, cut the wheel, and tore off another car’s bumper as she broke out of the line of stopped cars. She hit the gas hard to give the car enough momentum to fly across the drainage ditch. Even then the rear wheels hit the lip and for a moment Deborah thought the car would slide backward into the water. But the muscular front wheels somehow found purchase in the mud and the car lurched forward onto the median. She cut across, weaving around staggering survivors who were all trying to flee the blast, and then she hit the opposite lane, fishtailed around, straightened, and bore down to the west. The speedometer climbed to sixty and then eighty, and after that she stopped looking.

Deborah had no idea what had happened. The stalled cars and then something that looked like a riot, but it was half a mile from where she and Roger stood. It looked, though, as if whatever the commotion was it was coming their way, but then the world seemed to explode. She wondered about that, and whether she should be far more upset than she was. Shock. It was shock.

I’m in shock.

It was a strange thought to have. Like realizing you’re drunk. You know it, but can’t really take control of body or mouth or anything. Like being a passenger in a hijacked car.

I’m in shock.

She knew it to be true, but she didn’t know what to do or how to even react to that truth.

As she drove, she tried to work saliva into her mouth to clear away the awful taste. When the heat wave hit them, she’d taken a mouthful of ash and hot dust. She wasn’t badly burned — no worse than eating soup that was too hot — but the ash had a terrible taste. Sour and nasty.

And it itched something terrible.

Then she scolded herself for worrying about that when her husband was in such agony. She had to get him to a doctor. To a hospital.

Deborah fished for her cell phone, but there was no signal. None.

She turned the radio on, but the only station she could find was a conspiracy theory talk show. She switched it off.

Tears ran down her face as she drove.

Three times she saw flashing red and blue police lights, but they were on some other road, parallel to where she was, and far away. Heading toward the blast. And she did not want to go back there for anything. Deborah didn’t know if it was some terrorist thing or something equally horrifying, but she wanted no part of it.

In the darkness beside her, Roger moaned and shifted. She touched him as gently as she could, and he didn’t hiss or jerk away. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as he looked, she thought, praying that she was right.

“Roger?” she asked. “Hold on, baby, we’re going to the hospital.”

He moaned softly. An inarticulate sound. Like a dreaming person might make.

He pawed for her hand, though, and she let him take it.

“It’s okay, honey, we’ll get this taken care of.”

Roger kissed her hand, and his tenderness, even this deep into the horrors of his own pain came close to breaking her heart. Fresh tears filled her eyes as she spoke soothing words to him. Meaningless words, more a sound of comfort than any promises she knew she could keep. The world beyond the windshield was wet and vast and dark and she had no idea where the closest hospital was.

She drove on, faster than anything that was safe or sane.

Roger put her fingertips in his mouth. Kissed them and …

Licked them?

It was such a strange thing. Like he was trying to nurse on her fingers, the way a child would at her breast. God, was he that damaged? Was he that far gone that he was reduced to a childlike state? An infantile state?

“Oh, Roger…”

A heartbeat later she screamed as Roger bit down on her fingers.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Dez Fox knew that she should scream.

A scream would be good. It would punctuate this moment, seal it, send it into eternity.

People were supposed to scream when they died.

Especially when they died like this, trapped inside a nightmare.

Yet when she opened her mouth she said, “JT.”

In her ears the name sounded like “Daddy.”

It meant the same thing to her.

The dead shuffled forward, stumbling over the sprawled limbs of their dead companions. Some of them tripped and fell, but they got up again, mindless of cracked kneecaps and fractured wrists from their collisions with the unforgiving ground.

Dez backed away, but she knew that she had nowhere to run. There were zombies between her and the school. The lighted window was fifty yards away. It might have been a window on the face of the moon for all that it mattered to her.

She saw figures moving inside. Teachers, parents. Maybe even Billy.

It didn’t matter.

“JT,” she said.

And as if in answer to her speaking that name she thought she heard his voice.

This isn’t done, girl.

“JT…?”

Desdemona, you listen to me. You’re a cop and you’re a good one, but you’re not acting like one now.

“I … I can’t … I don’t…”

The closest of the infected were a dozen feet away. In four steps they would have her.

Four.

What about the kids, Dez? Asked JT. What about the little ones?

The school was a million miles away.

“I let them die.”

Damn it, girl, don’t give me that crap. It’s not your fault some damn fool opened that window.

Three steps. She could smell their burned flesh.

“I let them die, JT. I should have been there. I should have been smarter.”

You can’t unring that bell, girl, he said sternly, his voice as clear as if he stood right beside her. You can’t undo that. But you can damn well save the rest of them.

“No … I can’t…”

You can. That’s your job. Saving them is why you became a cop. Saving them is what’s kept you alive all these years, and you know it.

Two steps.

“JT … how can I do this?”

You know how.

“I don’t,” she said, but even as she said it her hands touched her belt, feeling the things clipped to it. The pouches with the handcuffs. The empty slots for magazines. The pepper spray.

Nothing there.

No help.

The stun gun.

No use against the dead. They didn’t react to pain.

Damn it, Dez. Be smarter than that, growled JT.

Stun gun.

The dead were driven by parasites. That’s what Billy had told her.

The parasites shut off most of the body’s functions except a little respiration, a little blood flow, and the nerves needed for standing, moving, grabbing, biting, swallowing.

Nerves.

Nerves.

Nerve conduction.

The hands touched her sleeves, her shoulders, her breasts, her face.

And then her hand drew the Taser.

Nerve conduction.

She heard JT laugh quietly. There you go. You’re not the fastest, girl, we both know that, but damn if you don’t always get there in the end.

The weapon came free of its holster. The Nova SP-5.

The stun gun had a five-shot magazine.

Open a door and go home, said JT.

She brought the weapon up, activating the laser site. Found a target a yard from her. Fired.

The flachettes whipped through the air and struck the dead flesh high on the chest. The charge surged through the wires and instantly the infected body arched back, all four limbs trembling like a puppet hanging in a stiff wind. The eyes bulged wide and the mouth opened and it tried to scream.

Scream.

Oh God … it actually tried to scream.

Two other infected were behind it, pressed against it to try and get to her. The rain and the intensity of the charge flashed from one to the other and the three of them were suddenly falling.

Falling.

Opening a hole in the wall of charred flesh.

Dez released the first cartridge and chambered the second, moving now, running through that hole. She fired again and a woman with no eyes suddenly juddered to a stop and then fell away, a whistling shriek rising from between her burned lips.

The scream was the first human sound any of these monsters had made.

It chilled Dez Fox all the way to the core of her soul.

The screams were so—normal. God … did that mean the people who had been in those bodies before the infection took over were still in there?

Don’t think about it, bellowed JT. Run. Run!

She ran.

She released the second cartridge. Fired a third, heard another tearing scream of human pain.

The zombies tried to close in on her, but she smashed into them, driven now by panic as much as need. She elbowed them and jump-kicked them in the stomachs, and rammed them with her shoulders.

Two shots left and twenty yards to go.

The air around here was suddenly split apart by thunder.

Small thunder. Not from the sky but from …

Gunfire rippled from the windows of the school.

All of the windows. A dozen barrels cracked. Four of the zombies went down. Two stayed down, two others began instantly to climb back to their feet, their bodies absorbing anything except headshots.

“Dez!” called a voice, and this time it wasn’t the ghost of JT Hammond hollering in her fractured mind. It was Billy Trout. “Run! The side door. Go … go … go!”

She saw it then, the staff entrance door stood ajar and five men were clustered there. Piper was among them, a shotgun spitting fire in his hands.

Dez fired her fourth shot and a man she recognized — Albert Thomas, who owned a tattoo parlor on Buckley Road — staggered back, a human cry torn from his dead throat. It sounded like Albert, too. But there was a quality to it, a rising note of panic as if in that one instant the man she knew was able to give voice to all the horrors that had been done to him. And it was then, with perfect and dreadful clarity, that Dez Fox realized the true and full extent of what Dr. Volker had unleashed on humanity.

Lucifer 113 was intended to make Homer Gibbon be aware of every moment, every sensation of what was happening to him as his dead body rotted in a coffin and was consumed by maggots. This was a punishment intended for a serial killer to make him pay for what he had done to the innocent.

And now it was doing that to every single infected person.

They were all in there. Their consciousness trapped in the hijacked bodies. Aware, connected to nerve endings, and totally unable to prevent their stolen flesh from committing unspeakable things.

Only in the moment of intense electric shock from the stun gun were those people able to give voice, to cry out. For mercy. For forgiveness. For release.

As she ran, Dez thought about the effect that bullets had. It ended the unnatural life of the living dead.

Did it also end their torment?

Was a bullet to the brain a kindness?

It was so twisted and perverse a concept that even as she ran she nearly doubled over and vomited.

There was one last zombie between her and the door, but it was in a direct line between her and the men with guns. She had one charge left in her gun. Could she use it, knowing this ugly truth? Could she bear to hear that scream again, knowing that she couldn’t then end the suffering of the person trapped inside the dead flesh?

It came at her, mouth wide to bite, hands reaching to grab.

She shot it in the throat, hoping to drop it without the scream.

But it screamed anyway.

It screamed like someone burning in the fires of hell itself.

The infected fell away and then human hands reached for her and pulled her inside the school and then slammed the door shut. Bodies thudded against the outside of the door and down the halls; echoing from the classrooms there was a last volley of gunfire.

Then three spaced shots from the hallway.

Dez knew what those shots meant.

Three shots for three small heads.

Followed by the sound of retching. And weeping.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Dustin Lee Frye was making the slowest getaway he’d ever heard of.

It was driving him crazy.

Four hours ago a friend of his had dropped him at the parking lot of the Woodsman Rest, right off Route 381 in Fayette County. Dustin had crouched under a dark gray poncho in driving rain waiting for his ex-girlfriend’s new boy toy to come to work. The boyfriend, a shovel-jawed goon with little pig eyes, worked the night shift as bartender at the Rest, and that meant he’d be on until two a.m.

At ten minutes to eight, Shovel-jaw roared into the lot in his 1970 Mustang Boss 429. A perfectly restored, mint-condition classic muscle car. The Grabber green skin seemed to glow in the downspill of light from the sodium vapor bulbs arranged around the parking lot. Over two hundred thousand dollars worth of car, bought for the asshole by his daddy, who owned big chunks of logging and pulp all through Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Dustin didn’t think it was at all fair that the pea-brained mouth-breather should have his ex-girlfriend and one of the sweetest cars in the world. Actually, as Dustin saw it, he could keep the girl. She and Dustin had ended things badly. Harsh language was involved. So was a restraining order. Not the happiest times in his life.

She was elsewhere, probably fretting over what to do about the stretch marks now that Shovel-jaw had knocked her up. If the baby was even his. There had been one last bout of makeup sex with Dustin before everything went to shit, so the whole paternity thing was a dice-roll.

The car, though. Dustin didn’t want the Neanderthal to have the car.

It wasn’t fair.

The car was perfect. From tailpipe to headlights, it was the absolutely perfect car. And assholes should not be allowed to have perfect cars. Dustin was sure there was a law about that somewhere. Or ought to be.

So stealing the car, in Dustin’s view, was not so much a matter of committing a crime as it was serving the public welfare.

He waited for Shovel-jaw to park the car in his special extra-wide slot, lock it, give the creamy green hood its usual pat, and go into the hunters’ club to mix drinks for the other mouth-breathers. The parking lot was nearly deserted, though, because of Superstorm Zelda. A smarter person, Dustin mused, would have called out and stayed at home. But no one ever called this guy smart. Rich, yes. Obnoxious, to be sure. Smart? Not so much.

Dustin started to get up so he could boost the Mustang, but another car came crunching over the gravel. Two men got out and hurried through the rain to the restaurant. Then another came. And another. Then one of the cars left.

It was like that for hours. Despite everything that was happening in the skies and the world, the damned place was doing bang-up business. Dustin was afraid to leave his hiding spot for a minute, sure that someone would spot him and then there’d be real trouble.

Finally, well after one in the morning, the steady in-and-out flow dwindled and died. There was a protracted stillness and when it seemed apparent that the last drinkers inside were going to take it all the way to the bell, Dustin rose up quickly from his place of concealment beside the Dumpster and drifted around the perimeter of the parking lot to come up behind the Mustang. Dustin had a friend who boosted cars on a regular basis — not professionally, more of a hobby, but he was good at it — who’d lent him a slim-jim and a key gun. Dustin moved to the driver’s door, checked the lot again, eased the slim-jim from under the poncho and fed the thin strip of metal down between the glass and the door. Popping the lock was a breeze.

He shucked the poncho and slid behind the wheel, mindful to keep the rain off the leather seats. He chunked the door shut and fed the teeth of the key gun into the ignition.

The engine started at once.

And it started with a very loud, very distinctive growl. All of those horses under the hoods shouting at the storm.

Dustin had no idea if Shovel-jaw heard the car start. He didn’t wait to find out. He put the car in gear, spun the wheel, and kicked ten pounds of wet gravel at the back of the restaurant as he peeled out. As soon as he was out of the lot, he turned left and followed a couple of crooked feeder roads until one spilled him out onto 381, where he turned north to catch 653, and from there he planned to turn the car west and drive it until he figured out what tomorrow would look like.

But after he turned onto Route 653 and drove ten miles, crossing out of Fayette and cruising the outer edge of Stebbins County, things started to slide downhill.

First it was the rain.

The sky split apart with thunder and for a moment it seemed as if the clouds themselves were being ignited by the lightning. Flash after flash, boom after boom. It hurt his eyes and rattled the windows. And the rain that fell was so thick that the windshield wipers did exactly nothing. It slowed him to a nervous crawl. All he could make out were the taillights directly in front of him. Those lights rolled forward at barely over twenty miles an hour and it was like that for a long time. The rain did not let up once. Dustin had never seen rain like this before.

Then the car in front of him — an old Camry — slowed more and more.

It finally stopped, and after a long time, the driver shut his engine off.

The rain only began slackening after Dustin had been sitting there for ten more minutes. It was still coming down pretty steadily, but it wasn’t wrath of God rain. It wasn’t Noah’s ark rain.

The Camry up front didn’t move, though. The driver simply sat there.

Dustin didn’t dare toot his horn or make any kind of fuss. Not while driving a stolen car worth a couple hundred g’s. No, sir. That would be monumentally stupid.

So he waited.

And waited.

That’s when the thunder started again. And lightning.

Except that’s not what it was, and Dustin realized it by slow degrees as balls of yellow light lifted from over the horizon. He watched as the light illuminated the thousands of cars stalled in long lines ahead of him, and in the rearview he could see thousands more dwindling into the distance behind him.

Then he heard the screams and the gunfire. Dustin had seen every war film and action movie ever made. He knew the sound of heavy-caliber machine-gun fire.

“Holy shit,” he said aloud.

People were running up the road between the cars. Fleeing whatever the hell was happening. But also … fighting?

He leaned forward to peer out at the night.

Not a hundred feet away he saw a woman in a pretty autumn dress dive at a guy in coveralls, slam him against the fender of a Chevy Aveo and …

“Holy shit!” he cried as he saw blood shoot up from the man’s neck like water from a broken fountain.

Two men pulled open the front doors of an Expedition and dove in. Blood splashed the insides of the rear window. A teenager with one arm missing—just fucking gone—ran directly at the front of Dustin’s car and flung himself onto the hood, denting it, smearing it with blood.

“Holy shit!” screamed Dustin.

He put the car in reverse to get away as the one-armed teenager began pounding on the windshield, but the Mustang shot back only twenty inches before crunching into the front end of a Focus.

“Fuck you!” bellowed Dustin, both at the Focus and the insane teenager. He threw it into drive and rammed forward, crushing the grille against the Camry’s rear. Glass exploded and one of Dustin’s headlights went blind. Five minutes ago he would have been heartbroken if a road stone tore a fingernail-sized scratch on the Grabber Green hood. Now he rammed forward and back three times, accordianing the bumpers, screaming at the howling thing that still knelt on the hood and pounding one-handed on the glass. Then he had an opening, and he was out. He jerked left out of the lane and onto the shoulder, spilling the bloody teenager off with a bone-jarring crunch. Beside the shoulder was a drop-off that was filled with water and it looked like a death trap to Dustin. Behind him other cars were pulling out and blocking the route for a backing-up escape. A quarter mile ahead there was a wide pull-off. If he could get there, maybe he could find a way to cut across the median. The opposite lane was completely clear. Farther along the road he saw a guy on a motorcycle do exactly that. So Dustin shifted again and hit the gas, sending the big Mustang rocketing forward.

At that moment, there was the biggest explosion yet from over the hill. A massive fireball that seemed to lift the whole road up and drop it. Thousands of people fled from it, screaming and bleeding, chased by waves of heat that set their hair and clothes ablaze. Behind them, mixed in with them, attacking them as they ran were other people. Wild-eyed and bloody, with snapping teeth and grabbing hands. Some of them were on fire, too, but they didn’t seem to care about that. All they seemed to want — or seemed capable of wanting — were the people who ran from them.

Heat punched at the Mustang, blackening the green paint, covering the windshield with ash. And in one frozen moment, Dustin could see things in that ash. Tiny threadlike worms that wriggled as the hot wind slapped them against the glass. There were other things hitting the car, too. Pieces of charred meat. Pieces of broken bone and burning swatches of cloth.

Dustin’s mind absorbed all of that visual data in a microsecond, and then he drove the gas pedal to the floor and the Boss 429 engine hurled the Mustang at the crowd of living and dead.

By the time he hit the wall of them he was going fifty miles an hour.

Dustin felt himself rising from the seat. He felt the steering wheel hit him in the chest. Saw the windshield coming at him so fast.

So fast.

The fires and explosions, the rockets and bullets, the teeth and hands of the dead — none of that did any harm to Dustin Lee Frye.

In the end, it was the car that killed him.

Major General Simeon Zetter got slowly out of his command vehicle and watched hell unfold. He and his aides were in the safe zone, outside of the blast area, well beyond the perimeter of violence that the satellites and surveillance helicopters determined enclosed all of the infection.

No one spoke.

No words really fit the moment.

During the drive here from the school, Zetter was absorbing the intel from FEMA, from the White House, and from other sources. Initial estimates of potential civilian casualties were staggering. Four thousand minimum.

Minimum.

More than that were expected.

More than that were likely, perhaps inevitable.

The fireballs from the fuel-air bombs rose like the pillars of hell, seeming to push back the storm. The heat was so intense that it turned the rain to steam.

Behind where he stood, the Black Hawks and Apaches were touching down in the parking lot of an abandoned drive-in movie theater. It had been dangerous bordering on foolhardy to have them in the air at all with a storm of this kind, and they’d lost one crew to a crash. Something he had not yet reported to the president. Now, with these bombs, there would be shockwaves that would endanger all the others.

He heard one of his aides say something to himself, and for a moment Zetter thought it was a prayer. It wasn’t. It was the thing that Oppenheimer had said when the first atom bomb was tested.

“I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.”

And while fuel-air bombs were non-nuclear, the point was eloquent. Zetter felt like striking the man, but hitting someone for speaking the truth was not the way to survive this moment.

In silence, he endured the rebuke implicit in that statement.

Destroyer of worlds.

Destroyer of lives.

So many people.

The outer edge of the heat wave rolled through the night toward them. It had been greatly weakened by distance and did little more than brush past his face and fill his mouth with a bitter taste. Zetter turned and discretely spat into the mud. Some of the others did, too. A few still wore their hazmat masks.

The heat blew past them and for a moment there was a deceptive stillness, a calm that told lies about the night. Then the rains began to fall again, and the storm winds blew, and the sounds of screams echoed through the night. Car horns blared, faint and muted.

“Sir,” said another aide, hurrying toward him from the communication truck, “you need to see this.”

His voice held a rising note of panic that made Zetter spin around and go running after him, with his other aides in tow. As he ran Zetter turned and spat again, trying to clear his mouth of the acrid, itchy dust from the shock wave.

He felt sick to his stomach, but he decided that it was the shock, the stress, the horror of it all.

In that, General Zetter was entirely wrong.

They moved across the quarantine zone alone and in packs. In the ragged, bloody, and fire-blackened clothes of farmers and tourists, travelers and news reporters. A few wore National Guard BDUs. They moved together, weeping, crying out in unending pain from bites that had torn through skin and muscle, or from blistered burns that bubbled on skin that had been touched by the hellish heat.

They staggered away from the flaming pit where the Starbucks had been, and away from the blackened shells of their cars. They left behind friends and family members.

Those that could run, did.

The rest limped and shambled and crawled.

Away from the bombs and the bullets and the things that bit.

None of them had a plan, or a direction. They simply fled.

And the dead followed after.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Trout and Dez sat in the principal’s office. Mrs. Madison had found a blanket and wrapped it around Dez’s shoulders, but rainwater dripped from her clothes and pooled on the floor beneath her chair. Trout pulled his chair close and sat with his hand on her knee. He thought she’d object to that, but after a while she squeezed his hand.

Mrs. Madison sat across from her. Uriah Piper and Jenny DeGroot were in the office as well. No one else.

“It was Gerry Dunphries,” said Jenny.

Dez looked at her. “What?”

“He was supposed to be helping in the kitchen, cutting open cereal boxes, but when I looked up he was gone. I figured he went to the bathroom, or…”

“Or what?” asked Trout.

“Or needed to find a quiet place to cry.”

Everyone tried not to look at Dez, but one by one they did, and it made Trout winced.

Mrs. Madison tried to console her, “Please don’t think you’re in any responsible for what Mr. Dunphries did. He was deeply distraught by everything that’s happened and—”

“Fuck him,” Dez said quietly.

Mrs. Madison blinked. “Pardon?”

“Fuck Gerry Dunphries and fuck his being ‘distraught.’”

“That’s—”

“And fuck you for whatever you’re about to say,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear any bullshit from anyone. Dunphries opened that window and he got three kids killed. End of story and may he burn in hell.”

“That’s hardly fair,” said Piper.

“It’s unrealistic,” agreed Mrs. Madison. “Shock can induce many different degrees of psychosis.”

“Since when are you a psychologist?” sneered Dez.

“Since I got my MA in psychotherapy and child counseling before you were born.”

“Yeah? Well fuck your MA, too.”

Mrs. Madison recoiled and her throat flushed pink.

“Dez,” Trout said gently, “let’s dial it down and—”

“Oh, and most of all fuck you, Billy Trout.” She slapped his hand off her knees. “Okay, so Gerry Dunphries was batshit. Lot of that going around. Our town is overrun by zombies and we’ve just been abandoned by the military. Batshit seems to be the only flavor we have left, so we all better get used to sucking on it. You want to know how batshit crazy I am? When I was out there surrounded by all those frigging dead sonsabitches with no ammunition — you know who helped me? You want to know who talked me through it? You know who saved my life? JT motherfucking Hammond. Yeah, my dead partner. My best friend. The man who helped save all of your lives. He had my back and told me what to do and how to get through it just like he always did. How’s that for batshit?”

The room was utterly silent.

Dez leaned forward and fixed Mrs. Madison with a steely stare. “You want to know the kicker to that? Even now, even knowing that I’m crazy my ownself, even right here in your office, I can still hear JT’s voice. Telling me to stop yelling, telling me to watch my language, telling me to take it out of overdrive. Yeah, I can hear that clear as day.”

“Dez…” began Trout, but she ignored him.

Dez sat back. “We’re all crazy. Fine. If it’s the way things are then it’s the way things are. I’ll be happy to talk to the rest of the adults and explain the facts of life to them. If any of them are too fucked up in the head to be part of how we’re going to survive, they have my permission to hang themselves or give themselves a sponge-bath with steak sauce and go outside. But they don’t take any of the kids with them, they don’t let the kids see it, and they don’t let those fucking zombies in here. And if anyone does anything to endanger the other kids, I will personally shove a gun up their ass and pull the trigger. That is not — I repeat not—a joke. Am I making myself crystal fucking clear here or do I need to start kicking some basic survival sense into everyone in this frigging school?”

The silence following her words was heavy and long. Trout looked at the faces of the others, tried to read their eyes and predict what they’d say.

It was Uriah Piper who spoke first. “I won’t shoot anyone for being crazy or stupid,” he said. “But if you need to do that I’ll load your guns for you.”

Mrs. Madison gave a slow, grudging nod.

A strange smile formed on Jenny DeGroot’s young face. “I’m absolutely with you, Dez.”

Dez and everyone else turned to Trout. He cocked an eyebrow, “Honey, if you even need to ask then you really are batshit.”

The harsh mask of anger and hurt on Dez’s face softened. “Thanks, Billy … but if you ever call me honey again I’ll kneecap you.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Piper cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt a tender moment here…”

“Fuck you,” Dez and Trout said at the same time.

“… but I need to get back to securing the building. Looks pretty clear that there are more of those things out there and for whatever reason they seem to be coming here.”

Dez started to nod, then abruptly held up a hand. “Wait.”

“Wait … no…”

“What?” asked Trout.

“When I was outside,” she began slowly. “The buses…”

“What about them?”

She began shaking her head. “We’re thinking about this the wrong damn way. Jesus, how could I have been so dumb?”

She stood up, dropping the blanket to the floor and walking to the door. She opened it and looked out through the suite of offices toward the main part of the school. Her gaze roved over everything including the walls and the ceiling. Then she turned and leaned against the frame and shook her head again.

“When this thing started I came here because I knew this was where they were going to take the kids. Town shelter and all that. Okay, fine, it’s strong and defensible and we have some supplies. Then we were locked in here by the National Guard. This became our place, you see what I’m saying?”

No one did.

“We thought we were going to ride it out in here. The Guard would airdrop food and supplies and the geniuses at the CDC would cook up a cure or vaccine or something. Then the frigging Guard lit out of here like their asses were on fire. It wasn’t an orderly retreat and it wasn’t the kind of wrap-up you have after a field deployment has completed its job. No, the way they went tear-assing their way out of here means they were going to a fight, and it was a bigger fight then they anticipated. Armies plan and move with some kind of order. They only bolt and run when the shit has seriously hit the fan. Then there was that explosion. Or maybe it was a series of them. Big fucking airbursts. Not nuclear because we’d all be dying right now if they’d dropped a nuke on Stebbins or Bordentown. No, I think they found a big fucking nest of these things and they tried to sterilize them with fuel-air bombs.”

“What are they?” asked Jenny.

“Thermobaric cluster bombs. It’s the biggest and most powerful non-nuclear device we have.”

“Dear God,” murmured Mrs. Madison.

“I see where you’re going with this,” said Trout. “Can’t say I like it.”

“I don’t see,” said Jenny.

“Last resort,” said Piper, and both Trout and Dez nodded. The farmer explained, “A bomb like that wouldn’t be something they’d use if they could contain this with regular tanks and helicopters and such. Scorched earth is what you go for when you’re losing a fight.”

“Exactly,” said Dez.

“I’m still not following,” said Jenny. “Does that mean they wiped them out?”

Trout fielded that. “You didn’t see the infected who were outside. They were all burned. The bomb may have killed some of them, but it didn’t kill all of them. Any of them who weren’t in the direct blast zone, any of them who were only burned, are still out there. And after what just happened, I think it’s pretty clear they’re coming here.”

“Here? But why? I mean, wasn’t this just random? Weren’t these infected just whichever ones were in the area?”

“No,” said Dez, “they were too badly burned. They’re coming here from closer to wherever ground zero was.”

“The blast was north and west,” said Trout. “Over by Bordentown or near there.” He paused. “Which is where the quarantine zone line is.”

And where Goat was, he thought, but he didn’t say it.

“Okay,” said Jenny, “but again — why here? Why the school?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Madison, “surely you’re not saying they can smell the children here.”

“With the rain?” mused Piper. “Probably not.”

“Then why?”

Trout glanced at Dez. “I’ve wondered this before. I know the infected are supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, brainless. Brain dead. But could there be some trace left? Maybe something the parasite drive can tap into? Genetic memory? There’s a precedent in science.”

Dez turned haunted eyes away from him. “I don’t care what’s driving them. I don’t care if they are coming here because they remember the school or because they think it’s prom night. Fuck it. The point is that they are coming here and if we stay here, then this place is going to stop being a refuge and start being an all you can eat buffet.”

She turned back to them and now her eyes were cold and dangerous.

“And I will not let that happen.”

Trout said, “What do you have in mind?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

“Talk to me,” croaked the president in a voice grown hoarse with yelling and pleading. “Where are we with containment?”

Every eye turned away from him and focused on the big screen and its many smaller windows. The satellite thermal scan still showed hundreds of dots moving in all directions. Smaller windows were ground-level views from military vehicles and some field-troop helmet cams as they engaged the infected. The sounds of gunfire, even muted to a whisper, were dreadful. And there was so much screaming. From the infected who had not yet died, from possibly uninfected civilians running from the blasts and from the dead, and from the soldiers.

“Sir,” said General Burroughs, “General Zetter is requesting orders on what to do with uninfected survivors.”

Sylvia Ruddy said, “How can we tell if they’re uninfected? Do we have a way to triage this?”

“Scott?” asked the president.

Blair felt like he was a passenger on a sinking ship. Like he was the only man to have seen the iceberg but no one had paid attention to his shouts of warning. Now the president wanted answers from him. Solutions.

“Sir,” he said slowly, “we do not have the protocols or resources to triage anyone. We don’t have the manpower on the ground to detain and monitor large numbers of civilians.”

“What are you saying?” demanded the president.

“What I’m saying, sir, is that we cannot afford the luxury of treating anyone as potentially uninfected. We have to respond as if every person coming across those fields is a carrier. Every single one.”

The president got to his feet and towered over Blair. “Are you insane?”

“No, sir. You asked for my recommendation. That is the only possible course of action.”

“I refuse to accept that, goddamn it.”

Blair rose as well. “Refusing to accept the truth about Lucifer 113 is what brought us to this point, Mr. President. We have acted timidly and slowly from the beginning and we are fighting an uphill battle.”

“Those are survivors?”

Blair pointed a finger at the screen. “They’re already dead!”

“No,” said the president with a stubborn shake of his head. “Simeon Zetter will contain this.”

Blair gaped at him, simply unable to speak.

On the screen, with every second that passed, the images told a story that anyone with eyes could understand, but everyone with hearts refused to accept.

Except for Blair.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Dez and Trout called a meeting of as many of the adults as could be spared from guard duty and childcare. Trout suggested that everyone meet them downstairs in the gymnasium.

“Why here?” asked Dez as she and Trout went down to wait for them to gather. “People died down there today.”

“Right,” he told her. “Where better to make your point about how safe the school isn’t?”

“You want me to play these people?”

“Of course I do, Dez. Play them and then lead them, because you are the best chance we all have of getting out of here.”

Dez studied him for a moment, then gave him a small, wicked smile. “If we ever get ourselves out of this thing, Billy, I’m going to bang your eyes crooked.”

“You’ve done that more than once.”

“I ain’t saying we’re getting back together, but … yeah, I think a littler recreational yee-haw might take some of the edge off.”

“That’s all it’ll be?” he said, arching an eyebrow. “Something to settle the nerves?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“Not even a little one.”

Dez bent and gave him a quick, wet, delicious kiss. But instead of the quick catch-and-release he expected, she took his face in both hands and looked deeply into his eyes. Her smile faded away completely.

“I — wasn’t screwing around back there.”

“When?”

“When I said I heard JT talking to me.”

He smiled. “Wait … you’re telling me you’re crazy? You? Dez Fox? You shock me, woman. Shock me, I say.”

“Fuck you.”

“I believe that is what we’ve been discussing.”

She kissed him again.

When she was done he did not feel a single one of his injuries. He was gasping for air when she pushed him back. He was also hard as a rock and he believed that there was never a less sensible or convenient time for an erection in the entire history of sexual congress.

Dez, quick as always, saw the bulge and her smile came right back.

Before she could hit him with a joke, he said, “No, it’s not a gun in my pocket. I’m just very damn glad to be here with you.”

She reached down and cupped his hardness through the stained cloth of his jeans.

“Careful now,” she said, “or you’ll make a girl blush.”

She gave him a squeeze, then released him and turned quickly away as the gymnasium door opened and people began filing in.

Billy Trout genuinely hoped he had enough time either for a cold shower or to spend five useful minutes banging his head on a brick wall.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

“Why are we going to Pittsburgh?” asked Goat, though he thought he knew the answer.

Homer shot him a sly look. “See a few old friends.”

Goat knew that he should just keep his mouth shut, but despite all of his fear, the pain in his body, and the absolute strangeness of this experience, there was a part of him that was a still a newsman. Or maybe it was the other aspect, a somewhat older and more precisely defining aspect of who he was — the filmmaker. This was all good drama. It would be great cinema. Cinema verité in real point of fact, because this was the truth. This was real.

It only felt like a nightmare.

He said, “You’re going to find your foster parents, aren’t you?”

It was the first time Goat saw Homer lose control. It was brief, but it was there. The car swayed and for a moment the look of Homer’s face wasn’t that of a killer or a monster; it was the lost and desperate look of a child.

Goat knew the story. He’d been in the courtroom during testimony by prison psychiatrists and social workers. After Gibbon’s heroin-addicted mother had given him up for adoption, Homer went through one foster home after another. In a couple of them the child had endured horrific sexual and physical abuse. One of those former foster parents was later arrested in connection with the abuse of another child, and investigators found hundreds of photos stored on the man’s computer. Photos of him and various girlfriends and drinking buddies, doing things to children — boys and girls ranging in age from five to twelve — that sickened everyone in the courtroom. Billy Trout had gone outside and thrown up in a trash can. Goat tried to look at the poster-board-sized reproductions of those photos as clinically as he could, pretending in his mind that these were movie props; but the bitter and raw truth of them gouged marks on his soul.

The photos were presented as part of Homer’s defense, claiming that any crimes he’d committed were direct results of permanent emotional and psychological disfigurement inflicted upon him as a child. Disfigurement. That was the word one psychologist used and it stuck for the duration of the trial, becoming a catchphrase. It was a word Goat had never before heard used in that context, and he could not shake the ugly awareness of all it implied.

The defense was thorough and exhaustive in an attempt to cultivate sympathy through horror, but rather than any sympathetic reaction the effect was to emotionally numb the jury. They disengaged from the evidence, and Goat watched that happen. It’s how he would have filmed the scene. As far as he saw it, the defense lost the case more than the prosecution won it, and it did so by an overuse of the most compelling argument.

The expression that flitted across Homer’s face now was tied to those memories, and Goat was absolutely sure that in that moment, Homer felt rude hands on him and cringed at the thought of how, once again, his body and his world would be plundered.

When Homer spoke, his voice was quiet, filled with a false calm that was as fragile as spun glass. “There’s a couple of people I wouldn’t mind saying hello to. People I never got around to thanking.”

“Thanking?”

Homer turned to him and the smile that formed on his lips was inhuman, repulsive. Vile.

“For opening the Black Eye and teaching me how to speak with the Red Mouth.”

Goat didn’t dare reply to that.

Homer gestured to Goat’s equipment. “Shouldn’t you be taping this shit?”

“Yes,” said Goat quickly, realizing that this was gold and that it was his lifeline. He unzipped his bag, removed the camera, plugged it into his laptop and adjusted the settings. He turned the dome light on because otherwise it was far too dark, but the yellow light chased only some of the shadows away. There still seemed to be too many bits of darkness hiding in the cab, waiting to pounce.

Goat found some small steadying comfort in the process of handling the tools of his trade. It returned to him a measure of personal power.

“Okay, we’re good to go.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll do a quick introduction and then you could just talk,” suggested Goat. “Tell your side of it.”

“My ‘side’?”

“Tell the truth as you see it. Or would you rather I ask questions?”

“I don’t know. Set it up and let’s see what happens. But don’t say where we are, okay?”

“No problem.”

He hit Record, then turned the camera on himself, gave his name and his affiliation with Regional Satellite News. Then he pointed the camera at Homer and introduced him. Homer gave the camera a few glances that were almost shy.

People and cameras, thought Goat. Weird.

As Goat checked the feed on his laptop, he loaded Foursquare and tried to connect the locator app to a GPS app, but there was no Wi-Fi signal.

“You want this on the Net, right?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then once we tape some stuff, we have to get to someplace where I can pick up a signal. Anyplace with free Wi-Fi.”

Homer thought about that then nodded. “Sure.”

“Are you ready?” asked Goat. Part of his mind seemed to stand at a distance and watch all of this with slack-jawed amazement. They were both flash-burned, filthy, bloody, and on the run from murders and some kind of catastrophic military action, and here he was talking to a Homer like they were ready to talk about the Daffodil Festival or a Little League game. It worried Goat that he could sound so normal, act so normal, when normal was something as dead as yesterday’s news.

He heard his voice speak with every appearance of calm control as set up the video. “We’re on the road — I can’t say where. Stebbins County has been — or is in the process of being — destroyed. You’ve heard some of the field reports by Billy Trout about what happened. All of it is real. However I have a different part of the story to share and it’s one everyone is going to want to hear. This is a side of the story that will help everyone understand the man who stands at the center of this storm. A man most people in the world believe was executed two days ago at Rockview Prison here in Pennsylvania. A man who is now beyond death as anyone knows it — and that statement is neither an exaggeration nor a joke. The next voice you’ll hear, the next face you’ll see, is that of Homer Gibbon.”

He turned the camera and switched on the top-mounted light for extra effect. He wanted the image to transform from the murky yellow shadows to something brighter and harsher, something that would show the bright red blood. In the stark light Homer was every bit the true monster. All sharp angles and brutality, but with a bestial intelligence glittering in his dark eyes.

Homer did not speak immediately, and his lack of certainty and clear discomfort kept the dead silence from being empty. This was great theater, thought Goat. This was fucking great.

After a few thoughtful seconds, Homer said, “Everyone thinks I’m a monster.”

“What do you think?” asked Goat.

Nearly a mile passed before Homer answered. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe that’s what I am now. A monster. I guess now more than ever.”

Homer shook his head and Goat wondered if there was a flicker of regret in the killer’s voice, or was he filtering this through his filmmaker’s ear.

“People use that word,” Homer went on. “Monster. They like to throw words like that around the way a monkey tosses his shit, hoping it’ll stick to the walls. They don’t understand anything about what goes on in a person’s head, just like they don’t understand what it means to be something different. Something bigger.” He laughed. “It’s like witches.”

“I’m sorry … witches?”

“Sure. In prison you got nothing to do but read books, and I read this one book, Witch Hunts: A History of the Burning Times—it had a lot of pictures in it, like a comic book but it’s not superhero stuff. This was about real stuff that happened. What do you call a book like that?”

“A graphic novel?”

“Yeah, that was it. This one was about the history of witches and the things people used to do to them because everyone had some stupid idea that witches were giving blow jobs to the Devil or some shit. Goofy stuff like that. What it really was, was that people — men, mostly — were afraid of the witches because of what the witches knew. And what they called witches were just women who knew some important shit. Medicine and like that. Natural healing and all that sort of thing. Herbs and liniments and potions. There wasn’t anything with the Devil. It wasn’t about that. You know why those men killed those women?”

“Tell me,” said Goat.

“It was because those women knew something the men didn’t. They had secret knowledge, and that knowledge didn’t come from the men. The men didn’t own it and they couldn’t control it. Those women were out there using this secret knowledge and they didn’t need jack squat from the men, and that really scared the men. You only got power if someone needs something from you and you have a leash on it. You understand?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Those men … they knew that the women weren’t fucking around with the Devil or any of that shit. That’s not why they got mad. They got mad because the secrets the women had were starting to matter to the people. The common folk. Those men saw their stranglehold over everyone starting to slip, and that meant they’d lose money and they’d lose power. And they couldn’t have that. So they said that those women, those witches, were monsters. And since most people are just dumb fucks, they went along with it and soon they were burning chicks at the stake and drowning them and crushing them under rocks. That’s how the men kept their power. It’s how scared people always keep their power. That’s why they killed Jesus. That’s why they killed that little Indian guy, Gandhi.” He pronounced it Gan-dee. “It’s probably why they killed John Lennon, too, ’cause that sonofabitch definitely knew some of the real secrets.” Homer nodded to himself. “He sings to me in my head sometimes, did you know that?”

“No. What does he sing?”

“I don’t know the names of the songs. New stuff that he wrote after he died.”

“Oh,” said Goat, and felt vaguely disappointed. He couldn’t quite understand why.

“My point,” continued Homer, “is that people throw out the word ‘monster’ before they know what something is. And it’s stupid, it’s an insult, because that word is so … so small, and sometimes what they’re trying to describe is way bigger than they know, bigger than they can even imagine.”

“And you feel that the way in which they used it to describe you is the same kind of error? The same kind of small thinking? That it’s them being — what? Blind or simply unable to understand what they are seeing?”

Homer took a long time with that, and as he drove he kept looking at Goat, as if reappraising him. He nodded a few times to himself.

“Now I’m wondering,” he said slowly, “whether you’re one of those smart-ass fellows who know how to feed someone enough of a line of bullshit so he can save his own ass.”

Goat said nothing.

“Or if maybe you’re starting to see what the Black Eye wants you to see. And maybe hear what the Red Mouth is whispering. Tell me, son … which is it?”

There was no way to know how to respond, because Goat could imagine how either response might spark something nasty. If he admitted that he was stringing Homer along, then the killer might simply pull over and finish what he almost started back at Starbucks. On the other hand, if Goat came off like a willing convert, would there be a price to pay to join Homer’s church?

In the end he told Homer a version of the truth. And he meant every word.

“I don’t know what to believe,” he admitted, “but I’m sitting here with you and that means I am twenty inches away from the biggest and most important story any reporter has ever heard. This is the kind of story that will change the world. You know that already, Homer. I know it, too. Who knows, maybe I really will start hearing what the Red Mouth says. I probably will, because I think I’m starting to get you, to see things the way you see them. However, right now, at this moment, I’m trying to understand the whole story. That’s what I want from you, Homer. I want you to tell me everything so I can report the biggest story in history. That’s the truth, Homer. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

It was five whole miles before Homer spoke.

Up ahead, barely visible in the rain, was a 7-Eleven with its lights on. Homer drummed his fingers on the knobbed leather of the steering wheel.

“You want to understand me, son? Fine, that makes sense to me. You saw some of my truth back there at the Starbucks. Now bear witness to more of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the Red Mouth is hungry and it will not be denied.” Homer pulled the Escalade off the road and slid into a slot. There were two cars outside. One was a beat-up old Chevy, the other was a Lexus SUV.

“What? I mean … Jesus, are you … are you…?”

Homer laughed.

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. How’s that for a big news story?”

He got out and took the keys with him, then leaned in through the open door.

“Make sure you film it, too. Every damn bit of it.”

Homer slammed the door and headed toward the store.

Goat did not try to run. He never even opened the door. Instead he raised the camera, adjusted the zoom, rolled down the window, and filmed everything as Homer Gibbon opened the front door of the convenience store, strode in, and showed everyone what the Black Eye saw, and let them hear the secrets whispered by the Red Mouth.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

Dez laid it out for them. The military’s withdrawal, the fuel-air bombs, the burned dead, and the vulnerability of the school.

“If we stay, we risk a siege,” she concluded. “God only knows how many of these things there are, and I sure as shit don’t want to find out. We need to get out now while we still have a chance.”

“How do you propose to do it?” asked Piper, following a cue Trout had given him.

Dez pointed over their heads. “Buses. There are more than enough school buses to get us all out of here. We need to clear out any bodies, hose the insides down to prevent infection, and then load the kids and as many supplies as we can take.”

“And go where?” asked one of the parents.

“Pittsburgh,” said Dez. “Or Philadelphia. Any of the big cities. Anywhere we can get the right kind of help and protection.”

“But those things are out there,” said Clark.

“Sure. Some of them. At last check there were eighteen that we could see. We have enough weapons to take them out.”

The crowd murmured at that. Taking them out sounded easy when stated in flat and antiseptic words, but every one of the people outside was a neighbor. Or a relative.

“We can’t just … kill them,” said a thin woman with watery eyes.

Dez walked over and put her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Dottie … those people are already dead. You know that. We all know that. The kids in here are alive. We’re alive, and if we want to stay that way then we have to square this all in our heads. This isn’t a bunch of people with the flu. They’re dead. They’re infected by something that makes them move, but they’re dead.” She paused. “Besides, considering what’s happened to them, putting them down would be a mercy.”

“Amen,” said Uriah Piper.

A few of the others murmured agreement. Dez patted Dottie and then turned to the rest of the crowd. She explained what she wanted done and separated people into teams. Not everyone liked the idea. The strongest objections came from Clark, the teacher who’d mouthed off earlier. He wanted them all to stay right there in the school. His logic was that if there was a problem like flooded roads or military roadblocks, some might get out rather than all being stopped.

“No,” said Dez firmly, “we all go together.”

“And what if we don’t want to go anywhere?” demanded Clark.

“You can stay, Clark,” said Dez, leaning on that word. “Doesn’t matter to me. But the kids are coming with me and I need enough adults to drive buses and handle guns.”

Most of the crowd looked uncertain, but there were murmurs and nods, a few clear votes of support. However, Clark stood his ground.

“Who are you, of all people, to say what happens with the kids?”

She got up in his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Clark stood his ground. “Let’s face it, Officer Fox, you’re not exactly a role model. How many times have I seen you staggering drunk, coming out of one shithole bar or another? How many times have you been reprimanded for excessive force? Yeah, I know about that stuff. My sister, Bitsy, was on the town council. I know all about you. You’re a loudmouth and — what do they call it in the movies? A loose cannon? That’s it. Exactly why is it we’re supposed to listen to you or follow your orders?”

Trout saw the dangerous red climb up Dez’s throat and bloom on her cheeks.

“That’s enough, Clark,” he said.

Clark wheeled on him. “Oh, right, and we should listen to you, too. Mr. Live From the Apocalypse. Mr. Give Me a Pulitzer Because I Have Innocent Blood on my Polo Shirt. Fuck you. You turned this whole thing into a story because like all reporters if it bleeds it leads, right? I’ll bet that when all those bullets were flying and the kids were screaming, you probably had a hard-on just thinking about how big a story this was. Well excuse me all to hell, Billy, but I don’t think you have a real stake in this. You don’t have any kids here. We do. Or we’re charged with taking care of these kids. They’re only a story to you. Besides, everyone in town knows that you’re been banging Dez Fox since high school, so this is the two of you in cahoots.”

Billy Trout snarled like a dog and swung a skull-cracker of a punch at the point of Clark’s jaw.

Clark leaned back with the ease of a trained boxer and let the punch pass, then he hooked Trout in the gut with a fist that he buried deep in belly flesh above Trout’s belt buckle. Clark pivoted and clopped Trout behind the ear with a right that put him flat on the floor. Trout was so shocked and hurt that he couldn’t even break his fall. He fell flat on his chest. And threw up.

There was a click and a blur of movement and then Clark was against the wall with Dez’s pistol barrel screwed into the soft pallet under his chin.

“You miserable cocksucker,” she hissed, “I’m going to blow your shit all over the—”

“No.”

The word was snapped out, sharp and full of cold command.

Then Uriah Piper moved into Dez’s peripheral vision. His face was hard as stone. “Put the gun down,” he said.

Dez and he locked eyes.

“Now,” said Piper.

On the floor, Trout make a sound like a strangling cat.

With great reluctance Dez stepped back and lowered her gun.

“Put it away,” suggested Piper. She did. “Now see to your friend there. He doesn’t look good.”

She slammed her Glock into its holster. Clark, who despite having had a gun pointed at him, managed to sneer with open contempt. Dez sank to her knees and pulled Billy’s head onto her lap. His face was the color of an overripe eggplant and he was only able to breathe in small gasps. He made little yeep sounds. Dez wiped the vomit from his face and held him. Her eyes never left Clark, and she hoped he could read his future in those eyes.

Uriah Piper, his voice and manner calm, stepped between Dez and Clark as if wanting to break that line of communication. But the action forced Clark to shift his attention to the laconic farmer.

“You handle yourself pretty well, Clark. You box?”

“Sure, so what?”

“So did I,” said Piper, and without warning he hit Clark with a short jab that exploded his nose and a right cross that put him on the floor right next to Billy Trout. Both punches were so hard and so fast that they looked and sounded like a single blow.

Everyone stared in sudden, intense shock.

Clark lay there, nose and mouth streaming with bright blood.

Dez Fox gaped. Even Trout focused his bulging eyes on the quiet farmer.

Piper looked at his knuckles, spit on them, rubbed the spit into the calluses, sighed and then seemed to slowly become aware of the crowd. He said nothing to them, but he squatted down next to Clark.

“Here’s the thing, my friend,” he said mildly. “Some people never want to be part of the solution. All they want to do is bitch and whine and create complications for other people. You’ve been like that as long as I’ve known you, and that’s going on twenty years. Since, what? Little League? I don’t remember you ever once stepping up and helping without running your mouth. Mostly that’s okay, that’s people being people, and it didn’t matter much to anyone. Now it does matter. Now we got to work together or we all get hurt or get killed. Now … I’m no fan of Officer Fox and I barely known Mr. Trout outside of what he writes in the papers, so this isn’t me sticking up for my friends. This is me, a farmer and a part of this community saying that if you don’t shut your mouth and work with us, then by the Lord Jesus, when we roll out of here in those buses I will personally tie you to the front grill, cover you with A1 sauce, and use you for bait. Look me in the eye and ask me if I’m joking.”

No one said a word. Certainly not Clark, who stared at him with eyes that were filled with fear and strange lights.

Piper dug a clean tissue out of his pocket and held it out. When Clark made no move to take it, the farmer bent and placed it on his chest, patted it flat, then straightened. He turned and looked down at Dez and Trout.

“My guess is that we don’t have a whole lot of time,” he said. “Probably be best if we got our behinds into gear.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

The Situation Room was crammed with too many people and everyone was shouting. At each other, into phones; some, apparently, at God.

All National Guardsmen in the area had been deployed. Additional troops from joint-use bases were rolling, and the ban on interaction with state and local law enforcement had been lifted. In each of his many phone calls, General Burroughs used the phrase. “This is all boots on the ground.”

The Air Force was actively in play now, as were fighters and helicopters from the Marines and Navy.

Scott Blair took or made more calls than he could count. FEMA and all other disaster-response groups were being pressed to their limits. Teams from the CDC were on the ground, but they were being shunted to the side because there was nothing for them to do. Plenty of samples of living and terminated infected had been collected. They had gallons of the black blood, and more samples were being flown to labs all over the country. Everyone with a microscope was studying Lucifer 113. Nobody had an answer.

Then Blair’s phone rang and the display told him that it was Sam Imura. Blair snatched it up and cupped his other hand over his ear so he could hear. “Tell me some good goddamn news, Sam. Tell me you have the flash drives in your hand. Tell me what I need to hear.”

Sam didn’t. Instead he told the truth.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Billy Trout felt like death.

Since yesterday he had been slapped, punched, shoved, shot at, attacked by zombies, nearly gunned down by helicopters, pulled his back out, and punched some more. There was no part of his body that did not hurt. His stomach felt like it was filled with broken glass and he had a persistent ringing in his ear. Nausea eddied in his gut and his eyes had trouble focusing. He felt ninety years old as he limped slowly after Dez as she trotted down the hall toward the rear exit.

Finally he had to stop and lean against the wall, gulping in ragged lungfuls of air.

When Dez realized he wasn’t following her, she stopped and turned. “What are you doing?”

“Watching all the pretty fireflies,” he croaked.

He expected a sharp comeback, but instead she came back to where he stood, an expression of concern clouding her pretty face. She smoothed the lank blond hair out of his eyes and placed her palm on his cheek. An act of tenderness that was an echo of a Dez Fox that Trout used to know.

“I should have cut his balls off and fed them to him,” she said.

Trout managed a weak grin. “I’d have enjoyed that.”

She grunted and smiled. “Piper rang his chimes pretty well, though. Who’da thought?”

“Wish I’d seen it.”

“It was sweet.”

“Sure.”

Trout straightened slowly and then hissed sharply, collapsing back against the wall.

“Jesus Christ, Billy, how fucked up are you?”

“Oh … I’ve had worse.”

“No you haven’t, you asshole.”

“No, I haven’t,” he agreed weakly. “It’s the sort of thing people say.”

“Is it bad?”

“It’s not terrific,” he admitted through clenched teeth.

She shook her head. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

He slowly straightened again, face set against pain spikes. He made it to a relatively upright position. “On the list of immediate priorities, Dez, that’s right near the bottom.”

Dez didn’t argue.

“Come on,” he said, “we have work to—”

“Officer Fox!” a voice called sharply, and they both looked toward the stairwell as Jenny DeGroot came bursting out. “Something’s happening outside.”

“We already know about the soldiers leaving—”

“No,” said Jenny breathlessly, “it’s something else. You’d better come look.”

Dez cut a look at Trout, but he waved her away. “Go, I’ll catch up.”

Dez followed Jenny into the stairwell and Trout could hear their footfalls as they raced up to the second floor. The thought of climbing stairs was intimidating, but Trout forced himself to stagger into the fire tower and climb the stone steps, one at a time. It felt like to took a hundred years and the version of Trout that emerged from the tower was hobbled and hunched and gasping for breath.

Dez Fox nearly ran him down as she tore back toward the stairs.

“What?” he gasped as he flung himself out of her way.

“The soldiers,” she said. “They’re back.”

She took off running with Jenny and a few of the others at her heels.

Trout didn’t immediate follow. He couldn’t face the steps, not yet. Instead he limped over to one of the classrooms, went inside and peered out the window. Down in the lot a pair of soldiers was walking purposefully toward the school. They wore dark hazmat suits and had guns in their hands. They stopped at the corner of the building and one of them raised a walkie-talkie and spoke into it for a moment, listened, then lowered the device. Then, weapons raised and ready, they began walking slowly along the east side of the building.

Were they walking the perimeter or looking for a way in?

A sudden and alarming thought jolted Trout. Where exactly was Dez hurrying to? He thought he knew the answer and it scared him to death. He set his teeth against the pain and hobbled toward the stairs as fast as he could.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

On the other side of the county from his niece, Jake DeGroot wondered if he was dead.

Everyone else seemed to be.

Jake was a construction worker from Bordentown who volunteered to work all night in Stebbins, and he and his crew had been at it for nearly twenty-four hours.

Until everything went crazy in Stebbins, just over the county line.

Now he lay in a shallow pit, half-drowned, shivering, and terrified; hidden from view beneath the lowered bucket of a yellow front-end loader. His machine, the one he drove every day. Big Bird.

Rain hammered down on the machine. The bucket was half-filled with dirt from the trench in which he lay, and water filled the rest of the steel cup. It spilled over and ran down the sides, dripping onto him, touching him with cold fingertips. Rainwater had filled the pit nearly to the top and the cold was like a thousand knives stabbing over and over again into his flesh. He could barely feel his feet and his fingers felt like they were each being crushed in a vise. Cold was a beast that crouched over him, wrapped around him, bit like a vampire into him and sucked away his warmth.

Jake was afraid to crawl out of the dirty pit of cold water.

He had no idea what time it was. His cell phone was in his pocket and his pocket was under water. The only other clocks were the one in the office — a small travel-trailer parked at the edge of the construction site that might as well have been on the dark side of the moon — and the steel diver’s watch strapped to the forearm of Burl Hansard, the shift foreman.

Burl lay thirty feet away.

What was left of him.

His body was mostly hidden by mud and the front wheel of Burl’s Expedition. All Jake could see was half of Burl’s face, his shoulder, and his right arm.

Or rather what was left of the supervisor’s right arm.

Two fingers and a thumb. Some meat on the wrist, part of the upper arm.

Tendons and bone. Visible now that the rain had washed away the blood.

That was it.

And the face.

He had no face at all. All Jake could see were the ends of broken bones and lumps of meat he could not and would not try to identify.

Jake lay there, shivering, staring at his dead friend.

Two hours ago that ruined face had worn a smile. Two hours ago a soggy cigar had been clamped between strong white teeth, and a grin curled the lips. Burl had been that kind of a guy. You couldn’t depress the sonofabitch. No matter how bad things were, he could find something to crack a joke about. He’d always get people to laugh at funerals, even the family members. He killed them when he gave a toast at the union Christmas dinners. Tall, but nowhere near as tall as Jake’s six-eight, and built like a cannonball on bowed legs. A John Goodman kind of guy, bigger than life in every way. And smiling. Always smiling, no matter how bad the shit was coming down, or how late an emergency shift went, or how tough a job was. Always laughing.

Until three teenage girls came out of the woods and ate the smile off his face.

The thought — the memory — was so insanely vivid, playing in his head in HD with surround sound. All the colors, all the sounds.

They had been out here working the storm because the weather service said this was going to be a nut-buster. A hurricane, or whatever you call a storm like that this far inland. A supercell. Something like that. Torrential rains, hurricane-force winds, and an absolute guarantee of flash flood.

This was the storm, everyone said, that would finally break the levees.

Everyone always said that.

They were always wrong.

Until they were right.

Until today.

Jake and his crew were at it before the sun was even up yesterday morning and they kept at it all the way past midnight, working with bulldozers and front-end loaders, including his own big Caterpillar 950H. The one under which he lay. The crew were hard at it all damn day, pushing hundreds of tons of dirt into berms to reinforce the levees, cutting rain runoff lines, trying to help the town get ready for the storm. They needed five times as many men and machines on the job, but they used what they had. Did some good, too. The levees held north of the town proper, which is where everyone said the water would do the most damage. Jake and the guys saved maybe fifty, sixty farms from being flooded by dirty river water.

Below the town line, though, the National Guard was supposed to be doing the same job. And they had more equipment.

But then Magic Marti on the radio said that the levees had collapsed down there. Jake never got all the details, though. Not on that and not on whatever the Christ else was happening over there in Stebbins. Even with headphones on, between the rain and the engine roars, it was too loud to hear much of the news. And reception was for shit. He lost Magic Marti, whose radio show on WNOW came up from over the Maryland line, and when he had the chance, Jake tried to pick up the network news out of Pittsburgh. Got a little of it, but the news guy seemed to be losing his shit. Typical newspeople, he’d thought at the time. They go ass-wild whenever things get really bad, so instead of reporting the news they act like the news is all about them. Like Anderson Cooper standing in the fucking wind during Katrina. They shout a lot so you know they’re taking the big risk, but they don’t say much of anything people can use.

Like today.

Nobody seemed to know what in the blue hell was going on.

Certainly no one on the stations Jake listened to when he could get a signal. And no one he talked to. Lots of cars went by, but everyone was driving so fast you’d have thought the devil was after them.

Then those three girls came out of the woods.

Jake saw them and he was so startled that he almost ran his bucket through the berm he was building. He jerked to a stop to watch.

The girls came walking slowly out of the woods like there was no crisis, no storm, no goddamn ocean of water pounding down on them.

And damn if one of them wasn’t naked.

These were high school girls, or maybe college.

The one on the left wore jeans and a torn sweatshirt, the flaps of it hanging down to expose a blue sports bra and pale skin. The one on the right had a windbreaker on with the logo of some sports team Jake never heard of. Probably a school team. But the one in the middle was as naked as if she was taking a shower instead of walking through the woods where everyone could see her. She was thin, with tiny breasts and visible ribs.

Jake had two reactions.

The guy in him immediately checked out her body.

The man in him became instantly concerned. She was young, naked, vulnerable, and clearly out of her mind. Drugs? Something else?

All three of the girls had marks on them that looked like cuts, but the distance and the cleansing rain made the marks look blue and bloodless.

The girls came straight across a muddy field, negotiating the uneven terrain where heavy-equipment wheels had created an obstacle course of wheel ruts. One by one the other guys killed their engines. They all stared. A few of the men were smiling, and one clown whistled, but the sound was shrill and it died in the air. And these kids were clearly in trouble. That bullshit about construction crews sitting around whistling and acting like they had dicks instead of brains may be true sometimes, but nearly every man here had a family, kids.

Burl was the first guy to do more than sit there and gape.

“Yo!” he cried as he jumped down from the cab of his Cat D9. “Yo, kids … what the hell’s going on? You girls okay? What are you doing out here?”

He kept up a string of questions as he jogged heavily through the mud to intercept them. The girls paused for a moment — just a moment — as he drew close, and it seemed to Jake that in the cold and misty rain they’d been unaware of him until he spoke, until he moved.

He thought that then, and knew it now.

The girls all smiled at him, grinning to show white teeth. Then they broke into a run to meet Burl. Arms outstretched, like children running to the safety of their daddy’s arms.

Except that wasn’t what it was.

Of course it wasn’t.

Even with fractured logic, even if things weren’t what they were, that wouldn’t have been the way it was.

Maybe Burl knew it, too, Jake thought. Knew it a step too late, because as he got close to them his own pace faltered, and his voice trailed away, ending on a rising note of question.

The girls answered that question by leaping at him.

Driving him backward.

Driving him down to the ground.

Climbing all over Burl.

Bending toward him.

In a damaged guy’s fantasy world that would have been a Penthouse letters page three-on-one. But this was the real world and naked teenage girls didn’t walk out of the rain to bang a fat construction worker.

That’s not what they did.

For a moment, though, Jake didn’t understand what they were doing. From a distance it really did look like they were kissing him. His face, his throat. Their hands were all over him.

And then the screaming started.

So high.

Jake would never have guessed that a man as big as Burl could scream so loud, so high, so shrill. Like a whistle blowing at the end of a shift. A long, sustained blast that went on and on as the girls’ mouths bent to him over and over again.

Everyone started screaming then.

All four of the other guys — and Jake — screamed as they started running toward the tangle of white limbs that were now streaked with bright, bright red.

The first one there was Richie, another bulldozer jockey. He ran up like he was going to handle this shit right there, right then. But when he was twenty feet out his nothing-can-stop-me run slowed to a walk as he saw what was actually happening.

His screams went up a notch. From man yell to something younger, higher, and more frightened.

The three girls raised their heads and snarled at him.

Like lionesses around a zebra.

Jake was fifty yards back and he could see strings of meat caught between their teeth, swaying as they looked at Richie.

Then two of them came off the ground and rushed him. It was so unexpected.

Not really fast.

It was awkward and even a little slow.

But there was absolutely no hesitation. One moment they were looking at Richie and the next minute they were at him. Just like that.

Richie skidded to a stop and tried to backpedal, but the mud was too wet. He went down hard and the girls were on him. Once more the screams changed.

Changed into something raw and filled with denial.

The other guys were there. Hank and Tommy and Vic.

Jake was almost there. He’d been farthest away.

They grabbed the girls. Shoved them. Knocked them back.

The girls turned on them. Their faces were smeared with blood that was so thick the downpour couldn’t wash it off.

Everyone was wrestling, struggling.

It was crazy. All those big men. Three teenage girls, none of them bigger than one-ten. The blood.

All that blood.

Jake stepped down wrong and sank to mid-shin in watery mud. Pain detonated in his knee and for a terrible moment he thought he’d broken his leg. But it was just jammed straight. Maybe sprained. It stopped him cold, though, and pitched him face-forward into the mud. It went straight up his nose, into his eyes, into his screaming mouth. Down his throat.

He coughed and gagged and blew, pawing at his face, trying to unclog his nostrils and mouth so he could drag in a breath. Swallowed more mud doing that and a worse spasm of coughing nearly tore him apart. His chest convulsed and he vomited mud and coffee and two Egg McMuffins into the storm, and the fierce wind blew it back into his face.

For a long, twisted time he lay there, dripping with mud and puke, trying to breathe. Failing. Trying.

Until black fireworks exploded in his head and the sounds of the rain dwindled into a distant buzz and Jake knew that he was choking to death. Right there. While his friends fought little girls and screamed and bled.

Desperate, terrified, Jake balled his right fist and punched himself in the solar plexus as hard as he could. It felt like being shot, but a ball of something — bread or Canadian bacon or mud or all of that shot from his mouth and vanished into the rain. He dragged in half the air in the world. The flesh around his eyes tingled and the world was incredibly bright but filled with fireflies.

Then the wind brought the screams back to him.

That was how the day started for Jake DeGroot.

It was the best part of his day.

It got so much worse after that.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Dez Fox made no sound at all as she opened the small door that connected the teacher’s lounge to the corner of the schoolyard. The wind screeched through the chain-link fence and rain hit the concrete so steadily it sounded like white noise. Dez took several small, quick steps, her feet barely lifting from the ground as she moved up behind two of the patrolling soldiers. They were twenty feet ahead of her, walking at a measured pace, heading to the turn at the far end. They carried their M4s at an angle to keep rain from filling the barrels. Even though both of them wore gray-green hazmat suits, Dez could tell that one was male and the other female.

Dez stopped behind a decorative outcropping of red brick and racked the slide of her Daewoo shotgun.

Even with the storm it was a loud and distinctive sound, and she’d waited until she was in position so the soldiers could hear it.

She yelled, “Freeze right fucking there.”

They froze. Right there.

“Unsling your rifles and stand them against the wall,” Dez ordered. “Do it now.”

The soldiers hesitated and the woman started to turn.

“Don’t make a stupid mistake, girl,” warned Dez.

“You’re the one making a mistake,” said the female soldier.

“And I’ll cry about it later. Drop the guns or I’ll drop you. Last warning.”

The soldiers exchanged a brief look, then they slid the straps from their shoulders and very gingerly stood their weapons against the wall.

“Place your hands on top of your heads, fingers laced. Good, now turn around slowly. Fuck with me and I will kill you.”

They did exactly as told and though Dez couldn’t see their faces behind the masks they wore, each of them stiffened in surprise. Dez smiled as she stepped away from the wall. Behind her, Uriah Piper and eight other men — each of them experienced deep-woods hunters — knelt in the rain in a shooting line with rifles snugged against their shoulders. A sound made the soldiers look up to see eight more gun barrels — small arms and long guns — pointing at them from half-opened windows.

“Yeah,” said Dez to the soldiers, “you’re that fucked.”

For a long moment there was no sound except the dull impact of raindrops on brick and pavement and clothing and skin. Dez lowered her shotgun and walked over to the soldiers.

“Jenny?” she called, and Jenny DeGroot trotted out of the building holding a plastic trash can. Then Dez began stripping weapons and equipment from the soldiers. Grenades, walkie-talkies, knives, IFAK first-aid kits, ammunition, canteens, equipment-belt suspenders, gun belts, and the rest until each soldier wore only their hazmat suit and their battle dress uniform beneath it. All of it went into the plastic trash can until Jenny staggered under the weight.

“Take it inside. Uriah, get their rifles.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Officer Fox?” asked the female soldier.

Dez wasn’t surprised to hear her name. She was the only police officer left alive in Stebbins, and her presence in the school was certainly known to the military. Even so, she didn’t like hearing this woman say it. She produced two sets of plastic flex-cuffs, handed her shotgun to Piper, spun the female soldier roughly around, yanked her arms down behind her and quickly fitted the cuffs around the wrists. She repeated this with the man, who had so far kept silent.

“This isn’t how you want to play this,” warned the woman.

Dez tore off the woman’s goggles and yanked down the cowl of her hazmat suit. The woman had olive skin, short black hair, and dark eyes. She did not look even remotely afraid of Dez or the guns pointed at her, which was very strange. The woman was also older than Dez expected, maybe thirty-three, with crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines etched around her mouth.

“Listen, sister,” said Dez. “You think I’m making a mistake here? Are you really that stupid?”

“You’re only making more trouble for yourself. What do you hope to accomplish?”

Dez wiped rainwater from her eyes. “What do I hope to accomplish,” she echoed, “Sure, fair question. I’ll tell you and maybe it’ll even sink in.” She pointed to the school. “There are eight hundred people in there. Most of them are scared little kids. None of them are infected.”

The woman nodded. “And?”

Dez almost smiled at how cool this woman was. Cuffed and captured, she was keeping everything in neutral. Dez wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or nervous.

“The other reason is that we need some insurance that General Zetter won’t bomb this place. He might be willing to kill civilians, but I don’t think he’ll pull the trigger on his own people.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“No,” admitted Dez, “but fuck it. You play the cards you’re dealt.”

The woman studied her, then nodded. “Fair enough. However, I don’t work for General Zetter. He doesn’t know my name, or my partner’s name, and he has no idea that you and I are having this conversation.”

“Bullshit. If you’re not with Zetter, what are you? Regular army? Who are you working for?”

“His name is Captain Sam Imura,” said the woman. “Hurt either of us and he will blow your head off.”

“That’s mighty tough fucking talk but I don’t—”

“Dez…,” said Trout suddenly. “Oh God … Dez.”

She looked at him and then down at her chest. There, between her breasts, right over her heart, was a tiny red dot. It quivered ever so slightly.

A laser sight.

She stood facing the soldier, which meant that someone out there in the storm was aiming a rifle at her. Someone hidden by rain and the humped shapes of buses and cars.

Dez shifted her shotgun so the barrel pointed at the woman’s face. She took a breath and yelled loud enough to be heard above the rain. “Take your shot, motherfucker. I’ll blow this slut’s shit all over the wall before I go down.”

“Officer Fox,” said the woman calmly. “This isn’t about you.”

Suddenly two more laser dots appeared. One was on Uriah Piper’s chest. The other moved in a slow line up Billy Trout’s body, over his chest, across his face, and stopped exactly between his eyebrows. This dot did not quiver at all.

“Captain Imura was one of the top three snipers in U.S. Special Forces. The other two men are superb shots and they are in positions of concealment. They can drop nine of your people in under four seconds, including you.”

“I’m not afraid to die,” sneered Dez.

“If we wanted you dead, Officer Fox, we’d have taken you as soon as you stepped outside of the building. This isn’t about who’s brave enough to die. It’s about who’s smart enough to live.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Goat whimpered when he saw what Homer Gibbon did inside the 7-Eleven; however, he kept the camera rolling.

There were five people there. A family of three, a man who dressed like a bartender, and the young man working the cash register.

The store’s employee lay where he’d been dropped, his chest on the floor and his feet still hooked on the counter. That’s how it had started. Homer walked in, reached over the counter, grabbed the kid, dragged him up, and took a bite out of his throat.

Then Homer dropped him.

The other people in the store screamed and panicked.

The woman pushed her ten-year-old son behind her as she backed into an aisle. Her husband tried to drag Homer off the cashier. Homer wheeled on him and drove a savage kick into the man’s crotch that sent him crashing into a display of chips and pretzels. The other man, the bartender, apparently knew some karate, because Goat saw him throw his own kick, catching Homer in the gut. The blow staggered Homer, but the killer folded around the bartender’s leg, clutching it to the point of impact. He bent all the way over it and Goat suddenly realized that he was bending to take a bite.

The bartender screamed and pounded on Homer to let go.

Homer did. Abruptly. He whipped the trapped leg up into the air, which caused the bartender to flip backward. He crashed down on the wire rack, scattering brightly colored bags of Utz pretzels, Lay’s potato chips, and Snyder barbecue pork rinds. The man lay there, back arched over the twisted wire, writhing and hissing between gritted teeth.

That’s when the woman began throwing things at Homer.

Cans of Spam and Campbell’s soup struck the killer’s back and shoulders. He threw an arm up to protect his face as he waded toward her. He never once stopped grinning. Homer was as dead as the other monsters, but he wasn’t like them. Not entirely. Because he was the first infected person in this plague, because the purest form of Dr. Volker’s Lucifer 113 pathogen had been directly injected into his veins, the parasitic reaction was different. His mind did not die along with his flesh. Goat knew this. Understood it. And it terrified him. It made Homer into a kind of monster that was so much greater, so much more dangerous than anything else.

Goat watched Homer grin, heard him laugh, as he swatted the cans out of the air like someone playing a game.

A game.

It was a mercy — for Goat, not for the woman and her child — that Homer tackled them and they vanished between the aisles. Blood shot upward, though, spattering the top rows of canned goods and stacks of plastic-wrapped Stroehmann bread.

Goat never once looked at the door handle.

He never once seriously thought about running.

He understood that he was trapped inside this drama and that there was no exit cue on his script.

After several minutes, Homer rose from between the rows, his face painted with a new coat of red. He wiped his mouth, though he was still chewing something. He looked across the bloody tops of the bread toward the window, and through the glass to where Goat sat behind the dispassionate camera.

And he gave Goat a cheery, buddy-buddy thumbs-up. Like a football jock after a successful play.

The bartender was struggling to rise, but Homer stepped over him and walked in a casual swagger toward the door. Then he paused, turned, went to the cooler and took out two cold bottles of Coke, and plucked a handful of candy bars from the rack. He nodded to himself and left the store.

When he opened the driver’s door he held the Coke and candy out to Goat.

“Guess you got to eat, too,” he said.

It took a lot for Goat to accept these things. It cost him an expensive chunk of his soul.

Homer got behind the wheel and started the car.

Inside the store, the mother and child, both of whom had been savaged, were on their feet. Her husband was only now struggling to his feet, his hands still cupped around his crotch, face purple with agony. Goat had never seen a man kicked that hard in the groin before, and from the awkward way the man stood it seemed obvious that bones had to have been broken. He raised his head toward his family.

And screamed as they rushed toward him, reaching for him with bloody hands. He fell beneath them and Goat turned away.

“No,” barked Homer, hitting him hard on the shoulder, “you don’t look away. You fucking well look.”

It cost Goat another part of his soul to turn back. To witness another death.

And another resurrection.

The cashier was rising, too, scrambling toward the bartender with the bitten leg.

More blood.

More screams.

“There,” said Homer, “there it is.”

“W-what…?”

“That’s the secret the Red Mouth wants you to know. The Black Eye wants to open in the center of your forehead so you can see. You can see it, can’t you?”

“I … see it.”

“Glad to hear it. I was beginning to have my doubts about you, son.” He tapped the video camera. “Did you get everything like I asked?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll put it on the Net?”

“As soon as we get somewhere with a Wi-Fi.”

Homer grunted, a note of deep satisfaction, perhaps of relief.

“Good,” he said.

He pulled back onto the highway and headed toward Pittsburgh.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

“Please, God…”

Jake DeGroot prayed nearly continually, but he prayed under his breath.

He didn’t dare make a sound.

In case someone could hear.

He didn’t want anyone to hear him. Not the things that had pretended to be teenage girls. The things that had done those awful things to Burl and Richie and the others.

He was sure they were dead.

He just wasn’t sure that it mattered.

After the attack had started — if “attack” was even the right word — Jake had been down in the mud for too long. When he’d fallen face-first into the muck and choked on it and on his breakfast, getting his shit together took a long damn time. Lying there, gasping like a gaffed billfish, his leg screaming at him, his chest on fire, he had no strength at all. Not for a long time. Too long. Maybe. Or long enough. It was all a matter of how you looked at it.

Since then, hiding in the ditch under Big Bird, he’d thought about it a lot.

He thought it all the way through as the HDTV in his head played and replayed it. There was no remote to aim at it and surf away to something better and saner. To something that made any kind of sense.

Before Jake could struggle back to his feet the whole thing with Burl and Hank and the others seemed to have changed. To have ended in a way Jake didn’t understand.

The other three guys, Hank, Tommy, and Vic, had pulled the girls off of Burl and Richie. Pulled them off, fought with them, fell to the ground wrestling with them, and beaten the shit out of them. Through pain-filled eyes, Jake watched the guys punching and stomping the girls. It was surreal. Like something out of a bad movie. Like snuff porn.

Except that this was real and no matter how many times his friends hit the girls, they couldn’t put them down.

Not down so they’d stay.

First one girl would fall, knocked into the mud by a fist or foot, then another, but then they’d get right back up. With faces broken to ugliness by the blows, with teeth sliding out of their mouths on tides of black blood, with the white ends of ribs coming through their skin and broken fingers, they go right after the guys again.

And again.

And again.

Until Tommy knocked one of them down and stomped on her head. But it took five or ten kicks. At first all he did was drive the girl with the torn sweatshirt deeper into the mud. Tommy was bleeding from half a dozen bites on his hands and wrists. Then one of his kicks must have done something worse. Broke her head, maybe. Or her neck. Something. Because she suddenly stopped fighting, stopped trying to get up. Stopped everything.

Tommy staggered back, staring down at her, his face as slack as if he’d been slapped, eyes bugged. Jake could understand that. The craziness of the attack. The bites and the blood. And what he’d just done.

How could they ever explain this?

All these big guys and three teenage girls. One of them naked. Another with her shirt torn open and her bra showing. Beaten to shit so they didn’t even look like girls anymore.

What could any of them ever say that would make sense of that?

What?

What?

Tommy stood there and looked down at the girl while the other guys kept rolling around fighting.

Then Tommy spun away, dropped to his knees, and threw up.

Jake was still trying to haul himself out of the mud, still trying to remember how to breathe. He fought to get to his feet, but his knee immediately buckled and he went down again.

That’s when Burl got up.

The naked girl had left him in the mud and was fighting Richie. Hank and Vic were taking turns knocking down the girl in the windbreaker and getting bit and knocking her down again. All of them screaming and cursing.

Jake began to crawl through the mud while across the rainy field, behind the five struggling figures, Burl Hansard stood up. It seemed to take a long time for him to do it. He was so badly hurt, maybe so dazed, that he was clumsy, he looked like he was drunk. The rain slashed at him, sending crooked red lines down to the mud, making his skin look white as paper.

“B-Burl…” called Jake, but he was too far away and his voice was lost in the sound of the storms and all that yelling.

Burl paused for one moment, his pale face turned toward Jake, eyes locked; and in that fragment of time, Jake knew that everything here was wrong. Worse even than it had been. He didn’t know how he knew — it was a reaction born in the deepest, oldest, most primitive part of his brain. It was a knowledge of wrongness without any intellectual interpretation. It was simply wrong.

Burl’s eyes were open but Burl was not in there.

Even from that distance, Jake knew.

Somehow Burl was gone.

So who looked at him from his friend’s eyes?

Who, or what?

All of this burned through Jake’s head in less than a second.

Then Burl took a step. Heavy, lumbering, like he didn’t quite remember how to use his feet. He pulled one work boot out of the mud and took a step, but it was more like falling forward than walking forward.

Not toward Jake.

Burl turned toward the knot of struggling figures. A step, another.

He reached out to help pull the naked girl away who kept trying to bite Vic even though he had her by the hair and kept punching her in the face. Burl grabbed the girl and hauled her away, and Jake expected him to start wailing on her. But he didn’t. Instead he simply shoved her aside and with a rush and a yell that was as loud as it was meaningless. Then Burl grabbed Vic’s face, taking it in both of his hands the way a grandmother does when she’s going to kiss a kid on the lips.

Except that’s not what was happening.

Of course it wasn’t.

Burl pulled Vic forward, tearing him free from the mud, crushing him close, and then he bit down, tearing into Vic’s nose, crushing it, ripping it. Blood exploded against Burl’s face and it seemed to incense the man. He growled like a dog and began tearing at Vic, worrying at his face the way a dog does. Vic screamed and screamed. He beat at Burl, punching him with the same red, swollen fists he’d been using with similar futility on the naked girl. The fists bounced off of Burl’s massive frame. Vic brought his knee up into Burl’s balls. Once, again, and again.

Nothing.

And it was then, at that moment, that Jake lost all hope that there was any way to understand this. He’d been in fights. He’d given and taken shots to the groin. Some guys could cowboy through it, biting down on the pain, bulling through it, but even the toughest of them reacted. You had to react. It was your balls.

Burl didn’t twitch. All that happened was a jerk of his body with each impact, but there was no more reaction to it than when somebody brushes your shoulder on the subway. Less. It was nothing. Dead meat being hit.

That was it.

That was all.

Burl never stopped biting.

Vic’s face.

Vic’s cheek.

Vic’s throat.

Then Vic stopped screaming; he stopped kicking. Someone turned on a power hose of red in Vic’s throat. Blood showered Burl’s face and chest.

Jake lost it then.

He could hear past his own screams.

His eyes seemed to switch off for a moment as if they refused to see any of this.

Time punched him senseless and each second was like a brutal fist against his brain. The sounds and sights of what was going on broke apart and flew off into the storm.

Tommy and Richie were still fighting. One each with a girl.

Then Tommy was down and the girl with the windbreaker knelt on his chest. There was one little, final flap of Tommy’s hand. After that, nothing.

Richie picked the naked girl up and flung her away from him. Then he looked wildly around as if trying to decide how to react, failed, and then simply ran.

Badly.

The mud and the rain and the damage brought him down within two steps.

“No!”

The cry was torn from Jake. It was not the first time he’d yelled, but this one found a hole in the storm where there was no thunder, no howling wind, no screams. A flash moment of quiet into which his one word stabbed.

Every face turned toward the sound.

Toward him.

Burl and the girls.

Even Vic.

Oh, God. Vic.

He sat up and swiveled his head around on his ruined throat.

Richie saw him, too, and he reached out with a bloodstained hand. “Jake … oh, Christ … Jake!”

It was a mistake.

The girls, broken and disfigured, crippled into shambling wrecks, turned away from Jake and began limping after Richie. He tried to crawl away from them.

Didn’t.

Couldn’t.

Burl and Vic did not go after Richie.

Vic got to his feet and, nearly shoulder to shoulder with Burl, began moving toward Jake.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

“Mr. President,” said Scott Blair, “Captain Imura’s team is on-site at the Stebbins Little School. I’m waiting now on word about the drives.”

“How soon can Imura get those drives to us?”

“He won’t need to. He’ll upload them to his tactical computer and send them via burst transfer to us. We’ll have them five minutes after he has them.”

“Thank God,” said the president. “Thank God.”

Sylvia Ruddy covered the mouthpiece of the phone into which she’d been speaking. “Scott … how much stake are we placing on what’s on the drives? I reviewed Trout’s broadcasts and it seemed clear that Volker regarded his variation of Lucifer as unstoppable. He said as much to his CIA handler. I have transcripts of all of this and there’s nothing in anything Volker said to indicate that there’s a silver bullet on those drives.”

Blair placed his hands flat on the table. “Have you not been following, Sylvia? I never said that there was a cure on the drives. We need them for our people — Dr. McReady, Dick Price at Zabriske Point, the team at the CDC. They are the most talented bioweapons people on earth. It’s always been our hope that they’ll find a weakness in Volker’s variation.”

“That’s a long damn shot,” said Ruddy.

“It’s the shot we have.”

The president got up and walked over to the big screen on which the satellite images were shown, with the thermal signatures of hundreds of people scattering through the storm. He touched the screen at the outer edge of the dispersal pattern.

“All the science in the world isn’t going to help us if we can’t contain the outbreak.”

No one spoke.

He nodded to General Burroughs. “Amistad, give me the numbers.”

Burroughs punched some keys that overlaid a red circle around the troubled area. “The only thing working in our favor right now is that the infected are unable to drive vehicles, and most of them are slow, moving at a fast walk or slower. So, by estimating the potential distance traveled by foot since the quarantine break, we have extended the Q-zone to cover this area.” He hit keys and the line jumped outward so that it covered an area with a sixty-four-mile diameter, with Stebbins in the exact center. “Even if an infected person was traveling on foot at a rate of four miles an hour — which is virtually impossible because of terrain, weather, and, er, the nature of the infection, we estimate that the maximum distance from Stebbins would be thirty-two miles. Therefore we need to designate everything inside this extended area to be our new hot zone.”

The president nodded very slowly. “How many people live inside that zone?”

“It’s mostly farm country…”

“How many?”

It was Blair who had those numbers. It hurt him to say it, though. “One hundred seventy thousand people.”

The president closed his eyes.

“However, if it continues to spread at this rate, we’ll have to expand the zone again,” said Blair. “By tomorrow morning Pittsburgh will be inside the hot zone.”

He turned. “Ladies and gentlemen, I will take any and all suggestions for how to contain this. As of right now no option is off the table.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Two of the red laser dots vanished and a few seconds later two men came walking slowly and carefully out of the rain. They wore the same dark hazmat suits as the other soldiers, and carried similar gear. The taller of the newcomers had an M4 in his gloved hands; the other had a sniper rifle. Dez recognized it. A .408 Cheyenne Tactical sniper rifle that fired .338 Lapua Magnum supersonic rounds. A rifle bullet like that would result in a kill shot no matter where it struck a person.

The laser dot on Billy Trout remained where it was and Dez’s heart hammered in her chest.

The man with the sniper rifle walked past Uriah Piper and the other farmers, showing a total lack of concern that they all held weapons. He walked right up to Dez, slung his rifle barrel down, raised his goggles onto his forehead, and pulled down his hood to reveal a middle-aged Japanese face. A small mouth, crooked nose, and quiet eyes. Lots of old scars.

“Officer Fox?” he asked, his voice mild and surprisingly deep for a man of his size. Thunder boomed like a dramatic counterpoint and lightning glowed along the edges of his face. Imura raised an eyebrow. “Wow. Nice timing, but I promise that I didn’t plan the theatrics.”

Dez almost smiled. Didn’t.

The soldier offered his hand. “Captain Sam Imura.”

Dez did not shake hands. “Get that laser sight off of Billy.”

“Sure,” said Imura, withdrawing his hand. He tapped the electronic bud seated inside his right ear. “Moonshiner, stand down.”

The red dot vanished. Trout sagged and almost collapsed, but Piper caught him under the armpit and steadied him. Sam Imura looked amused. A fifth soldier, big and broad-shouldered, stepped down from his hiding place in one of the buses.

Dez stepped very close to Sam. They were the same height and she gave him the full weight of her anger and disapproval in a blue-eyed glared. “Okay, so now that we’re done measuring dicks,” she growled, “how about you tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“I will,” said Sam, “but first I need to know if the flash drives are still safe.”

“That’s why you’re here?”

“Mostly,” said Sam. He glanced at Trout. “Do you have them?”

“Don’t trust him, Billy,” said Cletus, one of the farmers. A few others grunted agreement, except for Piper, who stood as silent as a statue.

“Why didn’t you shoot first and just take the drives?” Trout asked sourly.

“Three reasons,” said Sam. “First, we’re not actually barbarians. I know, big surprise, right? It goes against the cliché, but what can I tell you? Second, if we started a gunfight, do you really think either side would win? We’d kill a bunch of you, and you might kill some of my people. That’s pretty crappy math.”

Trout pointed to the big auditorium windows halfway along the side of the school. That entire section of the school’s facade was peppered with thousands of bullet holes, and the windows were totally gone. “You guys seemed happy with that equation a few hours ago.”

“That wasn’t us,” said Sam. “That was Colonel Dietrich of the Pennsylvania National Guard who, as I believe you’ve been told, has been relieved of his command. He was replaced by Major General Zetter, who did not fire on you. He could have, you know. Your ‘live from the apocalypse’ broadcasts are being jammed, so no one would have known if Zetter razed this school to the ground. The fact that he didn’t should say something to you.”

Trout and Dez exchanged an uncertain look.

“What was the third reason, Captain?” asked Dez.

“Because if Mr. Trout here is dead and the flash drives are not in his pocket, then I could burn off a lot of time trying to find wherever he hid them.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty simple, really. The best approach is a straightforward one, so I decided to come and ask.”

“Except that you walked into an ambush,” said one of the farmers. “How smart was that?”

“They ambushed us, dumbass,” said Dez. “Now shut up, Cletus, there are grown folks talking.”

Even in the cold rain the man’s face flushed red.

Sam said, “Mind telling me why you tried to ambush my soldiers? It was my understanding that General Zetter negotiated a truce with you.”

“Fuck Zetter and fuck you.”

“There’s that,” conceded Sam.

“We thought he left two assholes behind to keep us penned in. Turns out we don’t think it’s safe in Stebbins County. Might come as a shock to you.”

Sam said nothing.

“So we were going to tie up Zetter’s sentries, take their weapons, then clear out as many buses as it’ll take to get these kids and the rest of the adults the fuck out of this particular ring of hell.”

“And go where?”

“Anywhere but here.”

“That was the general plan,” agreed Trout, “until you showed up. And I have to say, Captain, that you played a very dangerous hand of cards there. We could have just as easily shot your people.”

“That goes both ways, Mr. Trout, and in any armed conflict I rather like our odds.”

Dez tried to get up in his face. “You can suck my—”

Trout pushed her back.

“Much as I appreciate you not turning this into the O.K. Corral, Captain,” said Trout, “how about the added courtesy of a few answers. Like why’d everybody light out of here like their asses were on fire? What was that about?”

“Well, you’ve probably already guessed that this trouble isn’t over,” said Sam. “The infection, the outbreak. It’s not over. And that’s why we need your help and cooperation. That’s why I need you to give me the flash drives.”

Trout shifted, wincing at the pain in his body. “How bad is it?”

Sam Imura had the kind of face that rarely gave anything away, but Dez and Trout could both see dangerous lights flicker in the man’s eyes. Beneath the placid veneer of calm there was real fear there. Deep and intense, barely kept in check.

“It’s bad,” said Sam. “We may not be able to contain it. Mr. Trout … please … those drives may be our only hope of preventing a nationwide catastrophe.”

Trout sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

“What?” asked Sam.

“I don’t have the drives,” said Billy Trout.

Sam’s face went dead pale.

Moonshiner said, “Oh, shit.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

“Homer,” said Goat, after he started the camera again and adjusted the microphone, “why did you attack those people at the Seven-Eleven?”

“I thought you said you understood.”

“I do,” Goat said quickly, “but this will go out to millions of people who don’t yet understand. You want them to understand, right? That’s why we’re doing this.”

“Sure.”

“Then tell them.”

The rain was intensifying again, so Homer turned up the wiper speed. “What do you want me to say, exactly?”

“You just walked into a Seven-Eleven and killed five people. Talk about why you did that.”

Homer shook his head. “Is that what you think I did?”

“Didn’t you? You attacked everyone, bit them…”

“I didn’t bite everyone,” Homer said. “And I only killed two of them, and the Red Mouth brought them right back. It’s funny, in court they went on and on about how many lives they say I took. Maybe that used to be true, but that’s before I understood the real power of the Red Mouth. I wasn’t trying to take anything from anyone. I was always trying to give them something. That’s why I wanted my lawyer to put me on the stand so I could tell everyone that, so I could explain it. But he wouldn’t do it. He said that people wouldn’t understand and it would go against me in court. Against me? They fucking executed me. How much more against me could it have gone? I think that if he’d let me have my say, if he let me explain what the Black Eye saw and let me speak with the voice of the Red Mouth, then they wouldn’t have sentenced me to any frigging lethal injection.”

No, thought Goat, they’d have put you in a tiny padded cell and spent the next forty years experimenting on your brain to see what makes it tick.

He did not say this to Homer.

The killer kept talking, working it out for the camera. “That’s all different now. Thanks to Dr. Volker and the gift he gave me; now I can share that gift with other people. No one’s ever going to die. Not really. Not like it used to be. We’re all going to live forever.”

Goat kept the camera on the killer’s profile, capturing the way he nodded in agreement with his own words and thoughts.

“In the Bible Jesus talked about how the meek were going to inherit the earth. I forget where he said it, but it was important, and I think this is what he was talking about. The way people are when they wake up after I open the Red Mouths in their flesh. They don’t act the way they used to. They don’t talk; they don’t say stupid shit. I’ll bet they don’t even know if they’re Republican or Democrats. They’re just people. All the bullshit is gone.”

“They’re zombies,” suggested Goat.

“Sure, if you want to use that word. But I don’t know. Zombies. I always think of black guys with bug eyes in those old movies. Down in Jamaica someplace.”

“Haiti.”

“Haiti? Okay. Haiti. Wherever. Those are zombies. Is that what they are?”

“Dr. Volker said that he studied zombies in Haiti. The witch doctors there use a chemical compound to—”

“None of that matters. It’s what, voodoo? The Red Mouth isn’t voodoo and it’s not magic.”

“Then what is it?”

“If I tell you, you’ll laugh.”

“Believe me,” said Goat, “I won’t laugh.”

“It’s god stuff. I read a word once in a book. Celestial. You know what that means?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what this is. I know that because it’s what Jesus spoke about. It’s the meek inheriting the earth. And he knew. Those Romans opened Red Mouths in his flesh and he spoke the real truth. And he came back from the dead, too.” Homer shook his head. “Maybe Jesus was the first zombie. That makes sense to me.”

Goat almost asked him if he was serious or if this was some kind of twisted joke.

He didn’t.

And therefore Homer did not have a reason to kill him.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

“We have Solomon from Philadelphia,” said Gavin.

“Great to talk with you, Gavin. Love the show, just love it.”

“Always great to hear. So, talk to me, Solomon, what do you think’s going down in Stebbins?”

“It’s UFOs. This is exactly what happened at Roswell.”

“How so, Solomon?”

“First they make an official statement and then they recant it right away.”

“Sure, but the first statement was about an outbreak of a new kind of virus.”

“Which they recanted.”

“Viruses are terrestrial.”

“Are they, Gavin?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s all part of the conspiracy. Something crashed in Stebbins and that’s how the virus was released. It was something in the blood of the aliens. Something normal to their world but not to ours.”

“And the government is covering it up?”

“Absolutely. They want to use that virus as a bioweapon. That’s where these governments have always gotten their bioweapons. You think HIV came from people having sex with monkeys?”

“No, I don’t, but—”

“There you go. HIV, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola … the reason they’re so dangerous is because we have no natural immunity to that stuff. And why? Because it’s not from here.”

“How does that account for things like the black plague and the Spanish flu of the early twentieth century?”

Solomon laughed. “C’mon, Gav, you of all people have to know that they’ve been visiting us since before they built the pyramids.”

“Ah.”

“And this whole cover-up? That fake news story by Billy Trout? The rumors of soldiers shooting people in Stebbins? That’s just the military covering up the fact they have a crashed UFO. It’s textbook, Gavin. This is Roswell all over again.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

“Mr. President,” cried Sylvia Ruddy, “I think we have something!”

Everyone in the Situation Room whipped around toward her and all conversation died.

“Tell me,” said the president in a way that was an order flavored with a plea.

“Dr. Price at Zabriske Point received the Lucifer 113 samples. I have him on video conference.” She spoke into the phone. “Dr. Price, I’m putting you on with the president.”

A moment later Dr. Price’s thin, ascetic face filled the big view screen. His eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue but bright with excitement.

“Tell me something I want to hear,” said the president. “Do you have something for us?”

“I — We believe so. My whole team has been tearing apart the 113 variation and we’ve learned that Dr. Volker used new mutations of Toxoplasma gondii, which had always been a key component of Lucifer. Those mutations were part of his process of the neurological control functions of the bioweapon. While the genetically reengineered green jewel wasp larvae drive the aggression of the infected, the toxoplasma control the brain. That’s part of the process of shutting down higher function while keeping active those nerves and processes responsible for walking, grabbing, biting, swallowing, and so on.”

“Cut to it, Dr. Price,” the president said tersely.

“This is context, Mr. President. It explains what I think might work. Using the older form of Lucifer we were experimenting with parasites that would essentially attack the modified parasites. We had a great deal of success with Neospora caninum, which is a parasite similar in form to Toxoplasma gondii, but one found predominantly in dogs. Under standard microscopic examination, the N. caninum sporozoite—which is the body of the parasite — closely resembles the T. gondii sporozoite, and both diseases share many of the same symptoms. However — and this is where we may have hit on it — the N. caninum infection has a much more severe impact on the neurological and muscular system of test subjects.”

“How so?” asked Blair, and once more that dangerous spark of hope flared in his chest.

“The N. caninum variations we’ve been developing as a possible response to Lucifer create a certain set of symptoms — all of them in extreme degrees — that include stiffness of the pelvis and legs, paralysis distinguished by gradual muscle atrophy in which the muscles essentially seize up and can’t move. A secondary set of symptoms include severe seizures, tremors, behavioral changes, weakness of the cervical muscles near to the neck, dysphagia — difficulty swallowing — and eventual paralysis of the muscles involved in respiration.”

“Which means what, damn it?” snapped the president.

“It means, Mr. President, that we might be able to introduce a hostile parasite to the infected that will make them blind and paralyzed. Quite literally it will stop them in their tracks.”

“Good God,” gasped Ruddy. “You’re talking about people.”

Dr. Price looked at her with heavily lidded eyes. “No, ma’am,” he said slowly, “once a person has been infected by Lucifer — by any version of Lucifer — they are no longer people. They are dead meat driven by a parasite.”

“How is this a cure?” demanded General Burroughs.

“No … you don’t understand,” Price said. “There is no cure. Maybe there will be one day, I don’t know. That would take years of research. You asked me how to stop the infected. That’s what this is. A weapon that can stop them.”

Blair watched the president’s face, saw how this news hurt him. He didn’t like the man, but right now he felt deeply sorry for him. And, to a lesser degree, for Price.

“What form would this weapon come in, Doctor?” asked Burroughs. “If it’s some kind of parasite…”

“Actually,” said Price, “the Chinese developed a toxoplasma delivery system in the nineties. We’ve codenamed it Reaper. Lurid, I know, but it was designed to attack and destroy, so we … well, anyway, we acquired it from them and—”

“What’s the potential effect of this Reaper on uninfected persons?” asked Blair.

Price paused on that. “We … don’t know. We’ve never tested this on people.”

“How do we use it?” interrupted the president.

“Airbursts. The modified N. caninum are held in stasis inside a dry medium that can be packed into rockets calibrated for low-level detonation over infected areas. How big is your quarantine zone?”

“The zone is a circle sixty-four miles across,” said Blair.

Price considered, quickly doing the math in his head. “That’s what — twelve-thousand eight hundred and sixty-one square miles?”

“And it could expand,” said Burroughs. “How much of this canine stuff do we need?”

“N. caninum,” corrected Price. “Or just Reaper. That’s what we’ve been calling it, too. Easier to say. Hold on, let me make that calculation.”

They watched him as he tapped for several excruciating moments on a laptop. Blair saw a frown carve itself deeply into Price’s face.

“Um … the required parasitic load would depend on population, terrain, and weather conditions. However, if we work with the prevailing winds, we could put enough of the parasite-rich medium in a standard airburst bomb or rocket to cover several square miles. Less in a high airburst in low winds. More in the current conditions. Call it fifty tons of the medium.”

That was ugly news.

“How fast can we get the Reaper material to Pennsylvania?” asked the president.

Price blinked like a bug. “Mr. President … we don’t have that much of the Reaper stockpiled.”

“How much do you have?”

“Between here and one other lab, maybe eight, nine kilos.”

“Shit,” hissed Blair.

“Can you make more of it?” asked the president.

“We can make a mountain of it, sir. Making it isn’t difficult. But it will take time to set up a production process for it, and then there’s manufacture time, bonding with the dry medium, payload assembly … Mr. President, at the very earliest we could have the first batches ready for you in six days.”

Six days.

Those two words hung burning the air.

“Scott,” asked the president in a leaden voice, “do we have that kind of time?”

“Without containment, sir?” Blair shook his head. “In six days we’ll have lost most of the East Coast and the entire South. In six days, Mr. President, fifty million people will be infected.”

Dr. Price had nothing to say. There was no possible response to a statement like that.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

They went inside out of the rain. Sam Imura and his team — their weapons and gear returned to them, the cuffs removed — along with Dez, Trout, Uriah Piper, Mrs. Madison, and a small handful of the more sober and steady adults. Dez picked one of the smaller classrooms in order to limit the size of the crowd, and she closed the door. Several of the adults in the school clearly wanted to object, but none of them got farther than beginning to say something to her, and then clearly thought better of it.

“Where are the drives?” asked Sam as soon as the door was closed.

Trout started to answer, but Dez cut him off. “No. You first. You tell us what’s happening.”

“We don’t have time for that, Officer Fox,” said Sam urgently, “we—”

“Fucking make time for it.”

Sam turned appealing eyes to Trout, but he shook his head. “You heard the lady,” said Trout. “And if the clock is ticking, better cut right to it.”

Sam glanced at his people, then gave a short sigh. “Okay, in the spirit of us actually getting somewhere, I’m going to shoot straight with you.”

“Figuratively speaking,” murmured Trout.

“Figuratively speaking. Let me preface it by saying that my boss is Scott Blair, the national security advisor. He was the one who advised the president to drop a fuel-air bomb on Stebbins County.”

“Shit,” said Dez. “What an asshole.”

Sam shook his head. “No, he’s not. Put yourself in his place. He didn’t invent Lucifer and he wasn’t part of any group that kept that plague after it should have been completely eradicated. Blair’s only concern is just what his job title says — he advises the president on matters of national security. This plague threatens the entire nation. There was a window — a very small one — last night when it might have been contained. That window closed when Mr. Trout here broadcast his appeal to the world to save the kids here in the school.”

“You’re saying this is my fault?” demanded Trout.

“No, sir. I’m not in the business of assigning blame. Neither, I might add, is Scott Blair. I’m a response to a threat. Blair is probably the clearest-thinking person in Washington. When Volker first defected and gave Lucifer to our government, a set of response protocols were written that appropriately addressed the level of threat. If you spoke with Dr. Volker, Mr. Trout, then you understand how incredibly dangerous this plague is. Look at what happened to your town because of a single person being infected. Homer Gibbon. The spread was immediate and exponential; however, it reached that moment when the window could have been closed on the spread.”

“By killing children?” demanded Mrs. Madison.

Sam gave her a flat stare. “No. By killing everyone in this town. Every single living person. And, ideally, every animal, bird, and cockroach. Anything that could possibly carry the disease beyond these borders.”

“That’s insane.”

“No,” said Sam, “creating a doomsday weapon was insane. Using that weapon in an attempt to punish a death row prisoner was insane. That’s where the guilt and blame are, ma’am. If Dr. Volker’s handler — the CIA operative assigned to oversee his actions — had done his job, then we would not be having this conversation. If Dr. Volker has been properly assessed, he would have been put into a psychiatric facility and kept far away from any materials with which he could do harm. But, as I said, that was yesterday’s news. The truth is that the disease was injected into Homer Gibbon and now it’s loose.”

Mrs. Madison and several of the others were shaking their heads.

“Tell me,” said Sam with dwindling patience, “if you were in charge of the military response to this outbreak, tell me how you would have handled it differently. What could you — what could anyone—have done once this thing was known to be out?”

“Not killed children.”

“Which is what Mr. Trout told the world we were doing, and the president pulled back. The bombs never fell and the kids in this school are alive. Okay, that’s a wonderful thing. No one wants to kill kids. Not even the most extreme hawks. I’ve got a younger brother and a baby stepbrother. It would crush me if anything happened to them. If they were in Stebbins County, I know I would feel exactly the same way you do. It’s impossible for a sane and moral person to feel anything other than outrage, shock, and horror.”

“If your brothers were in Stebbins and it was on you to order the bombs,” asked Trout, “what would you do?”

“The soldier in me would order the drop,” said Sam. “But me — Sam Imura — I’d never want those bombs dropped. I’d hesitate and hope for another solution. That’s what anyone would do. And that is what they call fatal hesitation. Emphasis on ‘fatal.’ That human connection skews the logic and in these situations the logic cannot be skewed. That’s why we have so many procedures in the military — in everything from basic training to missile launch sequences — that are designed to separate the human element from the necessary action.”

“But the children…” said Mrs. Madison, leaning on it, forcing awareness of the implications.

Sam looked around at the faces. “This is the problem. You don’t understand the implications of what you’ve done. Of what you still think is the right thing. You want to save these children, and that’s beautiful, that’s so wonderfully human. But if we can’t get ahead of Lucifer, then these children are going to die anyway. If not today, then when your food runs out. You’ll have to leave the building and all you’ll find out there will be more dead. Dead adults and dead children. That’s the only other way this works out. If we can’t stop Lucifer then everyone will die. Everyone. Everyone’s children. Here in Pennsylvania and everywhere else. Listen to me; hear that word. Everywhere. There is no way this disease can stop on its own. It will continue to spread exponentially. The most conservative estimates of a global pandemic of this disease is total human annihilation in ten weeks, with the deaths of all three hundred million Americans occurring during the first five to ten days.” He looked at Billy Trout. “Tell me … how many children are you willing to kill?”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Burl and Vic lumbered toward Jake and with every step the world tilted further and further off its axis. Nothing here made sense. Not in any way.

Three teenage girls walking in a storm like they couldn’t even feel the weather. One of them naked.

Then those same girls attacking Burl and the other guys.

Biting them. Eating them.

Jake’s friends — big men — screaming and falling. Dying.

And …

And getting the fuck back up.

It was all so wrong that for a broken handful of seconds Jake forgot about everything else. He lay there in the mud and didn’t think about the pain in his leg, the ache in his chest from coughing up mud, or the need to flee. He lay on his stomach, hands pushed into the mud to raise his chest and head, and watched things come toward him that used to be his friends.

“No.”

He heard the word but for a moment he could not tell who’d spoken it. Jake never felt his lips move to form the word, didn’t feel the push of air as it escaped his throat.

No.

The word hung in the air, telling him everything he needed to understand about the moment and about the future. It answered every question he had.

No.

The rain fell in great slanting lines, popping on every surface.

“No,” Jake said, trying to explain it to the day, trying to be reasonable about all this. “No.”

Burl and Vic opened their mouths. They had nothing to say, though. Instead they shared with Jake the only thing they understood. The only thing that mattered now to each of them. They uttered a deep, resonating, aching moan of appalling hunger. It did not matter that the hunger was new. The sound of their moans made it clear even to Jake’s tortured mind that this hunger ran as deep as all the need in the world. A strange and alien hunger that could never be satisfied.

Behind the two men, the girls raised their heads. Then, to his deepening horror, Jake saw that Richie and Tommy — what was left of Richie and Tommy — were climbing to their feet. All those pale faces turned toward the sound of that dreadful moan.

And joined it.

With broken jaws and shattered teeth, with torn throats and dead mouths, every one of them — all of them — raised their voices in a shared expression of that endless hunger.

Jake DeGroot clapped his hands to his ears to stop the noise, but he could hear it all the way down to the pit of his soul. He screamed.

At the sound of his scream, Burl began moving faster. The sticky suction of the mud tried to slow him, but Burl’s face became a mask of bestial hunger and he tore his feet free, step by step, and reached with hooked fingers toward Jake.

That’s when something in Jake’s mind snapped.

The tethers anchoring him to the civilized man he was parted and that part of him floated away like a mask being removed to reveal his true face. It was an older, simpler, far less evolved face, and the eyes of the ultra-primitive saw the oncoming threat and the synapsis of the ancient lizard brain triggered unthinking and immediate reaction.

Jake screamed again, but this time it came out more as a growl, as a snarl of denial and fear and determination. He pushed himself backward, his legs kicking at the mud for purchase, finding it, taking his weight, propelling him into a crouch on fingers and toes. He skittered backward like a dog, hissing at the pain instead of with it, then he slewed around and launched himself away, rising into a sloppy run, falling, getting up again, running. And all the time screaming.

Burl and Vic and the others followed like a pack of rabid dogs.

Jake angled toward his front-end loader, putting it between himself and the pack. The keys were inside the cab. If he could only get to them.

But Burl and Vic split, each one heading toward one end of the machine as if this was something they had rehearsed. On some level Jake knew that they were simply taking the shortest route for each of them, but it felt like a coordinated attack. Jake glanced up at the cab and then to each side.

He wasn’t going to make it.

If he got inside, would the reinforced safety glass keep them back?

Even if the glass held, the door didn’t lock from inside.

He began backing away from the machine. The trailer they were using as a temporary office was forty yards away. Jake spun around, deciding to make for it. If he could get inside, the doors had locks. There were desks he could push in front of the door to block it. The windows were tiny, too small for someone like Burl to climb in through.

All of that flashed through his brain as he took the first step toward the trailer. Burl lunged for him, actually jumping like an animal to try and grab him. Then suddenly Burl’s head snapped to one side and his leap turned into a twisted tumble that send him splatting down to the mud, where he slid to a twisted stop.

His face was gone.

Simply gone.

Jake stared at Burl, trying to understand this new mystery, this new insanity. Even his lizard brain didn’t know how to process this.

Then something pinged off the bucket of the front-end loader and went whizzing past his ear with a sound like an angry wasp.

There was a second ping. A third.

That’s when he heard the sounds.

Distant. Small. Hollow.

Pok-pok-pok.

He whirled and crouched, staring into the rain.

Someone was firing.

Cold hands suddenly grabbed him from behind and Jake was falling. He twisted violently around to see Vic right there, tearing at him with torn fingernails, snapping at him with cracked teeth.

Vic was tall, over six feet, and nearly two hundred pounds. Jake towered over him, though, standing six-eight and packing an extra hundred pounds of muscle and mass on his frame. With power born of fear and desperation, he swung a punch into Vic’s face that knocked the man five feet back. Teeth and blood flew. Vic hit the side of the bucket, spun, fell to his knees, and then was abruptly flung sideways as a fusillade of bullets tore into him, punching holes in thigh and hip and ribs and skull. Vic dropped and lay utterly still.

Jake wanted to stand and stare. He needed to take a moment to reset all of the dials in his head. However bullets pinged and whanged off the machine and behind him the other … things … were still coming. Jake cut them a single quick look and realized they were paying no heed to the bullets that pocked the mud around them. Or to the bullets that tore into their own flesh. Jake saw clothes puff up as rounds struck them. He saw chunks of bloody skin go flying into the rain.

It was insane.

It was like they didn’t care. Or couldn’t feel.

Or were …

His mind teetered on the edge of saying what he thought it was or might be.

Instead he turned and dove for cover as more bullets hammered into the yellow skin of the Caterpillar. The bucket was still low to the ground where he’d paused it when everything started turning to shit. Beneath the bucket was a trench cut by the scoop, and Jake wriggled into that. Big as he was, the trench was deep enough for him to get below ground level, but it was already half-filled with muddy water that was stingingly cold.

Dozens of bullets hit the front-end loader and went ricocheting off into the storm. Jake could hear men shouting.

Richie came splashing through the puddles, still moaning, still hungry, and then he was falling backward, bits of flesh and bone exploding from his chest, his throat, his face, his skull.

Then one of the girls fell with a big hole in her lower back. As soon as she hit the ground she began to crawl, as if the pain she had to be feeling didn’t mean a goddamn thing to her. She saw Jake and began crawling toward his hiding place. She made it halfway there before a bullet struck her in the side of the head and blew brain matter five feet across the mud.

Jake saw it all from his hole.

The shouts were louder now. Men calling to each other as they came running across the construction site. Men in white hazmat suits and combat boots. Men with rifles and belts hung with grenades.

Soldiers.

Jake frowned, unable to understand this. Why were the soldiers in hazmat suits like on TV? That was the stuff they wear when there’s some kind of toxic spill. Only this was a hurricane, not a spill. Or whatever they call a storm this bad this far inland. Supercell. Something like that. It wasn’t any toxic spill. At least not as far as Jake knew.

Unless …

He blinked rainwater out of his eyes. Suddenly a lot of things tumbled together into a single pattern. Ugly, but glued together by some kind of logic.

What if there was a toxic spill?

The radio had been crazy all day with weird shit. Something about a riot out at Doc Hartnup’s funeral home. Something else happening at the school.

Jake only caught bits and pieces of it because you can’t really listen to the radio while operating heavy equipment. Too much noise.

Now he wondered what he’d missed.

And he wondered what kind of trouble he was in.

He almost called out to the soldiers.

Almost.

It was not his lizard brain that made him hold his tongue. No, it was the civilized part of his brain. The part that believed that if things were this bad — if they were sending in soldiers in germ warfare gear and letting them kill people this randomly — then things were already in the shitter. Those soldiers never called out a warning. They never checked to see if Burl and the others needed help.

They’d simply opened fire.

“Oh, God,” he breathed. But he did it very, very quietly.

As the soldiers hunted down the last girl and Jake’s other friends, he sank down into the water until just his eyes and nose were out. He breathed as shallowly as he could, and he closed his eyes.

In order to try and stay alive, he did his level best to pretend to already be dead.

CHAPTER NINETY

Dez looked as if she wanted to either throw up or punch Sam Imura’s teeth out. Either way, Trout wanted to grab the moment and pull it out of the fire.

“Captain Imura,” he said firmly, “I hear what you’re saying, and as a newsman I appreciate the urgency of your story, but if this thing is already out, then why does it matter if I have a copy of Volker’s research? Go find Volker. He has all of it. Hell, he’s the science. Go waterboard him, I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you anything you want to know. Coming after me seems kind of a waste of—”

Sam’s eyes were cold. “Herman Volker is dead. He committed suicide.”

Trout bowed his head and slumped into a chair. “Christ. Why the fuck didn’t you say so? You assholes always have to drag everything out. Shit.”

“We just found out about it,” said Sam. “Until now he’s been MIA and you were the only known source of intel. Now do you understand why those drives are so important? They are the only known record of Volker’s work. We have plenty of research on Lucifer but no one has a clue about what Volker did when he modified the disease into Lucifer 113. Initial analysis of the infected indicate that the disease is radically different from the old Cold War version. We don’t know if we have the time necessary to deconstruct and analyze Volker’s version. Mr. Trout … where are the flash drives?”

Trout’s mouth felt as if it was filled with burned ashes and bile. In a strained whisper he said, “I gave them to my cameraman.”

“Who is he and where can we find him?”

“Gregory Weinman. Everyone calls him Goat. He’s the one who was taking my standups and streaming them to the Net.”

“Where?”

“He walked out of town just as the Guard were setting up the roadblocks. The last time I spoke with him — before you idiots began jamming all calls — he was at the Starbucks in Bordentown.”

Sam Imura staggered. He took two or three small, aimless steps and almost collapsed against the blackboard on the wall. He put his face in his hands and said, “Jesus save us all.”

“What is it?” snapped Dez. “What’s wrong?”

Boxer went over and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder. Moonshiner and Shortstop sat down hard on the chairs. Only Gypsy held her ground.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Dez.

“Wrong?” mused Gypsy. “What’s wrong is that we are all totally and completely fucked.”

“I don’t—”

“That’s where the outbreak is,” said Gypsy. “The Air Force dropped fuel-air bombs on the whole area. Bordentown is nothing but a cloud of hot ash.”

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

“How we doing, boy?” asked Homer Gibbon.

Goat hoisted a fake smile onto his face. “We’re getting some really great stuff here. I can’t wait to get this onto the Net.”

Homer pursed his lips. In the dark, Goat couldn’t see the blood smeared all over the man. What little there was made it look as if the man was painted in tar. But he stank. At first the car had been filled with the sheared-copper smell of fresh blood, but now it was turning sour as the cells thickened and died. It was like being inside a meat locker with the power off. It took great willpower and a fear of reprisal to keep from vomiting.

“You think they’ll watch it?” asked Homer, sounding a little insecure about it.

A sharp laugh escaped Goat before he could stop it.

“You think that’s funny, boy?” asked Homer in a tone that was abruptly menacing.

“No,” Goat said quickly. “Far from it. I’m pretty sure everyone in the world is going to watch these videos. I don’t think anyone is going to watch anything else.”

Homer looked at him for a long time. “You really think so?”

“Yeah,” said Goat with complete honesty, “I absolutely think so.”

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

“That is not a happy-looking man,” said Billy Trout.

He and Dez stood together watching Captain Sam Imura as he stood on the far end of the room having a mostly one-sided phone conversation. The news that Goat had the drives and that the Starbucks where he was waiting for Trout’s call had been destroyed had hit everyone very hard. Imura stepped aside to call it into his boss — the national security advisor.

Imura had looked pretty defeated at the start of that call, but as the seconds peeled off and fell away, the man’s shoulders slumped. Then Imura straightened and cut a sharp, appraising look at Trout.

“Uh oh,” said Dez.

“Yeah,” agreed Trout.

Imura came hurrying over, still holding the phone in the way people do when the line is still open. “Mr. Trout, do you still have the satellite phone Weinman gave you?”

Trout nodded and produced it.

“Is it charged?”

“Half-charged, but yeah.”

“He has it,” Imura said into the phone, listened, and added, “Good. We’ll try again in five minutes.”

He disconnected the call and considered Trout. “Listen, I guess it’ll come as no surprise to you that they’ve been jamming all communications from Stebbins County.”

“You don’t say,” murmured Trout drily.

“I just asked my boss to have all jamming stopped. Satellite interference, cell lines, the works.”

“Good,” said Dez, “and then maybe we can go around and close all the barn doors ’cause I’m pretty sure the horses have all run off.”

Imura gave her a few millimeters of a tight smile. “If there’s even the slightest chance that Weinman left the vicinity of the Bordentown Starbucks, then maybe we can reestablish contact.”

“His name’s Goat,” said Trout, “and he didn’t have a car. He walked across a field to get to the Starbucks. Or maybe hitchhiked.”

“Then there’s at least a small chance he hitchhiked again. If he’s as tech-savvy as you said, then maybe he realized that service was being jammed and he moved on to someplace outside of the interference zone.”

“Which he wouldn’t have had to do if you ass-clowns didn’t jam him in the first place,” snapped Dez. “If he and Billy’d been able to stay in touch you’d already have Volker’s notes.”

Imura turned to her. “Really, Officer Fox, you want to Monday-morning quarterback this now? Is that the best use of our time?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Fine, we fucked up. It’s hereby noted.”

Dez looked mildly embarrassed; an attitude that Trout found amusing. As he enjoyed having his scrotum remain attached, he declined to say so.

Imura looked at his watch. “The jamming should be down in a couple of minutes. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

Trout glanced from him to the other members of his team. “Who exactly are you guys? You said private contractors? That’s the PC phrase for mercenaries, isn’t it?”

“In a manner of speaking. We’re former U.S. military who do special jobs.”

“Like what?”

“Like classified stuff that I’m not going to talk about to a reporter.”

Dez sniffed. “I met some of your kind in ’Stan.”

Imura smiled. “The contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq were mostly Blackwater, who are, even by the somewhat loose standards of the mercenary community, total dickheads. Not as bad as Blue Diamond, but swimming at the edges of the same cesspool. Personally, I wouldn’t piss on any of them if they were on fire.”

“Don’t sugarcoat it, Captain,” said Trout.

“There are all kinds of contractors just like there are all kinds of reporters and all kinds of cops.”

“And what kind are you?” asked Dez sharply.

“The kind I can live with,” he said. He cocked his head to one side. “You know, Mr. Trout, I was given a pretty free hand for how I wanted to handle this. We could have done a hard infil of the school and taken you.”

“You could have tried,” growled Dez.

But Imura shook head. “I mean no disrespect when I say this, Officer, but if we wanted to play it that way we would have succeeded.”

“I’ve met plenty of spec-ops jocks and—”

“You’ve never met operators like us. I’m not saying this to blow my own horn but to give you a perspective check. You have every right to think of anyone in a military uniform as your enemy. I don’t blame you. However, if we were your enemies you would be dead, Officer Fox, and Mr. Trout would be having an even worse day than he’s already had. It was my choice on how to play this and I set you up to take a run at us outside so we could take you. From all accounts you are a formidable law officer, but we play a different kind of ball. Let’s be clear on that.”

“Okay, okay,” said Trout before Dez could get into gear with the kind of verbal counterattack that would probably end in fisticuffs, “you could have done it the Rambo way and instead you didn’t. Why waste time making that point?”

“Because,” said Imura, “if we can accept that killing you isn’t high on my list of priorities, then maybe we can all put our dicks away and start working together.”

Trout smiled thinly. “It’s a lovely speech, Captain, but if knowing Dez has taught me anything it’s that trust is earned.”

“Not killing you doesn’t earn trust?”

“It’s a good start,” said Trout. “Let’s see where it takes us.”

He lifted the satellite phone and punched Goat’s number.

The number rang.

And rang.

And kept on ringing until Trout felt his heart begin to sink. Then someone answered it.

“Billy!” cried Goat. “Oh my God, Billy—”

There was a snarl of a harsh voice, the sound of an open palm on flesh, a cry of pain, and then a different voice growled, “Who the fuck’s this?”

It took Trout a couple of stumbling moments to match this new voice to a recent memory and then to fit those awkward pieces into a puzzle shape that made only fractured sense. He felt his heart lurch in his chest.

He said, “Homer?”

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

Scott Blair closed his cell and wanted to scream.

Instead he made another call and got the director of the National Security Agency on the line. He explained about Goat Weinman having the flash drives.

“What do you want me to do?” asked the director.

“Hack his phone and email. He’s a reporter and he’s on the run. There’s every chance that he sent the data to himself as a way of keeping it safe. Find out.”

The director didn’t ask whether Blair had a warrant. That time had already passed.

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

“Why as I live and breathe, it’s Mr. Live From the Apocalypse his ownself,” said Homer. “Billy Trout, how do you do?”

Homer grinned into the phone as he spoke. Beside him, Goat cowered back, one hand pressed to the welt on his cheek where the killer had belted him when Goat answered the call.

“Homer?” repeated Billy Trout. “Is this really Homer Gibbon?”

“In the flesh. Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed your little speeches on the radio coupla hours ago. Really exciting stuff.”

“How … how…?”

“You gonna finish that sentence?”

“How are you with Goat? Is he okay? Did you hurt him? Christ, you’d better not have touched him, you sick fuck.”

“Hey, mind your manners,” warned Homer, “or I will do some particular damage to your friend.”

“No, don’t!”

“I ain’t done shit to him so far, but that could change right quick, so make sure you keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Yes, yes, okay. I’m sorry. I’m just concerned for my friend. May I speak with him, please?”

Homer pulled onto the shoulder, put his hand over the mouthpiece, and turned to Goat. “This thing have a speaker?”

“Yes,” said Goat and when Homer held out the device, he flicked the switch. Homer leaned close and very quietly said, “You don’t speak unless I give the nod.”

“Yes. No problem.”

“And if you say the wrong thing, you know what I’ll do to make you sorry about it.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Homer held the sat phone up between them. “We got this on speaker, so Mr. Goat can hear you, too.”

“Thank you,” said Trout. “Goat … you okay there, buddy?”

Goat looked for approval and got a nod. “I’m okay, Billy. He hasn’t hurt me.”

“Thank God. Can you tell me where you are?”

Homer shook his head.

“No,” said Goat. “I can’t do that.”

“Can you tell me what you’re doing?”

Homer thought about it, then nodded.

“Mr. Gibbon wants me to tell his side of the story. The whole story. About the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. You remember those from the trial, Billy?”

“Sure.”

“That was only part of the story. A small part.” Goat saw Homer give him a small nod of approval and decided to take that script and run with it. “There’s so much more to the story, Billy. I know you’d really appreciate it. It’s the greatest story anyone’s ever told. It’s so … deep. So big.”

Homer looked pleased, but Goat was afraid of overdoing it, so he closed with that.

“I … see,” said Trout. “Sounds like something I definitely want to hear.”

“You really do.” An idea occurred to Goat and he hoped Trout would be sharp enough to catch the ball and run with it. “It’s like you always told me, Billy. There are layers and layers to Homer Gibbon. No one really knows him. The stuff at the trial was all bullshit. No one ever asked him the right questions. No one ever really wanted to know what he saw and why he does what he does. It’s like people didn’t think the Red Mouth or the Black Eye were real. You always said there was more to the story. You always said that it was a crime that no one ever let Mr. Gibbon speak to the jury, speak from his heart, and tell the whole truth. You were right, Billy. Absolutely right.”

There was only a half beat before Trout said, “Nice to know you were paying attention, Goat. And I’m jealous that you’re there to get that story. Will we ever get to hear it?”

Goat waited for Homer to give another nod.

“That’s what we have planned. I have some incredible stuff already. Really amazing stuff. As soon as we get somewhere with Wi-Fi I’m going to upload it and blow everyone’s minds.”

“That’s great, that’s — ah, I’m so jealous, man. You’re going to do more than blow minds, Goat. You’re going to open minds.”

“I know.”

“Goat, make sure you preserve everything. That information is too valuable to lose. You should back it up.”

“I have it saved to my hard drive.”

“No … back it up on those flash drives,” said Trout, very clearly and precisely. “That’s how the best reporters preserve the most important information.”

Goat almost asked him what the hell he was talking about when he realized that Billy was spinning the game on him. Telling him something.

And he got it.

The flash drives. Important information.

“You’re absolutely right, Billy. I’ll make sure I protect that information.”

“Good,” said Trout, and the relief was there to be heard in his voice. “Mr. Gibbon?”

“Call me Homer,” said the killer.

“Thank you, that’s an honor, sir. Please call me Billy. I want to thank you for what you’re doing for Goat. This is the kind of story he’s always wanted. Something big, something that will do a lot of good.”

“That’s what this is, sure enough.”

“Is there any way I can be of assistance?”

Homer snorted. “Aren’t you stuck in that little school with a buncha kids?”

“I might be able to get out of here. I’d be happy to help Goat with this story. With his camerawork and me doing the interviews we can—”

“No thanks,” said Homer. “We got this covered. You have a good day now.”

He ended the call and pulled back onto the road, heading northwest.

Goat’s heart was hammering with painful insistence and he stared longingly at the satellite phone. His mind, however, was replaying Billy’s word.

Preserve the most important information.

He cleared his throat and made his voice sound normal. “Billy’s right,” he said. “I need to backup everything on flash drives.”

“What are they?” asked Homer.

Goat explained, then added, “I always carry some extras. It’s a reporter thing.”

He dug into his pocket and showed Volker’s drives to Homer.

“All the videos you been taken fit onto those little things?”

“Absolutely, and then we need to get it out to the world.”

“Wi-Fi, right?”

“Wi-Fi,” agreed Goat.

“Okeydokey,” said the killer. He stepped on the gas and the Escalade plowed through the storm winds, heading toward Pittsburgh.

Heading toward hope.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

Major General Zetter and his top aides met in the mobile command post parked three miles from the blast zone. The big vehicle rocked as winds buffeted it. Electronic workstations provided real-time intel from satellites and field observation posts, and one wall of the MCP was covered in a high-res satellite map of Stebbins and Fayette counties.

“Sir,” said one of his captains, “we’re clocking sustained winds of forty miles per hour with gusts up to seventy. Western Fayette has winds above fifty. We can’t keep the birds in the air.”

This had been a problem since the start of this campaign. Helicopters do not like high winds, and with storm gusts, high-tension wires, unlighted structures such as grain silos, cellular towers, and trees swaying in the wind, the helos had had a difficult night. Five were down with damage. Two were wrecked, with the loss of one complete crew and two other Guardsmen in the hospital.

Zetter coughed and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, found one and covered his mouth as the coughs continued. It was the ash from the firebombs. He needed some clean air and maybe a gallon of mouthwash.

“Sir,” his aide prompted gently. “Should I recall the birds?”

On the big satellite map there were hundreds of small red dots. People fleeing from the attack on Route 653 and the resulting bombs.

“Keep them flying,” he said. Another fit of coughing wracked him, shorter but intense.

“Sir, did you say—”

“I said keep them flying,” snapped Zetter, his face bright red from coughing.

The aide nodded and turned away to relay the order.

As Zetter dabbed at his mouth, aware of the eyes that were on him, listening to a couple of other officers coughing. They’d all been out there with him.

It made him remember the respiratory problems from people who’d inhaled the smoke after the collapse of the Towers. Some of those people got sick from what they’d sucked into their lungs. Some died. He fished for the condition caused by breathing in particulate matter. Pneumonitis? He thought that was it.

Zetter wondered if he was going to get sick from the smoke. He already had some mild emphysema from all those years he smoked. He didn’t smoke anymore, but it was damage done. No cancer, though, so he’d been lucky there, but his wind was for shit. A long flight of stairs could put him on his ass for ten minutes.

Now this.

The dust.

The stress.

The fear.

Another aide, who was hunched over a small desk speaking into a phone, raised his head and pointed to the western edge of the map. On it several larger dots were moving in opposition to the outer wave of fleeing people.

“General, the additional units have reached the Outbreak Zone. I have their commanding officer on the line.”

Zetter hauled himself out of the chair and lumbered over to the desk, snatched the phone and identified himself. “With whom am I speaking?”

“Sir,” said a woman’s voice, “this is Colonel Ruiz.”

“Give me a sit-rep, Colonel.”

“We are tracking a large number of individuals heading west through farmlands. Estimate four hundred plus. They appear to be civilians.”

“Colonel, have you been briefed on Lucifer?”

“I have, sir.”

“Are you able to determine if these people are infected?”

“No, sir. Though a large number of them appear to be injured. We are seeing torn clothing, what appear to be flash-burns, and—”

“Colonel, can you contain the civilians and examine them for bites? We need to make certain that—”

Before the colonel could answer, Zetter could hear sounds from her end of the line. Military personnel yelling to the oncoming wave of people. Zetter turned and looked at the satellite map and saw the outer edge of the wave of lights closing very fast on the line of larger dots — military vehicles and their crews. He heard the shouts turn to yells.

And then there was the rattle of gunfire.

A few sporadic shots at first.

Then sustained gunfire.

And screams.

Colonel Ruiz never came back on the line.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

Demolitions specialist Mike Chrusciel liked blowing things up. After getting caught once rigging cherry bombs to the tailpipe of his high school disciplinarian, Mike was given the first of what became a series of lectures. Half the lecture focused on not playing with dangerous items and the dangers to himself and others. Once during that half of the lecture Mike had made the mistake of saying “Yeah, blah, blah, blah” out loud. He spent the next month in detention and got his ass hammered flat at home. That was ninth grade.

The second half of the lecture took a different direction. It was filled with suggestions for how he could turn his “hobby” into something useful. The military. Nobody loves blowing things up more than the army. That was the gist. Not in those words, of course, but that’s the message Mike took away with him.

Occasionally there was a third part of the lecture. More of a warning, really. The only really likely alternative for someone like him was a different institution. One with bars.

After high school, and with no adult criminal record at all and his juvie offenses sealed, he rode an administrative recommendation from the school vice principal into the National Guard. During screenings and training it became clear to everyone that Mike Chrusciel liked to blow things up. And when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be a danger to his fellow Americans, they put him into the right classes and taught him everything he ever wanted to know about explosives, IEDs, mines, grenades, satchel charges, and all of those other wonderful toys. He discovered that his connection to explosives went beyond the simple pleasure of seeing things go bang—he had a real talent for it. And working in the field, being allowed to play with explosives, gradually erased the immature thrill seeker part of him in favor of a more focused and intellectual aspect. Bombs of various kinds became like puzzles. Selecting the right device for each situation, purpose, or goal. He’d earned another stripe in Afghanistan and there was already some talk about him going higher. There was talk about OCS and maybe a career in the army rather than a short hitch to keep out of jail.

In the world of military ordnance, Mike Chrusciel had found himself.

He never expected to be planting mines here on American soil. Not outside of a test range. But the orders from General Zetter had been crystal clear. The infected were breaking through the lines. There were several chokepoints, where the landscape and the presence of rivers and streams would funnel anyone on foot to routes of least resistance. He and his partner, Cyrus, were assigned to mine one of those routes. Two miles farther down the road, a checkpoint was being reinforced in case any infected got through.

Mike smiled at that thought.

Get through?

Not once he was done. No, sir.

The orders were to disable any infected. Killing them, Mike was told, was more difficult in that it required very specific damage to the brain and brain stem. Fair enough. He could rig the paths so that anything dumb or unlucky enough to step onto that path would be crippled in a hot second. That would allow Mike and his partner to finish them off with headshots, or they could be left for the roving patrols that were scheduled to check all of these hot spots.

He studied geodetic survey maps and then walked the landscape to make his own determinations about likely routes. The infected were supposed to be as close to brain dead as made no difference. Aggressive but stupid, that’s how one of the guys described them. Mike had to make some important decisions and he took a little extra time to do it, fighting the clock to get it all right.

Mike concentrated on blast mines that would be triggered by someone stepping on them. He set the tension so that anyone over sixty pounds would trigger it. A deer’s footstep wasn’t heavy enough because its weight was distributed between four legs. But a human? When a person stepped on a blast mine, the device’s charge detonated, creating a blast shock wave composed of very hot gases traveling at extremely high velocity. When the blast wave hits breaks the ground surface, it results in a massive compression force that blows a victim’s foot off.

Infected or not, they were going down.

In areas where a larger group might pass, Mike planted the bigger and heavier fragmentation mines. These were crammed with several kilograms of shrapnel. A real party pleaser.

And for narrow areas where a single infected might pursue one of the patrolling soldiers, Mike positioned more than a dozen M86 Pursuit Deterrent Munitions. These PDMS were small U.S. antipersonnel mines generally used by Special Forces to deter pursuit. In function they were like small hand grenades, and each had a pin and fly-off lever. Once the pin is pulled and the lever has been ejected, a timer starts and after twenty-five seconds it launches seven tripwires with a maximum range of six meters. That creates a spiderweb effect; anyone pursuing the user trips a wire that activates the mine and a liquid propellant charge launches the mine a couple of meters into the air. The fragmentation warhead detonates, breaking the mine into six hundred flesh-rending fragments. Normally these devices deactivated themselves after a few hours, but Mike disabled the timers. To warn other soldiers, however, he tied plastic tags to tree branches. Yellow for land mines, orange for devices mounted in the trees. The tags had tiny sensors that would alert troops to their presence. Modern warfare, baby. Mike loved it.

Elsewhere, in spots where the infected were closing in on fields, Mike heard that planes were going to be dropping cluster bombs. Part of the GATOR land mine system. The Navy would drop five-hundred-pound CBU-78/Bs and the Air Force would lay down some thousand-pound CBU-89/Bs. Very heavy shit, and Mike wished he could be there to see it. Not the drop … he wanted to see what happened when a bunch of infected tried waltzing across a field of those puppies.

Ka-boom.

Once Mike had everything just so, he carefully retreated to where his partner waited. The guy they paired him with was a moonfaced kid from Monroeville named Cyrus who never said two words when no words would do. Mike knew chattier rocks. But that was okay. It was better when Cyrus said nothing because when he did say something it was dumb shit like, “Look, a deer.” Like it was a thing of wonder.

A deer.

In the woods?

How amazing.

This was the ass-end of Pennsylvania, deep in farm country, and both Stebbins and Fayette counties overlapped with state forests. Deer were as thick as mosquitoes out here, and just as annoying.

Big brown rats, in Mike’s view.

In the dark, though, and with all this rain, deer were a real problem. You could hear them and not know what was moving in the woods. You could see them and not know what they were, because they blended in so well, and moved so quietly. And they could just as easily trip a mine as one of the infected.

Mike explained this to Cyrus, who didn’t so much nod or say he understood as simply look marginally less vacant for a moment.

“We need an elevated shooting position,” suggested Mike. “That way if we see any deer coming along the path we can put them down, keep the network of devices intact. Okay?”

Cyrus made a grunting sound that Mike took as assent.

He put Cyrus in the crotch of an elm. For all his apparent vacuity, the kid could climb like a monkey. He was also a good shot, a safe weapons-handler. He wasn’t rewarding company but Mike didn’t expect to take any friendly fire.

With Cyrus in place, Mike drifted down a game trail, stepping around or over tripwires, double-checking that everything was just so.

Then he froze.

It wasn’t exactly that Mike heard or saw anything, but instead had a sense that something moved out there in the storm-filled, shadowy woods. He turned very slowly, surveying the landscape. The boughs of the trees swayed like the arms of drunks fighting for balance. Rain fell between the trees, gathered into fat dollops, and dropped from branches and leaves. Winds howled through the forest at ground level, slapping the bushes and shrubs this way and that.

There was so much movement that Mike couldn’t tell if there was nothing out there or an entire herd of deer.

Command had warned of packs of infected crossing farm fields after the bombs in Bordentown, but so far Mike hadn’t seen a single one of them. He hard the chatter on the radio and knew that there were some real problems out there, but it all seemed to be happening elsewhere. Sure as hell not here. So far the most they’d seen was a red fox, a bunch of squirrels, and not much of anything else.

The forest kept moving, but as far as Mike could tell it was just Superstorm Zelda being a total bitch.

He found his own tree and climbed up onto the lowest limb, relieved to have the dense canopy of leaves shield him from the heaviest of the rain.

And then he saw something that was neither wind nor squirrel.

The leaves trembled on the far side of a slope, and Mike put his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the center of a wall of rustling shrubs. If it was a deer, he was going to shoot its Bambi-ass before it could trip one of the mines.

Then the shrubs parted and something stepped through.

It wasn’t a deer.

It wasn’t a fleeing civilian.

It was a soldier.

It was a soldier, in fact, that Mike knew. It was a good friend of his.

“Teddy?”

Sergeant Teddy Polk staggered out of the dense line of shrubs and nearly lost his footing at the top of the rise. His white hazmat suit was covered in mud and torn in several places, the hood hanging down behind his back. Polk had no rifle and he walked uncertainly, weakly, with one hand clamped to his left bicep. Polk’s foot came down wrong and he pitched forward, staggering down the slope toward the pressure mine hidden halfway down.

“Teddy! No!” bellowed Mike as he dropped from the tree and began to run toward his friend. He knew the pattern of his traps; Teddy was walking right toward a blast mine.

“Stop!” screamed Mike. “For God’s sake, Teddy, freeze. Don’t move. Land mines!”

Teddy stopped. He looked around but his face was clouded by pain and confusion. He blinked and his mouth worked for a moment, trying to form a word.

“M-Mike?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Shit, man, don’t move. There’s a mine five feet in front of you. Stay right there. Let me come to you.”

Teddy Polk nodded, but it was a vague movement and Mike couldn’t be sure if his friend really heard him.

“Stay right there, okay, buddy? Don’t move.”

Teddy swayed like a drunken man, but he didn’t take another step.

Mike began creeping through the deadly landscape he’d created. He knew where he’d planted everything, and the yellow and orange tags were there, the colors glowing with luminescent paint even in the darkness, and pulsing when the lightning flashed. Mike was almost to the safe zone when he heard a sound behind him, and he pivoted, expecting to see that idiot Cyrus.

It wasn’t.

A woman stood directly behind him.

Middle-aged, dressed in jeans and a sweater covered in flower appliqués and blood. A woman with ragged bite marks on her cheeks and eyebrows. Black blood dribbled from between her lips.

“Shit!” cried Mike as he reached for his side arm.

The woman spit right into his face. Into his eyes and mouth. A big, wet gob of black blood.

Mike screamed and backpedaled, dropping the gun that was halfway out of its holster. The black muck was as thick as molasses and it tasted like copper and bile. He gagged, but he could feel it in his mouth. Itching. Burning. He pawed it out of his eyes as he reeled. He could see, but only a smeared swatch of the world. The woman hissed and reached for him, but Mike backhanded her away.

Then Teddy Polk caught him, kept him from falling.

Teddy called his name.

Except that wasn’t what Teddy said.

It wasn’t his name. It was just a meaningless moan. Not his name, not even a word.

A moan.

Like the sound the woman made.

Mike screamed.

He tore free from Teddy Polk and shoved his friend — or whatever this thing now was — and watched the wounded soldier stumble backward. Two steps. Three.

And Teddy’s foot came down on a pressure mine.

Mike tried to run.

He really tried.

He pivoted in the mud, spun the woman behind him — trying to put her between his body and the blast — and Mike bolted for the steep upslope that was free of mines. He got four good steps away from Teddy before the blast.

The shockwave picked him up and punched him hard into the slope. He felt something hit him in the lower back. He felt it stab him.

Stab all the way through him.

He half-lay, half-stood against the sharp canted slope, his chin resting on the knurled curve of an exposed tree root, his arms dangling at his sides. Thunder echoed in his ears and he could feel warmth running in lines down the insides of his clothes, front and back. It was the only warmth he could feel; everything else was strangely cold.

Off somewhere to the north he could hear someone call his name.

Was it Cyrus?

Was it his mother?

He couldn’t tell. His eardrums were ruptured and his head hurt so badly he couldn’t think.

He didn’t even remember pushing off from the slope. It happened somehow and now he stood on the path, looking down at the red things that had been Teddy and the woman with the sweater. They had been right there when the mine exploded, and it had exploded them. Torn them from humanity into — what? Parts? Pieces?

Mike didn’t like putting the right word to it.

Teddy had no legs at all. He couldn’t even see the pieces of them.

His back hurt.

And his stomach.

He touched the front of his hazmat suit and tried to understand what he was touching. His eyes stung from the black blood the woman had spat at him. The itching in his mouth and throat was really bad.

But Mike wasn’t sure if he cared about that or if he was just aware of it.

He ran his fingers over his stomach, and over the thing that stood straight out from the white material of the hazmat suit. When he raised his fingers he saw that they were smeared with red.

Yeah, he thought. That’s right.

He knew on some detached level that he was hurt. Maybe hurt bad.

He heard his name again. It floated to him on the wind.

Definitely not his mother.

Mike took a few small steps away from the red carnage on the ground. The rain jabbed at the skin of his face. It washed more of the black goo from his eyes.

After a while, Mike looked down at his stomach. Just to see.

It took him a long time to understand what he was seeing, to construct an explanation for the long, slender white thing that seemed to be growing out of him. It was jagged and heavy.

Like polished ivory.

Except that it wasn’t ivory.

He knew what it was.

He knew where it had come from.

The woman’s legs had been totally blown away.

But not all of the parts were lost. Mike tried a word, one he thought made sense of this.

“Femur,” he said. He heard how rational his voice sounded. That was okay.

The itching in his mouth was now deeper. Inside his nose, behind his sinuses, down in his stomach. His lungs.

Itching.

Hurting.

Aching.

Mike felt something moving on his lips. Drops of blood. He touched them, looked at them. Red. Sure. But threaded through the red were lines of black. And inside the black were twisting little white things.

He said the only word that really mattered. The word that made a statement about this whole farce, from the time his unit was rolled out until now. And maybe it was a statement about how this thing would continue to unfold.

He said, “Fuck.”

He heard Cyrus call his name, and hearing the voice provoked two immediate and intense reactions in him.

The first was that he wanted Cyrus to find him. To get him the hell out of here. To get him to an aid station because, fuck it, he had a piece of thigh bone shoved all the way through his body. Shit. Shit. Shit.

The other reaction was totally different, totally alien, totally terrifying.

When he heard his partner’s voice it made him so goddamn hungry.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Oh God, he thought.

He could hear Cyrus coming, crashing through the wet brush, circling wide around the area marked by the yellow and orange tags. Coming close, coming fast. Coming soon.

Mike Chrusciel tried to yell, to warn his partner, to tell him to get the fuck out of here. But his voice was barely his anymore. It was thick, filled with wrongness, and his warning cry sounded more like the moan of someone in pain.

But not physical pain. Not thigh bone through the stomach pain.

No, it was a different kind of pain.

The pain of a terrible, bottomless hunger.

Cyrus would be here in a few seconds. He’d come running up to help. And then what?

The officers had been pretty damn graphic in the briefings. They pulled no punches when they explained what happened to the infected.

People who were like him.

Jesus.

As Cyrus came running, calling Mike’s name, Mike turned and used the last little bit of him that was his left to own. He made his legs move. It was just a few steps.

He heard Cyrus yell, “No!”

Then Mike stepped onto one of the mines.

He loved explosions. Always had. They made him feel powerful. They always comforted him.

Take me home, he thought as he raised his foot, releasing the trigger.

He rode the blast all the way out of the world.

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

“Put something on it,” screamed the man.

“I’m trying,” his wife yelled back.

In the backseat the baby was crying. The woman knelt on her seat and tried to cram a folded baby blanket against the hole in her husband’s shoulder. It was not a torrent, there was no artery there, but it pulsed with his heartbeat, and his heart was hammering. His whole right side was slick with red.

“I don’t have anything to tie it with,” she said, trying to hold it in place with one hand as she tried to unbuckled her belt with the other.

“How bad is it?” he demanded in a terrified voice.

“It’s not bad, it’s not bad,” she said, knowing it was a lie.

“Did you see that? That cop just fucking bit me.”

“I know, I know. He must have been…”

She let that go because she didn’t know what the cop could have been. The radio was saying wild things, and the whole world behind them seemed to be on fire.

“We need to find a hospital.”

“No,” he barked. “No way. Keep the pressure on. I’ll be okay.”

“But you’re bleeding!”

“No way I’m stopping anywhere near here. Everyone’s nuts around here.”

She worked the belt off and managed to cinch it around his arm.

“Not too tight,” he cautioned, feeling a little calmer, a little more in control as the miles fell away behind him.

The baby was crying so loud that they both had to shout.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m good. See to Lucy. I’ll be fine.”

“We need to stop.”

But he shook his head. “No way. No damn way.”

The car shot down the road and vanished into the storm. They crossed the state line into West Virginia at nearly eighty miles an hour.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

Rob Meyer and his friends sat around a small foldout table in the singlewide trailer used as a greenroom for the performers on the fairground. None of them were in armor, having shucked the heavy chain and plate mail hours ago, after the pig roast that ended each day of swordplay, bawdy songs, medieval crafts, heavy drinking, and choreographed jousting. Since most of the events were under tents, the show had gone on yesterday — although in abbreviated form. The guys were all in sweats and T-shirts, their hair and beards glistening from rainwater. Rob had gone around the camp, banging on trailer doors, rousing the staff, telling them what was going on.

Some of them already knew. Night owls who’d been glued to their portable TVs or laptops since last night, watching storm-soaked reporters do standups outside of the Stebbins County line. Others had slept through it, dropping off to exhausted sleep after shucking their weapons and armor.

Now everyone was watching. Some there in the greenroom, others in their own trailers. No one was sleeping anymore.

Not on the fairgrounds, and probably not anywhere.

“Is this shit real?” asked one of the roustabouts. It was the sixth or seventh time he’d asked the same question.

“It’s real,” said Rob.

“Yeah, okay, but what is it?”

“It’s a riot,” said one of the grooms.

“I don’t think so,” said Rob. Before the groom could ask him to explain, the CBS affiliate out of Pittsburgh cut in with breaking news. They managed to get one of their news trucks close to a section of Route 653 in Fayette County. The reporter stood in the rain and shouted impossible things. Behind the reporter something was burning. Police vehicles whipped red and blue lights through the night.

“This is a scene of total chaos,” said the reporter. “You can see the fires that are still burning. Witnesses claim that military aircraft dropped bombs on the western edge of Bordentown. We can’t get any closer than two miles, but even from here the heat is incredible. An unnamed source in Washington says that these measures are being taken to prevent an outbreak of an as-yet unknown disease. This source claims that the disease is highly contagious and causes anyone who becomes infected to act in a violent and irrational way. Local police departments throughout the region, including many in northwestern Maryland, are reporting a shocking increase in violent crimes.”

Behind the reporter a man and woman, both bleeding from several wounds, were shoving their children into their car. The children were screaming, and the woman clutched a small, limp child to her breast. The husband slammed the doors and hit the gas so hard the rear tires showered a dozen people with mud. A moment later there was a heavy crunch and then the reporter was running with the cameraman following. On the road a woman in a waitress uniform lay sprawled in the road as the taillights of the car dwindled in the rain.

“Are you seeing this?” cried the reporter. “That car just ran over a woman.”

“Is this shit real?” asked the roustabout again.

“It’s real,” said Rob.

“This is crazy,” said one of the jousters. “That’s close. That’s like fifteen miles from here.”

“I know,” Rob said and cast a troubled eye toward the door.

The groom said, “It doesn’t make any sense. What kind of virus makes people do this kind of thing?”

“Maybe it’s a—” but that was as far as Rob got. There was a series of loud pops and they all whirled toward the door. “What the hell?”

There was another wave of them. Sharper now, closer.

“Someone’s shooting.”

But it was more than that. Beneath and between the shots, wrapped inside the fist of the storm, there were screams.

Suddenly the whole bunch of them were scrambling up from the table and crowding through the door into the rainy darkness.

The shots were louder but sporadic. A handgun, thought Rob. Not a rifle. Not automatic gunfire.

They peered through the rain, trying to orient themselves.

“There!” cried the groom, pointing down the long, wide avenue of the jousting field. The colored banners whipped and popped in the gusting wind. The field was turning into a muddy lake. On the far side of the field the horses neighed and whinnied with anxiety.

Rob took a few tentative steps onto the field and for a few seconds he couldn’t see anything.

Then there were three more shots. Three muzzle flashes that created a brief strobe-effect that revealed struggling, staggering figures. The screams came from there, and Rob’s mouth opened in horror as he saw staff members from the fair fighting with dozens of people. Strangers. Someone was firing, but there was only one last hollow crack and the gun fell silent.

The screams increased.

Some of the men — the groom, the roustabout, and a few others — immediately began running toward the melee. They all had friends there.

But Rob caught the arm of the jouster.

“No,” he said urgently. “There’s too many.”

“Christ, we have to do something…”

“I know. Come on.”

Rob dragged him toward the prop shed, which was bolted to the side of the greenroom trailer. Rob fished the key from his pocket, jammed it into the padlock, threw the lock and chain into the mud, and yanked the doors open. With only a quick worried glance at the jouster, Rob began pulling items from the shed. He pressed a broadsword into the jouster’s hands and then, almost as an afterthought, pulled a rondache shield from the rack and handed it to him.

“The fuck, man,” growled the jouster, holding up the sword, “it’s not even sharp.”

“Yeah, but it’s fucking heavy.” He grabbed his own long-sword — an exquisite replica of the ninth-century Viking Sæbø sword — and another of the round shields. Then he and the jouster turned and began running.

Some of the strangers were sprinting or staggering across the field toward them. They howled like animals. Their bodies were pale and wrong, and some of them had terrible wounds on their faces and arms and throats.

“Jesus Christ!” cried the jouster as two of them closed on him, racing forward with waxy white fingers.

The jouster was frozen in shock and indecision, so Rob shouldered him out of the way. He smashed one of the strangers in the face with the shield and struck the other one across the face with the flat of his sword.

The blows were heavy, backed by a lot of muscle and mass, powered by fear and a surge of adrenaline. The strangers staggered, slipped in the mud, and fell.

And then they got back up again.

Rob blinked in confusion.

The strangers snarled, revealing teeth that were smeared with blood so dark it was almost black. Then they launched themselves at him.

Once more Rob swung the rondache at one of the strangers. The shield was made of leather-covered wood with plates of metal studded with nails. Although the swords were unsharpened, the shields had to be fully functional or the performers would be crippled if they failed to block. Rob drove the metal edge of the rondache into the biting mouth of the closest attacker, and suddenly black blood and pieces of teeth filled the air. The man went down, but he writhed in the mud, trying to get back to his feet. Rob pivoted and brought his sword around in an overhand cut that packed muscle and gravity into the blow. Even without a sharpened edge, the second man’s head burst apart, showering Rob and the jouster with brain matter and more of the black blood.

They reeled back, spitting out the blood, gagging at the horror of what had just happened.

Then they heard feet slopping in the mud and they turned to see a dozen of the strangers running toward them.

Rob and the jouster exchanged a brief look.

For years they’d played the roles of warriors — swordsmen and knights, Viking raiders, Roman soldiers, even pirates. They’d each fought in thousands of duels, and on their off days they fenced with their peers. They were superb swordsmen and each of them held weapons with which their hands and reflexes and minds were perfectly attuned.

So despite the absolute madness and unreality of this moment, deep in the hearts of each of them some ancient voice cried out a challenge. A warrior’s call to arms. A bellow that would not have been out of place on the medieval battlefields of feudal Europe. As they yelled, their mouths began to curl into fierce smiles as if remembering those ancient days of bloodshed and glory.

With swords in hand, thy rushed forward to meet the charge, hacking and smashing.

The crowd of zombies swept over them in seconds.

But oh, how glorious those seconds were.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

Dez said, “What in the big green fuck was that all about?”

“Goat has the drives and I just told him that he needs to upload the contents and get them out.”

“I didn’t hear that,” said Dez.

“I did,” said Sam Imura. “And it was mighty damn clever. You think your friend understood what you were saying?”

“Positive.”

“Good.” He took the phone from Trout and removed the cable he’d jammed into it as soon as he realized who was on the other end of the call. The cable was plugged into a small computer strapped to Imura’s forearm, and the captain spent a few seconds tapping keys.

“What’s that?” asked Dez. “You running a trace?”

“Trying to. We already pinged the satellite Goat used earlier when he broadcast Billy’s messages from here. And…” His voice trailed off as he read the display. Then he snapped his fingers and one of his people hurried over with a different sat phone connected to a portable battery pack. Sam snatched the phone and made a call, which was answered immediately. “Sir … we may have caught a break. Goat Weinman is still alive and we’re reasonably sure he has the flash drives in his possession. The call was too short to get an exact fix on him. He’s in Pennsylvania, closing in on the suburbs of Pittsburgh. We need a team monitoring the frequency of his sat phone, and we need people watching the Net. Goat is going to upload videos of Homer Gibbon. Interviews. They should be large files, which means fairly long upload times. Once the first is up we need to capture his computer signature and backtrack him. He may try to upload the Volker files at the same time, so we have to put together a pattern search that includes as many keywords as we think might be in the Volker files. I suggest the Latin names of the parasites. They’re not likely to be in any other uploads tonight. Search on those and then feed that to the ground forces. We’ll need all local and state police in on that, too.” Sam listened for a few seconds, and then said, “No, sir, I don’t think that’s an option. The storm’s getting worse. There’s no way a chopper’s going up in this, which means that my team is too far away. I’m handing the football back to you.” He listened again. “That’s not how I see it, Scott. I do have my priorities straight. I’m not in a position to be of use in the manhunt, but there are other fights worth fighting.”

Trout thought he heard Blair yelling as Sam ended the call. The captain handed the sat phone back to his soldier.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve actually been a big help.”

“If it works out,” said Trout.

“Sure, if it works out.”

“Now what?” asked Dez bitterly. “You and your goon squad waltz off and leave us ass-deep in the alligator swamp?”

Sam smiled. He had a lot of very white teeth. “Actually, Officer Fox, I was rather hoping that I could help you get a few hundred kids the hell out of this particular ring of hell.”

Dez and Trout stared at him.

“What?” they asked in unison.

“You said that you wanted to load the buses and take the kids somewhere safe? Well, if you could use five very well-armed bodyguards, consider us part of your team.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

Jake DeGroot realized that he couldn’t hide in a wet hole all night.

They might find him.

The soldiers. And the …

He had no word for the other things. Things like the girls. Like his friends. Like Burl.

Just because they hadn’t found him so far didn’t meant they wouldn’t.

Or couldn’t.

He had no real idea what they could or couldn’t do.

He had to move. To get out of the hole.

Before that.

And before he froze to death.

Jake knew that it wasn’t really cold enough for that, but the water was cold enough to numb him. He remembered seeing something about hypothermia on an old episode of Survivorman. His teeth chattered constantly, shivers swept over him in waves, and he didn’t like the way his heart was beating. No, he didn’t like that one bit. He was a big man, and the last thing he needed now was a heart attack. Or slow feet because his nerves were in some kind of shock.

But leaving the pit … That was so scary. It made his balls want to climb up inside his body. It made him want to cry. Or scream.

Or go to sleep.

That was the other problem.

Between working hard all day yesterday and last night, and then lying here for hours in the cold, he was getting weirdly drowsy. He kept nodding off and then jerking awake when his face fell into the water.

“Got to get out of here.”

He didn’t know he was going to say it out loud until he’d said it. His voice sounded ridiculously loud and very strange. There was a sharp note of panic in his voice. A whine that was almost a sob.

He didn’t like that, either.

“I’m losing my shit here,” he told himself, trying to make his voice sound normal and reasonable. It didn’t.

The rain was heavy, relentless. The ditch was so completely filled that the whole area was becoming a small lake.

“You’re going to drown here, you dumb fuck.”

There was anger in his voice now. That was better.

Better.

Even so it took Jake another three minutes to will his right arm to rise out of the water. Not because it was so numb with cold — which it was — but because he was numb with terror. There was no light except what flashed across the sky, and all that showed him was water, mud, and the bodies left behind by the soldiers.

Burl.

“Move, goddamn it. Move, move, move, move.”

His right arm came up slowly, rising to the surface, then above it, and finally out toward the mud beyond the ditch. The rain immediately washed the mud from his hand, and when the next lightning flashed he was horrified to see how pale he was. Blue-white. Corpselike.

Like one of them.

“It’s the cold, asshole,” he told himself. “It’s just the cold.”

He reached for higher ground at the edge of the pit, but his fingers sank into the mud and found nothing to hold. He tried again and did nothing more than splash and stir the water in which he lay.

“No,” he said, and that note of panic was back in his voice, stronger and sharper than before. Jake tried it with both hands. Nothing. He tried to kick against the near edge of the ditch, but his feet sank to the ankles. It took real effort to pull his feet out again. The right one came first, plopping free of the mud, but as he pulled the left one out he felt his shoe slide over the bulb of his heel.

Then he heard the sound.

Off to his right, on the other side of Big Bird, his yellow front-end loader.

It was a splash, but it was too heavy to be rainwater.

He froze and listened.

Another splash.

And another.

Each one just a little louder and more distinct than the last. Coming closer to where he wallowed in the mud.

“Oh, Jesus…”

At the sound of his voice the sounds of splashing paused for one moment and then began again. Not faster, but faster. Coming around the end of Big Bird. Coming in his direction.

He heard the other sound then.

The moan.

Jake almost screamed, knowing it for what it was.

One of them.

Stay or go, stay or go? He was trapped inside a bubble of indecision for a terrible long moment. Then the splashes got even louder, and suddenly Jake was moving. His whole body thrashed and twisted like a beached dolphin. He pawed at the mud and kicked and wormed his way up the edge of the pit.

Closer and closer. The moan louder. A single voice raised in a plaintive cry.

Jake was halfway out of the pit when he saw it.

It was a man. A stranger. Dressed in a business suit, jacket torn, tie askew to expose a ravaged throat.

For an awful moment their eyes met. The man in the mud and the thing in the rain. Then with a cry like a wild animal, the creature rushed at him, hands outstretched. Jake screamed and tried to scramble away, got halfway to his feet, and then it was on him, slamming into him, knocking them both down so they slid back into the muddy pit under the front-end loader. It clawed at Jake, trying to grab him, trying to pull him toward teeth that snapped and clacked.

Jake punched it, hitting the infected man in the face, in the throat, in the chest, but it was hard to find the balance and resistance to throw a solid punch. Jake was six-eight and more than three hundred pounds and this man couldn’t have been more than two hundred, but in the mud and water they were evenly matched.

Except that the thing did not react to any of Jake’s punches. Jake felt cartilage collapse beneath his knuckles as he hammered at its nose and throat. He felt bones crack in the face and temple and ribs. And he felt pain explode in his fingers and knuckles and wrists as the impacts took their toll while the struggle reawakened shocked nerve endings.

But the thing kept fighting as if pain was not even connected to its existence.

And maybe it wasn’t.

This thing was like Burl and those girls. It couldn’t have been alive. Not with the injuries it had. And yet it was fighting. It was a monster.

A monster.

He rammed his forearm under its chin and pressed the damned thing down into the mud. Inch by inch he pulled himself atop until finally he straddled it, pinning its arms down, battering its head deeper and deeper into the mud.

“Die you motherfucker!” he shouted, then choked on spit and snot and mud.

Jake kept shoving it down, using his massive body to try and smother it, bury it. Mud filled its mouth. The bones of its throat crumbled to nothing. And yet … those hands kept flailing beneath Jake’s shins. Buried in mud and drowned, battered to a wreck, it kept flailing.

Jake sobbed with helpless terror. He fought a thing that could not be whipped and his own understanding of the world began warping at the edges, pieces flying off it until everything seemed distorted and surreal.

Something inside Jake’s head broke.

Not a bone, not anything physical.

Something much deeper.

Something in his mind that was stretched to its farthest limit could not stretch any further and it snapped.

The blackness became blacker still as his eyes filled with dark poppies that blossomed like fireworks. He heard a weird tearing sound in his ears and an animal growl that he could feel coming from his own throat. The growl turned into a roar as Jake reared back and tore the dead thing out of the mud, then grabbed its chin and a fistful of hair and with more raw power than he had ever put into a single action ever in his life, he wrenched the head around. Bones exploded inside the savaged throat and still Jake turned. The body stopped struggling, and still Jake turned. His mind began falling into a dark, red well and still Jake turned.

And then he was pitching sideways, all resistance gone, the hair and chin locked inside his hands, but the creature’s torso flopping the other way.

Jake plunged into the waters, still holding the head.

He lay there for a moment and in that moment he heard, saw, felt, and tasted nothing. There was nothing. Only a vast blackness.

Then …

Water seeped past the spasm in his throat and he inhaled it.

With a wracking, aching, gargling cry he came awake again. Lightning flashed and its reflection lit the underside of the front-end loader’s bucket. Jake saw what he held in his hands and with a choking cry of disgust he flung it away, and then he was scrambling again, thrashing his way out of the pit, away from the headless thing, away from the reality of what he’d just done.

The screams that made it through the coughs were high and shrill and inhuman.

He got sloppily to his knees and tried to run, but gravity and balance were at war and all he could manage was a sloppy lope on all fours. He fell, got up, fell again, and finally managed to get to his feet, and there he stood, wide-legged, wide-armed, letting the rain assault him as he screamed.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

“Where the hell is General Zetter?” thundered the president.

General Burroughs had a phone to his ear, but he said, “There’s no technical problem, Mr. President. We pinged the lines and everything’s working. However no one is picking up.”

“Get some-damn-body on the phone,” the president insisted. “I want to know what the hell is happening.”

Aides scrambled to call secondary contacts.

“Sir—sir—” yelled one. “I have one of the helicopter pilots on the line. Lieutenant Mills. Putting the call on the speaker.”

“… ah, Christ this hurts … Jesus…”

“Lieutenant Mills,” said the president loudly, “this is the president. I need you to give me a sit rep.”

“Sir? Sir…?”

The pilot’s voice was filled with panic and pain.

“Listen to me, son,” said the president, “I need you to take a breath and tell me what is happening. Can you do that?”

They heard the man take a long, hissing inhalation. Then in a voice that was a fraction steadier, the pilot said, “It’s … it’s all falling apart.”

“Are you injured, son? Can you tell me that much?”

“The bites … damn, you never think they could hurt this bad.”

The president closed his eyes. “Son … do you know what happened to General Zetter?”

There was a very long pause filled only with rapid breathing that was close to hyperventilation. Then in a substantially weaker voice, the pilot said, “He wasn’t bitten. I’m sure about that. None of them were.”

“Who wasn’t bitten?”

“The general. Everyone in the command truck. I was with them. I was on the ground by then. We weren’t anywhere near the fighting. Nobody was bitten. But … but … oh God. We thought he was sick, you know? From the dust cloud after we dropped the fuel-air bombs. We thought it was just from breathing the ash. But, damn it, nobody was bit. Not until … not until it all went to shit. General Zetter, Captain Rice. All of them. They went apeshit. Ah, jeez … I think they clipped the artery. The tourniquet’s not doing shit. Oh God, oh God.”

“Where is General Zetter?” asked the president.

But there was no answer.

None at all.

Which was too much answer for everyone in the Situation Room.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

Billy Trout was no damn use at all to anyone. He knew it and everyone else knew it. Too much of him was bruised or strained, which meant he couldn’t drag bodies — and body parts — out of the buses, and he couldn’t work the janitor’s power-hose to wash away the black blood. It was gruesome work and he was not sorry that he couldn’t help.

Instead he set up his camera and began filming it. That and everything else.

With the jamming off, he put together a new field report, explaining the facts as he knew it, with many of the blanks filled in by Sam Imura.

It surprised Trout how forthcoming Sam was, and he pulled him aside for a moment to ask about that. They stood by a window that looked down on the parking lot and the rows of big yellow school buses.

“I’ve interviewed a lot of cops, soldiers, and federal types in the past,” Trout said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever had one actually spill the goods without either going off the record or prosecuting a personal agenda. In a nutshell, what gives?”

Sam shook his head. “I come from a long line of realists. My dad’s one. He’s a cop in California, in a small town out near Yosemite. He was never the kind to pad the truth or get behind an ‘official’ story. Dad believes that the truth is the truth.”

“No one I ever met in Washington agrees.”

“They can’t,” said Sam. “They’re politicians, and politics is about leverage, not about the truth. Not sure I ever heard a politician ever give a straight answer to anything. Everything’s agenda-based with them.”

“Okay, but you work for a bureaucrat.”

“Sure, but Scott Blair’s a lot like my dad. He’s not very well liked in D.C. because he always wants to cut to the bottom line.”

“He’s the one who wanted the president to bomb us back to the Stone Age?”

Sam met his eyes and nodded. “Yes, he was.”

“Nice.”

“Tell me something, Billy. Considering what’s happened and how things might be if POTUS followed Scott’s recommendation … do you think he made a bad call? Or do you think the president was right to cave and send the bombers back to the barn?”

“That’s unfair. You’re asking me to say whether it’s right or wrong to kill six hundred kids.”

“Take fairness out of the equation. Look at it for exactly what it is, a problem of survival. Not of a few, but survival of the species. Take a step back and look at the real problem, the big picture, Billy, and tell me what we should have done?”

“First, tell me the absolute truth … is it really that bad out there?”

“Yes.” Sam said it without hesitation.

“Are we in danger of losing control of this whole thing?”

Sam’s face turned to stone. “Billy, we may have already lost control of this thing. The math is so bad. There are so many ways this can go bad on us, and almost no way that we can put this genie back into the bottle.”

“You’re saying we’ve lost? Christ, Sam, is that what you’re saying?”

“I … don’t know. There are still some cards we can play. And the spread will hit some natural barriers. Rivers, mountains, lakes, bridges. All of those are potential chokepoints or they can act as firebreaks. Can we get ahead of it? I don’t know. Not unless we up the game.”

“Up it from fuel-air bombs? Shit, what’s the next upgrade after that?”

Sam said nothing.

Billy looked down at his hands. “Oh, man…”

“So, again I ask you, Billy, last night, what should we have done last night?”

It hurt so much for Trout to say it, but he managed to get the words past the stricture in his throat. “You should have killed us.”

“Yes,” said Sam, “we should have killed you. And God help my soul for saying and believing that.”

They sat in silence for a moment, each of them looking at the world through that lens.

“Then why are you helping us now?” Billy asked again.

Sam nodded to the buses down in the lot and the dozens of people scrambling to prepare them for an escape. “For me and my guys it’s like being cut off behind enemy lines. Sure, we could make it back to the front, but I have a feeling that this is going to change from a gunfight — which is what we do — to a war we’re only going to be able to fight from the air. Providing the storm ever stops. In a mechanized war, we’re not much better than five extra sets of hands. It’s a waste of our specialized skill sets.” He gave Trout a rueful grin.

“And here?”

“You kidding me? Six hundred kids, two hundred civilians, and a horde of flesh-eating monsters? We might actually get to be bona fide heroes. And wouldn’t that make a nice change.”

“You’re joking.”

Sam held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Only a little.”

Down in the lot the four members of the Boy Scouts were helping with the preparations. Trout had been introduced to them only by their combat call signs and what little he could deduce about their personalities. The woman, Gypsy, was a problem solver and apparently the second in command. Moonshiner was gruff and lacked obvious warmth, unlike Boxer who seemed to wear his heart on his sleeve. Shortstop was the most detached of the bunch, very pragmatic but aloof.

“What about your team?” asked Trout, nodding out the window. “Are they on the same page as you?”

Sam nodded. “They usually are. We tend to think like a pack of…”

He stopped speaking and leaned close to the window as lightning flashed and flashed again. The soldier’s body went suddenly rigid with tension. Then he tapped his earbud.

“Team Alert, this is Ronin. I have eyes on the street beyond the north fence. We have potential hostiles. Repeat, potential hostiles.”

It was Boxer who turned first, snatching his rifle from where it lay under a jacket and out of the rain. He brought it up and snapped on the top-mounted light. The beam cut through the rain and the openings in the chain-link fence, and there, filling the street, were silent figures who moved with slow, implacable steps.

“Give me numbers,” ordered Sam.

“Christ, boss, I got forty of them. Shit, no, there’s more coming.”

Gypsy’s voice cut in. “We got more coming in from the west and…” Her words trailed away.

Boxer turned, saw what she saw, and said what Sam and Trout were only now just beginning to see.

“They’re soldiers,” said Boxer. “Oh, goddamn, it’s the National Guard. They’re all … they’re all … ah, shit.”

“Got to be fifty of them,” said Moonshiner.

Moonshiner popped a flare and sent it high into the air.

There were not fifty.

There were hundreds of them.

Torn, bleeding, shambling, and hungry.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

The experts did one threat assessment after another, each time rebuilding both outbreak and response models to fit new data.

With each new assessment the president felt the world slip away from him. He sat in his chair, fingers balled into fists on the tabletop, staring at speaking mouths and screens filled with data.

Scott Blair looked every bit as bad. He hung up from a call and rubbed his eyes. Or was he wiping at tears? The president couldn’t tell.

Blair held up a trembling hand and the room fell into a flawed and troubled silence.

“That was Dr. McReady. She’s with the NBACC field team in Fayette County. They reached General Zetter’s command post. It was deserted except for several infected. The, um, infected were all members of the Guard command staff.”

“How the hell is that even possible?” demanded General Burroughs. “If they’d been overrun we’d have known about it.”

“That’s why Dr. McReady called. Her team was able to subdue and examine the infected at the command center. A few had been bitten, but most showed no signs of violence. No bites, nothing.”

“Then what in hell happened?” asked the president.

Tears broke from the corners of Blair’s eyes. “Dr. McReady thinks that the bombs reduced many of the infected to particulate matter and ash. Those particles still contain parasitic larvae, and the storm winds are spreading them throughout the region.”

There was a beat and for a moment some of the people around the table seemed unable to comprehend the implications.

The president wiped at his own tears. “Say the rest, Scott. Tell them.”

Blair placed his palms on the table and leaned heavily on them, his head hanging down between hunched shoulders.

“Lucifer 113 has gone airborne,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

Jake DeGroot came back to himself slowly.

So slowly.

With pain and realization and horror.

He stood in the rain and slowly looked around, trying to remember what world this was. Fifty feet away the yellow bulk of Big Bird stood like an anchor that held him to the world.

He gasped and spat out the awful tastes in his mouth, and wiped his face with the back of one big hand.

His first clear and cogent thought was that this was not an isolated event. It couldn’t be. The girls had been hurt—Killed? Was that the word? — somewhere else and had walked onto the construction site. That meant whatever this was didn’t start here. This wasn’t some old Indian burial ground or any of that horror movie stuff. This was something else, and whatever it was, it was happening out there.

Out … where, exactly?

The second thing he thought was that they knew about it.

They.

The government, or at least the National Guard. Those were soldiers who shot Burl and the others. Soldiers.

That meant that this thing was really damn big.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

He listened to his voice. There should be panic there, that desperate whine, but it wasn’t there. He sounded like himself. The way he should.

It was the second thing that anchored Jake DeGroot.

It helped him take a real breath.

“Think it through,” he told himself, liking the sound of his voice.

He didn’t have much family in the area. Only a niece, Jenny, who lived in Bordentown.

He could go there.

But no. Jenny was a single woman and a teacher.

With the storm, the single teachers volunteered to work at the region’s emergency shelter. The Stebbins Little School. The kids would have all been picked up, but the cops would have moved the old folks to the school. And some families from the flooded areas. The school had cots and food and a generator.

That’s where Jenny would be.

And suddenly he was very afraid. Not for himself this time. Jake thought about Jenny. She was a tiny little thing. It took everything Jake had to stop that one guy.

Jenny?

She could never …

Before Jake even realized he was doing it he began running for his car, slapping his pockets for his car keys.

And not finding them.

They’d been in his jeans pocket.

He looked back at the pit under Big Bird.

They must have fallen out. Down in the water. Down in the mud.

Jake swallowed a lump the size of a fist.

“No fucking way.”

Even if he could work up the nerve to crawl down there where the dead man was, what were the chances he would find those keys in all that mud and water. After all that fighting and thrashing. His car was useless to him. Even if he knew how to hotwire it, there was no time and no tools.

His heart started to sink, but then he raised his eyes. Just a few feet.

And stared at the big metal monster.

Big Bird.

“No,” he told himself. It was too clumsy, too slow. And the school was too far.

Then he was running through the mud toward the machine.

The key for Big Bird was still where he’d left it, right in the ignition. He twisted it and the big diesel engine roared to life with a growl so loud that it sounded like a dragon rousing from a troubled slumber. He pulled the door shut, sealing himself inside the Plexiglas cab. He turned the heat to high, shifted hard, and began moving through the mud. The Cat’s top blacktop speed was forty, and the mud cut that down to less than half.

The school was eleven miles away, almost due south.

“I’m coming, Jenny,” he said aloud, and the fact of having a purpose, of having someone else to fight for, made his whole body feel as hard and powerful as the steel of the machine in which he rode.

He did not hear the crunch as the left rear tire rolled over the corpse in the mud. Nor when the right rolled across the nearly submerged body of Burl.

Or, if he did, Jake refused to allow himself to acknowledge it.

“I’m coming, Jenny.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

“Everyone back to the school!” screamed Dez, but the adults were already dropping hoses and running. She ran behind them, shoving the slower ones, chasing them all to safety. “Check the doors. Keep the kids away from the windows. Move … move.”

Moonshiner and Shortstop laid their rifles atop the front and rear hoods of a burned-out police car. Boxer climbed atop one of the buses and Gypsy went into another one and pointed her gun out the window. Only Sam and Trout stood their ground.

“We’d better get inside,” warned Trout, but Sam didn’t move.

“There are so many of them,” he said softly.

Dez ran back to join them, her Glock in a two-handed grip, face set and hard.

“You want to fight them here?” she asked incredulously. “There are too many ways they can come at us.”

The dead were closing in. The nearest ones were fifty feet beyond the fence.

“It’s your house,” said Sam. “It’s your call.”

“There’s more coming across the yards,” called Boxer, pointing. They turned and saw more of the infected staggering through the lines of connected yards to the east.

“Dez,” said Trout, taking her by the arm, “this is stupid. There are too many of them. Let’s get inside.”

But Dez pulled her arm free. “No.” She turned to them. “Listen, Billy, Sam — we can reinforce the building and hole up, but for how long? The supplies we have won’t last. Sam, can you guarantee that the army’s coming back for us?”

The answer was on Sam’s face. “This is falling apart. I don’t think anyone can make promises right now.”

“What are you saying?” asked Trout. “That we could be stuck here for weeks?”

“Billy … I’m saying if this keeps going the way it’s going, then no one will be coming for us.”

“Until when?”

Sam shook his head. “We could lose this war.”

“War? It’s an outbreak…”

Sam pointed to the dead soldiers who were approaching the fence. “Not anymore.”

Trout felt his blood turn to ice. He cut a look at Dez, who looked horrified, but she was nodding to herself.

“How long can your team hold them on the other side of the fence?” she breathed. “How much time can you buy us?”

The soldier’s mouth tightened. “How much time do you need?”

“An hour,” she said. “Maybe less.”

“To do what?” demanded Trout.

“To do what we started out to do. Get all the supplies and everyone in the school onto the buses.”

“And then what?”

“We get the fuck out of here.”

“And go where?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Philly? New York?”

“No,” said Sam. “Go south. Go to Asheville.”

“North Carolina?” asked Dez. “Why there?”

“Because the storm is heading east. Roads will be bad and they’ll be blocked. Because everyone running from this will be going east. And we can’t go west because when we pinged Goat Weinman’s satellite phone it was clear he was heading northwest. Maybe to Pittsburgh. We should go south and get into the mountains.”

“Sure, but why Asheville?” asked Trout. “Why there specifically?”

Sam hesitated for a moment. “There is a government installation there.”

“Since when?” Dez asked skeptically. “I never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. It was built during the Cold War. The mountains there are honeycombed with miles and miles of labs, living quarters, the works.”

“That’s just an urban legend,” said Trout. “I read about that. It’s not real.”

“It’s real. In the event of a nuclear exchange it was deemed a save zone because it’s outside of the prevailing drift patterns for likely nukes.”

“Hey,” called Gypsy, “somebody out there want to make a fucking decision? We’re going to be dancing with these things pretty soon.”

Sam touched Dez’s sleeve. “It’s there. Trust me.”

Dez met his eyes, searching them for truth and trust. Then she nodded. “Okay.”

“Good,” said Sam, looking relieved. “We’ll hold them as long as we can. You better get your asses in gear. Hurry!”

Dez spun and ran for the building. They could hear her shouting orders before she was even inside.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

The president stood up slowly and walked the length of the room until he stood in front of the big screen. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, appearing to stare into the middle distance.

“Mr. President,” said Scott Blair, “we’re starting to get reports of random attacks in other places. Harrisburg, Gettysburg…”

“How?” asked Sylvia Ruddy. “How is that possible? None of the infected could walk those distances, and the winds can’t have reached there yet.”

“Survivors,” said Blair. “People in cars or trucks. Either bitten or people who breathed in the ash. We know that some escaped the containment. We have to shut down the highways and the airports. Trains and buses, too. We need roadblocks. If we have to, we can blow the tunnels and bridges on the major highways.”

The president nodded, and phones were snatched up to make those calls.

“Sir,” said Ruddy, “I think we need to initiate the Emergency Broadcast Network.”

Another nod.

“I’ll draft a speech to the nation,” she said, and hurried out.

After she was gone, the president turned slowly to face his tableful of generals.

“Talk to me about nuclear alternatives,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

“You said you need to connect to the Net, right?” asked Homer.

Goat looked up from his laptop. He was cutting Homer’s diatribes into video bites that would be short enough to be watch in their entirety.

“Yes. I have several bits ready to go up on YouTube. Why?”

Homer tapped the windshield, and Goat peered through the whisking wipers to see the words “FREE WI-FI” glowing in blue neon on the front of a redbrick building.

“How long’s this gonna take?” asked the killer.

Goat hedged. “Video files are big,” he said slowly. “Takes a while for them to upload and—”

“You need both hands to do that shit?”

Goat immediately flinched back, pulling his hands back as far as he could get them from the murderous madman. But Homer laughed. A deep, creaking bray.

“I ain’t gonna eat your hands, you dumb shit,” he guffawed. “Jesus. You’re fucking hilarious sometimes.”

“Why — why did you ask?”

“’Cause I want to go inside for a minute and I want you here where I get back.”

“I don’t—”

Homer reached into the backseat and produced a coil of heavy, hairy twine. It was brown and the spiky hairs made it look like a vast, coiled centipede. “Took this out of that last place. Useful shit. Gimme your left hand. C’mon, give it here unless you want me to take it.”

With great reluctance, Goat slowly extended his trembling hand. Homer caught his wrist with fingers that were as cold and damp as worms but as strong as steel. He jerked Goat’s arm toward the steering wheel and then began looping the hairy twine around wrist, steering column, and between the spokes if the wheel. He tied sophisticated knots in the twine, looped more twine, tied additional knots, and then pulled on the ends until the bulb of each knot was compressed into a tiny, rock-hard nugget.

“That ought to do ’er,” he said, admiring his work. He gave Goat a friendly grin. “You only need one hand to jerk off with, right, boy?”

“I—”

“You set about putting my story out there for people to see and hear. You do that while I go see some folks about something I need.”

“What is it? What are you going to do? What is this place? Why are we here?”

Homer’s friendly grin became lupine. “You ain’t figured it out yet?”

“Figured what out?”

“What I am.”

“I … know what you are. I mean I understand what Dr. Volker did to you. I know about Lucifer 113.”

“I ain’t talking about no zombie bullshit, boy. Try again.”

Goat licked his lips. “I understand about the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. Is that what you mean?”

The killer sat there for a long moment, his eyes flicking back and forth between Goat’s as if looking for something first in the left, then the right, and over again. It was like the flickering of a candle. “You listened to everything I said and you sat as a witness to everything I done tonight, and you still don’t understand. That’s a damn shame, boy, ’cause I thought you were going to be my apostle. I thought you were like Luke and John and all those holy men who wrote the Bible. I thought I could use you to tell the truth. The real and gospel truth.”

The shift in Homer’s voice and phrasing was immediately chilling. Instead of the faux homespun shit-kicker lingo, these few sentences were spoken in a slow, more precise manner. Goat had noted it only once before, when Homer discussed the way the Red Mouth spoke through him to tell the truth. He wanted to replay that clip, to listen once more to what the man said then because now he felt — no, he was absolutely certain — that it was far more important that the pseudoreligious rant of a psychopathic killer. He saw the dangerous look of cold disappointment in Homer’s eyes and knew that he needed to do something right now.

He said, “I’m trying to understand,” he said, making his words come out with equally slow and sober gravitas. “I want to understand. But the apostles — how many of them understood right away? They had to think about it, to witness it, to let it speak through them, right?”

Goat was Jewish but he’d seen enough movies to know the basic New Testament story. He’d even watched parts of that old Jesus of Nazareth miniseries during a filmmaking class. He grabbed for every detail he could snatch out of memory.

“Peter … the one who was Jesus’s right-hand man. He didn’t get it at first, but look what happened. He’s the role model for the pope, right? He was a fisherman and don’t they say that the pope wears the shoes of the fisherman?”

He wasn’t sure if this was exactly true or if it was something else from another movie. It sounded more or less right.

“And all the others,” Goat continued, keeping the rhythm of it going, “they became true believers. And Paul, what about Paul, remember him? He was kind of a prick and a bad guy and then something happened to him on the road to Damascus and suddenly he’s writing most of the New Testament.” He paused, giving the moment a dramatic beat, choreographing it, directing his own performance. “You want me to tell your story, and I agreed to do that. If you need me to understand the secrets and mysteries of it, then you have to give me time to process it. To think it through. To let it speak inside my head and heart.”

Those were lines from an old movie, an art film about socialism in Paris, but he was pretty sure it was one Homer would never have seen. Goat twisted them to fit, pitching his tone to have a smoldering passion waiting to bloom. Or at least that’s how he imagined it if he was directing someone for this scene. He hoped he was actor enough to pull it off.

Homer Gibbon said nothing as the slow seconds ticked by. Then he reached out and touched Goat over the heart with the tip of his index finger.

“If you open your heart to the Red Mouth, you will see with the Black Eye.”

Goat swallowed. “I–I want to. Just give me time.”

The killer gave him a single, slow nod and let his finger trail down Goat’s body, over his stomach and groin, along his thigh and up cover the edge of the laptop. “You better use this thing to tell my truth, or I will—”

“Homer,” said Goat quickly, taking a terrible risk, “don’t. Look at me. Use the Black Eye to look into my eyes. See me. You don’t need to threaten me anymore. We’ve crossed a line, Homer. We’re somewhere else now.”

The moment stretched and stretched, and then Homer withdrew his hand. He reached for the door handle, but paused to pat Goat’s bound left wrist. “The rope stays on. Trust, like faith, is earned.”

Then he got out of the car and began walking, bare-chested and erect, through the rain to the building with the FREE WI-FI sign.

Goat sagged back and had to fight to keep from hyperventilating. It was an even harder struggle to keep from pissing in his pants.

Then he was in motion. Even one-handed he was fast on a laptop. He accessed the system preferences and found the Wi-Fi, connected to it, and began uploading the files. But as he did so a small window popped up telling him that his email was sent.

Email?

It was only then that he remembered the message he’d composed way back at Starbucks.

In Bordentown. Homer Gibbon.

Quarantine failed.

It’s here …

“Oh my God,” he breathed, realizing that no one knew.

Then he thought back to the violence on the road, the helicopters, the explosions.

People knew.

But they didn’t know that Homer was loose, that he was on the road.

That he was free.

Goat used the webcam on his laptop to record a quick and desperate video message. He had no idea how much time he had — or had left — so he made it short. He gave their location, and explained what Homer had already done. He emphasized that Homer had killed people, and had wounded others. He referenced Lucifer 113 and that Homer was, for all intents and purposes, the patient zero of this plague. He ended it with a statement that was both a call to arms for the authorities and a desperate cry for help.

It took several agonizingly slow seconds for the video file to upload to his media listservs, including the one that had all of Goat’s White House correspondent colleagues. Then he posted it on YouTube and immediate deleted the file from his computer.

He kept glancing out the window at the building into which Homer had disappeared. It was a club of some kind.

What could Homer want in there?

He checked the video files of the interviews with Homer. Most were so big that they were still uploading, but many of the shorter ones were already up. He sent the same batch of them to his listserv using DropBox and WeTransfer, dumping all of the raw footage into the media cauldron, praying someone would watch it, understand its reality and importance, and act on it.

With all of that done, Goat scrolled through the video clips until he found the one in which Homer used the same eerie tone of voice. He watched it all the way through. It wasn’t long, but it hit him like a punch to the throat.

He watched it again.

And again.

It was on the third viewing that the whole truth broke through.

The awful truth.

He suddenly knew why Homer was here.

Just as he knew why Homer had stopped those other times. He knew why Homer killed, and he knew why Homer sometimes spared lives. It wasn’t mercy and it wasn’t any of his humanity connecting with individuals.

It was something else.

Something horrible.

Something far worse than anything Homer had ever done, before or after he’d become the monster that he now was.

Homer wasn’t on any vengeance kick. He wasn’t hunting for his former foster parents. No, that was too mundane and cliché a motive for a person who was hearing the kinds of voices Homer heard.

No, what Goat realized with perfect clarity was that Homer, knowing and accepting what he was, what Volker had done to him, had embraced it. He hadn’t killed everyone at the 7-Eleven, but now that made sense. He hadn’t killed them all, but he’d infected them all.

The same with the people back at Starbucks. He killed some and fed on some, but his real agenda was spreading the infection. Like some kind of nightmare blend of John the Baptist and Johnny Appleseed, Homer was on the road to spread the word of his god. To spread the gospel of the Red Mouth and the Black Eye.

To create the paradise that he’d envisioned, that he’d spoken of. A world inherited by the meek. By the mindless dead. By those raised up, as Jesus had been.

At least according to Homer’s view of the cosmos.

It was a horrible plan, but a very practical one. A workable one.

Behind them, at the 7-Eleven and the traffic jam on the road, the infection was probably already spreading. Outside of the quarantine zone.

Goat snatched up his camera and babbled all of this into a live stream. He saved it and posted it on Facebook.

Then he logged onto Foursquare, the social media app for sharing your location.

“Find us,” he begged. “Find us.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

“Okay, listen up,” said Sam into the team channel. “This is a holding action. We don’t fire until and unless there’s a danger of a breach. Watch the fences. If they start putting pressure on it, we use selective fire to drive them back, or we drop enough to block access. This is a target-rich environment but that’s also a good way to burn through too much ammo. Check your targets. Headshots only. Unless you’re pressed, take time for accuracy. Make ’em count.”

Behind them Dez and Uriah Piper had set up chains of people to bring out the hundreds of boxes of food, water, and supplies. The chains split off to feed the stuff into a dozen Type C Blue Bird school buses. Uriah Piper was running from bus to bus to start engines and check fuel levels. A couple of teachers were busy siphoning gas from buses that were too low in fuel to make a long run or too badly damaged. Each bus had a standard capacity of seventy-seven passengers and the driver, which meant that a dozen of them would easily transport the eight hundred survivors of Stebbins County with room for boxed supplies.

Jenny DeGroot had found a can of spray paint and was writing a message on the outside wall of the school, but Trout couldn’t read it at that distance. Probably a note about where the buses were going. Smart, he thought.

Trout, too dinged up to help, was recording everything and, he hoped, streaming it out to the Net. He wanted people to know. Unfortunately, he had no laptop, so he couldn’t check to see if anything was showing up on the Web.

Sam came over and looked Trout up and down. “Do you have a gun?”

“No. I’m not very good with one.”

“You’re worse without one.” He bent and removed a small automatic from an ankle holster and held it out to Trout. “Beretta 3032 Tomcat. Seven-round box magazine. Less than a pound and fits into any pocket.” He showed Trout how to use the thumb safety. “Better to have it and not need than need it and not have it.”

“One of Dez’s favorite lines.”

Sam smiled. “Dez … is she your lady? Girlfriend? Wife? Something?”

“Something. We’ve been a couple more often than you’ve had hot dinners, but recently we’ve been on a break.”

“A ‘break’?”

“As in she keeps threatening to break parts of me I don’t want broken.”

“I joined the army because war is easier than love,” said Sam.

“Very wise words.” Trout glanced over at Dez. “She’s a foul-mouthed redneck who is, politically speaking, to the extreme right of Glenn Beck, but even with all that I love her. Always have.”

“That street go both ways?”

Trout sighed. “Not lately.”

“Ah.”

“I mean … apocalypse and all. Not a hearts-and-flowers sort of thing.”

“I hear ya.”

“Tell you what, though,” said Trout. “For all of her rough edges — she has the biggest heart. She’d die for any one of those kids, and for most of the adults, too. No, that’s not quite right. She’d happily and mercilessly kill for those kids.”

Sam nodded. “A warrior rather a soldier.”

Trout cocked an eyebrow. “There’s a difference?”

“Soldiers are called to serve and when their service is done they go home. A warrior lives on the battlefield. It is home.”

Trout studied him. “Yeah … that’s Dez.” He weighed the gun in his palm, nodded thanks, and put it into the pocket of his stained and torn sportscoat.

“Listen, Billy, I think I’d better tell you some things. I heard from my boss, Scott Blair.”

“Good news, I hope.”

“I wish … but, no. Lucifer has become an airborne pathogen now.”

“Ah … jeez…”

“Our bioweapons people are scrambling to mass-produce a different parasite that might render the infected inert. Not sure if it’ll kill them or not. I don’t think they’re sure.”

“How soon will they try that?”

Sam shook his head. “Not soon enough. I told Scott that we’re heading to Asheville. He said he’ll call ahead to make sure we get an open door.”

“Can we trust him?”

“People should have trusted Scott from the jump.”

Trout took his point, and nodded. “They still want me dead?”

Sam gave a half-smile. “No, just the opposite. They want you to get out any information you can. Scott thinks it might help some people, especially if things keep going the way they’re going.”

“Sam…” Trout said tentatively, “how bad are things? No bullshit, how bad?”

“I wasn’t joking before when I said that we were losing this war. They may have to drop nukes to stop this.”

“Are you fucking crazy? Are they?”

“It’s being looked at as the scenario resulting in the lowest number of casualties.”

And it was then that the full enormity of it hit Billy Trout. Until then, despite everything he’d seen and all that he knew, it had been a local issue. It had been a Stebbins County thing.

Now he understood.

Now his own words came back to pummel him, to lash at him.

Reporting live from the apocalypse.

“Boss!” yelled Boxer. “They’re coming!”

They spun around and saw that a mass of them were at the fence, and the chain links and piping were starting to bow inward under the combined weight of more than fifty bodies.

“Can you really hold them?” begged Trout.

Sam unslung his rifle. “Tell your girlfriend to hurry.”

The Boy Scouts took careful aim, and fired.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE

“Did you hear?”

Captain James Yakima looked up from the flight log at his copilot for the nonstop to Paris.

“Hear what? The riots or the storm?”

“Both, I think,” said Beecher, the copilot. “They’re shutting us down.”

“Shutting who down? Our flight?”

“The airport,” said Beecher. “At least that’s the rumor.”

“Goddamn it,” growled Yakima as he dug in his pocket for his cell. He punched in the number for his boss at Delta and had to wait six rings before the call was answered. “Carol, what’s this crap I’m hearing about the airport getting shut down?”

Beecher stood and waited while Yakima listened.

“Okay, with any luck I’ll be eating a nice piece of veal at the Restaurant du Palais-Royal before they pull the plug. Thanks, Carol. Keep me posted.”

He disconnected and placed the phone on the table.

“So — what’s the verdict?” asked Beecher.

“Carol says they’re going to do it, but the official order hasn’t come through yet.”

“The storm’s going the other way. Local winds are below twenty and—”

“It’s not the storm. Carol said they were going to impose martial law on western Pennsylvania and maybe parts of Maryland and West Virginia, too.”

“For a riot?”

“She says it’s not a riot. Carol said her brother-in-law works for MSNBC and they’re still running the virus story.”

“I thought they shot that down.”

Yakima spread his hands. “What can I tell you? The good news is that it doesn’t affect us. We’re wheels up in sixty-six minutes. C’mon, let’s get a coffee before we go aboard.”

He closed the flight log and stood up. As they headed toward the door to the crew lounge a short fit of coughing stopped Yakima in his tracks. He coughed for twenty seconds, then waited, listening inside his body for more, and gradually felt the spasms stop.

“You okay?” asked Beecher.

“Yeah. It’s nothing. Tickle in the back of my throat.”

“I have some lozenges,” said Beecher. “In my bag. Want me to dig ’em out? Won’t take a sec.”

“Nah,” said Yakima. “It’s nothing. I have four days off in Paris. If it’s a cold, where better for a little R and R?”

They headed out of the lounge, got their coffee, and proceeded directly to their plane. In a little over an hour they were in the air, flying high over the storms of Pennsylvania, skirting the edge of the worst of it, crossing into New Jersey and then far out over the Atlantic.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN

The comedian’s name was Jeremy Essig and he felt like there should be sirens blaring and dogs hunting him. Not just there at Trickster’s, but at a lot of comedy clubs. After all, the image the audience saw was a sketchy-looking character looking nervous in a spotlight splashed against an unpainted brick wall. It screamed “escaped prisoner.” If not from a prison than definitely from a facility for people with dangerous social disorders.

And the audience was a lot like a posse. They seemed like nice people, but they could turn mean and dangerous in a heartbeat. He’d seen it. All comics have seen it. One minute you have a crowd hanging on your every word, laughing in anticipation of what you’ll say before you even begin the joke, willing to follow you through twists and turns of skewed logic and occasionally clinical observation, believing that you’ll steer the boat into port in some magical lands. That’s when it’s working right, when the rhythm is like jazz and the words tumble out with the kind of timing that opens minds and unlocks the muscles so that smiling and laughing is the easiest thing to do. Those are the times when the comic and the audience are all together, sharing the ride, understanding each other on a level you can’t really describe.

But then there are those times when everything on the other side of the spotlight looks alien and hostile. Pale faces in the dark, staring with dead eyes, their mouths unsmiling, hands on tables or in laps as if they’re too damn heavy to light for even a token clap. There are times when the joke’s rhythm is off, like a discordant note that paints itself in the air and no matter what else is played that’s the thing everyone can’t look away from. Like that. What sucked most was that there was no pattern to it. Sure, sometimes it’s hitting the wrong note or forgetting to take a look at the demographic. Like busting on the Tea Party in South Carolina, or skewering Obama in Chicago. Like being the first comic to make a joke after a crisis and really seeing firsthand what “too soon” actually means. Rookie mistakes that even the pros make, and Jeremy could remember too many of those moments in his own career.

On the upside, after you survive the moment and crawl out of a dead gig like that, you can take the experience and spin it into material for another date.

Tonight, though, the audience was right there with him. The mojo was red hot and despite the late hour they were all coconspirators in a mad scheme.

Plus, everybody was hammered. Even the waitstaff at Trickster’s was in the bag. And the emcee for the event, Lydia Rose, was smiling the kind of smile only a very happy, very drunk person can manage during that last hour before falling over becomes a gravitational imperative.

Jeremy walked back and forth on the tiny stage, letting movement and the shifting of the travel spot kept any moment from getting stale. He wore an ancient Flaming Moe’s T-shirt and scruffy jeans and looked as comfortable as he felt.

The gig was largely impromptu. What had started with a standard double-bill with him and Tom Segura, and a handful of raw up-and-comers, had become something else. The original show should have ended at midnight, but then word started coming in about how Superstorm Zelda had pretty much wiped a small town off the Pennsylvania map. A lot of people were believed dead. And there was a bunch of wild conspiracy theory crap thumbtacked to the story. Viruses, something about the National Guard trying to kill a bunch of kids, some asshole ranting about the apocalypse, and — this was the best part, as Jeremy saw it — zombies.

Fucking zombies.

They all had a good laugh about that during the break, but then they started hearing more and more about the number of expected casualties and it stopped being funny. Jeremy couldn’t remember who suggested doing a fund-raiser. Maybe him, maybe Tom. Maybe Lydia. Or maybe it was one of those things that just evolved. At first it was something they thought would be good if someone else did it. Then it was something they thought they should do. Then it became something they needed to do. Then it became what was actually happening tonight.

Alcohol and some serious weed were involved in every stage of the process. Smoke your way to the right level and everything seems incredibly doable, even logical. The basic pitch was a comedy marathon for the duration of the storm, with Tom Segura and Jeremy Essig as ongoing headliners. Calls went out to other comics within driving distance.

Finding a name for it took the longest. Tom wanted to call it Blow Me, Zelda. Jeremy liked Comic Relief: Redneck Edition, but Lydia thought they’d get sued for that. After another blunt they settled on Laugh at the Storm, and bullied a friend who had a 501(c)(3) to accept donations via PayPal.

Now they were into the second hour of it.

They streamed the show live to the Net and put clips on YouTube, reposting those to Twitter and Facebook. Some friends of Jeremy and Tom Skyped in and did bits that were flashed onto the wall. While the comics were doing their bits, Lydia put the event on Foursquare, then pulled photos from the video stream and posted them on Pinterest, Tumblr, and InstaGram. Suddenly it was real. It was an actual charity fund-raiser for the victims of Superstorm Zelda.

The crowd at Trickster’s were totally into it, and within forty minutes carloads of people showed up from all over Pittsburgh, fighting their way through storm winds and rain hard enough to swell all three of the city’s big rivers. It was standing-room only, and the bartenders were mixing drinks and pulling pints as fast as they could.

Jeremy did several twenty-minute sets, cycling through old material and some new stuff, and also improvising on what was happening.

“According to the Internet news,” he said, half-smiling as he paced in front of the audience, “there are monsters out in the sticks around Stebbins. Slack-faced, empty-eyed, unthinking, shambling hulks who will kill anything that moves. And aside from the locals, they also have zombies.”

The audience loved that. It was a running joke that the entire length of the state between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was an even more redneck version of Mississippi. A red state with blue bookends. Certified gold for observational comics like Jeremy Essig and Tom Segura.

“It’s not really surprising that they have a zombie outbreak in farm country. All those graaaiiiiins.”

A smaller laugh that time, but they were still with him. Jeremy took a beat to comment on the lack of laughs, and that got a laugh. One of the golden rules of his kind of comedy was to own the bad moments so they were part of a shared experience, rather than simply try to limp away from a wounded joke.

He switched gears a bit and drove his routine onto safer ground by talking about how people on the Net were saying that the government was trying to cover up the zombie thing. No matter which lever the audience pulled, it was usually safe ground to attack the government as a whole. Not necessarily taking potshots at specific politicians but at the huge, self-destructive, creaking machine that was national politics. He saw Tom and Lydia watching from offstage, grinning and nodding encouragement.

Jeremy took some of his old jokes about FEMA’s failure after Katrina and gave them a Superstorm Zelda spin.

“If you wait until the zombies eat most of the people, then you only have to save a few. And since the survivors will be the ones fast enough to outrun the living dead, you have people who look better on TV.”

From there he cruised into the vagaries of pop culture.

“Tell me there won’t be a reality show in six months. Real Zombies of Stebbins County. Strap on a lie detector and tell me we won’t be watching that.”

And he was casting the show with redneck subtypes when someone in the audience screamed.

It wasn’t a scream of laughter or even a shout of inarticulate drunken mirth.

It was a real scream.

A stop the show scream.

The kind of scream where the entire crowd is jerked out of the moment, the spell instantly broken, and they focus on a single spot in the room.

In the back of the small club, standing framed in the pale rectangle of light from the lobby, stood a tall figure. A man. Bare-chested and wild-looking. Grinning. The woman who’d screamed sat at the table closest to the exit, and she and everyone at her table were frozen in a tableau of horrified recoil.

And …

Here Jeremy’s mind began stumbling over the details.

The man was wrong.

His whole body was wrong.

It was red.

Bright, glistening red.

Like he’d been splashed by red paint. Or …

A Carrie joke started forming in his head in the split second before the red-splashed man turned, grabbed the woman who’d screamed, hauled her to her feet, and …

And he dug his teeth into the hollow of her throat.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN

“Forget the supplies,” growled Sam. “Get the kids on the damn buses.”

He didn’t wait for Dez to respond. He laid his rifle atop a car hood and began firing slow, spaced shots. With each shot Trout could see the head of one of the infected fly apart and splash those around it with black blood. The other soldiers were nearly as good, and soon the bodies were piling up, clogging access to the fence.

But that was one attack point.

Dez vanished into the building but was back a moment later leading a line of children. The kids were all holding hands. Most of them were screaming as they ran. Adults ran with them, shepherding the kids toward the buses. It started as an orderly evacuation, but with each second it began to disintegrate.

Boxer yelled, “Hostiles at nine o’clock. Count seventy plus.”

He peered through a bus window and saw several tattered figures climbing awkwardly over the low chain-link fence. Boxer opened fire on them, but the wind was whipping up leaves and debris, spoiling his aim and warping the flight path of his rounds.

“Close on them,” bellowed Sam.

Boxer shot him a despairing look, then climbed down from the bus and began running across the playground toward that part of the fence. At twenty feet he knelt, put his rifle to his shoulder, and began firing. Now one after another of the dead pitched backward. The other Boy Scouts closed on other sections of the fence and began firing from closer range.

The children kept screaming, and the sound tore at Trout’s heart. It was a steady, unbearably shrill wail of total terror and total hopelessness.

“We’re losing the fence,” cried Gypsy, and even as she said it a fifteen-foot section of the chain link collapsed into the schoolyard. Infected spilled forward, falling over each other, piling up, writhing and scrambling to keep moving forward toward their prey.

Moonshiner and Gypsy began shuffling backward, yard by yard, while still firing.

“Reloading,” called Moonshiner. “Last mag.”

“Dez, hurry up goddamn it!” roared Sam.

Trout limped over to try and help, but there were already enough people. There simply wasn’t enough time. Six hundred children, many of whom were too scared to leave the school. Many of whom had to be dragged or carried out. Some of them broke away and ran back into the school, with teachers and parents chasing them.

There was no order left in the exodus.

Against all sanity, one of the children tore free from Mrs. Madison and went running directly toward the zombies who were getting to their feet. Trout could not understand it until he heard one awful, heart-wrenching word.

“Mommy!”

In the midst of the living dead, a woman with half her hair torn away and fingers missing from her left hand, reached for the child, her mouth splitting into a mockery of a mother’s smile, teeth bared to bite.

Trout realized that he was running. Pain shot up his back and down his legs. Cracked ribs grated beneath his skin. His breath burned in his lungs, but he was running, angling away from the bus, racing to intercept the little girl.

He reached her four paces before the zombie did.

With a cry of agony he snatched her up and tried to run with her.

But his legs buckled and he went down hard on his kneecaps. He twisted as he fell, hitting the ground on his back instead of crushing the girl under him. Then cold fingers were tearing at him, trying to rip the child from his arms. Black drool fell from ragged lips as the infected thing bent close to try and bite the child who had been her daughter when the world was a different world.

Trout rolled sideways and kicked out, felt his foot hit something, heard a bone break, and then the zombie fell next to him. It did not react at all to its broken leg, but immediately buried cracked teeth in Billy Trout’s shoulder.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

Tom Segura sat on a stool with Lydia, the short, curvy, brunette emcee. The two of them were having a great night, riding the wave of excitement that was their impromptu fund-raiser comedy marathon. Tom was sipping a Redbull and covertly trying to count Lydia’s tattoos every time she moved. Some of them were in really interesting places. Onstage, his friend Jeremy Essig was killing them with an on-the-spot series of jokes about a zombie reality show.

Then everything changed.

Just like that. From one side of a moment to the other.

The audience was laughing their balls off about Billy Bob and Bubba the zombies and their monster truck when suddenly a woman’s scream knocked the whole night off its wheels.

“What the hell?” cried Lydia as she launched herself from her stool. Tom was a half-second slower, and he tried to see what was going on, but there was a waitress with a tray of drinks between him and the woman who’d screamed.

“Great fucking timing,” Tom muttered as he tried to edge around to get a better look. On the stage, Jeremy looked like he was frozen into the moment, eyes and mouth wide.

The whole club went silent for a heartbeat, but as Tom stepped around the waitress to see what was up, the entire club erupted into mad panic.

Utter.

Mad.

Panic.

Suddenly everyone was screaming. Women. Men. Everyone.

On stage, Jeremy screamed, too. The part of Tom Segura’s mind that was a regular guy felt twin pangs of fear and confusion. The part of him that was a professional comic actually provided commentary.

You scream like Chloë Moretz, dude.

But then the crowd split apart as people panicked and scattered, revealing an image that Tom knew was being burned onto the front of his brain as he looked at it. A bare-chested, bloody man, viciously tearing at the skin and muscle of a woman’s throat.

Right in front of him.

This wasn’t movie special effects and it sure as shit wasn’t someone’s idea of a practical joke. What Tom was seeing fifteen feet in front of him was real. Real blood, real flesh, real madness, real pain.

And he screamed, too.

He did not remember picking anything up, and even when he threw the beer bottle he was surprised that it was his hand that winged it at the attacker’s head. Tom was not a fighter. He didn’t know many comics who were. Words had always been both his sword and shield. Sarcasm was his left hook and insight was his right cross.

He saw the bottle leave his hand, saw it close the distance in what appeared to be ultra-slow motion. Saw it strike the killer right on the temple.

As good a throw as anyone in the Major Leagues ever hurled.

Dead on. A hundred-mile-an-hour ball that burned across the plate fast enough to make a fool out of a .300 batter.

Tom expected the killer to go down.

That would have been the button on this routine. That should have been the logical end, or maybe the opening act of a new phase of his career. Tom Segura, hero comedian. The stocky kid from Cincinnati who dropped a psycho with a bottle of Coors Lite.

That was the script he was already writing in his head. That was the lead for the Breaking News.

Except …

Except that’s not how the scene played out.

The bottle hit hard, hit with real force, hit hard enough to make a clunk that Tom could hear over the woman’s gurgling screams. Then it ricocheted off of the killer and hit the woman square in the right eye.

The bottle fell to the floor.

The killer dropped the woman right on top of it.

He turned to Tom.

And smiled with bloody teeth.

Tom thought, “Oh … shit.”

Or maybe he said it aloud. He wasn’t sure, because after that he was screaming louder and more shrilly than Jeremy.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

“Mr. Blair!” yelled a young officer, one of the sharpshooters from the military intelligence group. “You need to see this.”

Blair hurried over and bent to look at something on the officer’s laptop.

“What is it?”

“We were able to pick the IP address of Gregory Weinman’s computer from the files he uploaded to the Net. Well, sir, he just uploaded a new batch.”

“Is it more of Trout’s ramblings?”

“No, sir. There are several files, including what appears to be interviews with Homer Gibbon. The autodating on the video files say that the interviews were all done in the last few hours.”

“Christ!”

“And there’s more. Weinman posted a message, a plea that appears to be directed to us. To the military. He’s asking us to find him because he is with Homer Gibbon and Gibbon is spreading Lucifer.”

“Did he provide an exact location?”

The officer smiled. So strange a thing under the circumstances.

“Yes, sir, he did.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

The pain was immediate and excruciating, and Billy Trout screamed. He thrashed and beat at the woman, trying to shake her loose. The little girl shrieked, too, her voice as shrill as a seagull’s, and she began beating her tiny fists all over Trout’s face. She smashed his nose and hit him in the eye.

And then another screaming, howling thing plowed into them. It hit the zombie with so much force that teeth snapped off at the gum-line and the creature fell away. Trout instantly rolled the other way, shoving the child from him. He flopped onto his stomach and saw Dez Fox sitting astride the infected woman, fingers knotted in what was left of the woman’s hair, lifting her head and slamming it down on the concrete over and over again until the back of her skull exploded and sprayed the wet ground with brain tissue and black blood.

The little girl shrieked again and tried to rush to her mother’s defense, but Trout caught her wrist and pulled her kicking and screaming down to where he lay.

Trout was screaming, too, trying to determine how bad the bite was, trying to wriggle out of his jacket to see how soon he was going to die. The hysterical little girl kept hitting him, making it impossible to do anything. Then suddenly Dez pivoted off of the dead zombie, plucked the little girl off of him and then started tearing at Billy’s sportscoat. She yanked it down and tore his arm from the sleeve, then pawed at his shirt to find the bite.

“Am I dead?” Trout cried. “Oh, God, Dez … am I dead?”

And she kept saying, “Don’t you leave me, Billy Trout, don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking leave me, too. I’ll fucking kill you if you leave me…”

The lightning flashed and Dez used its brief light to bend close.

“God, please don’t let me be dead,” he wailed.

Dez straightened, glared at him and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It rocked his head sideways and he snorted blood from his broken nose. Then she grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and half-hauled him off the ground.

“It didn’t break the skin you stupid motherfucker.” She shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “I could fucking kill you, you stupid son of a bitch.”

Then people were crowding around them, pulling her back, lifting him to his feet, taking the little girl away from the horror that lay on the ground. Trout saw Sam there, firing a pistol instead of his sniper rifle. Moonshiner was with him, too. Firing, firing, firing.

There was an awful sound behind them and Trout turned to see another section of fence collapse and a wave of the dead come rushing into the lot. At least a hundred of them. Some fell with the fence, but the others climbed over them, shambling or running. Screaming their hunger, moaning louder than the storm. Sam fired and fired. There was no time to aim now.

Moonshiner yelled for them to get back. He dropped a spent magazine and reached for a replacement.

Which he did not have.

There was one terrible moment when his questing fingers spider-walked across his belt and harness and found nothing.

“Shit!” he said. He reversed his rifle in his hands and swung it like a baseball bat as the mass of zombies came swarming at them over the fence. Another section fell. And another. Hundreds of the dead were closing in on them.

The bus engines roared and fists pounded on the horns. Children screamed somewhere behind them. Trout kept swimming in and out of consciousness, aware that he was being half-carried, half-dragged along, but with no idea who was helping him. He saw Dez and Sam standing shoulder to shoulder, firing into the onrushing sea of the infected, trying to buy Moonshiner time to retreat.

And then the dead were on him.

“Noooooo!” howled Sam.

The big soldier swung the rifle once more and two zombies staggered back with shattered faces, but a dozen more launched themselves at him. Sam fired over and over again, killing an infected with every shot. So did Dez.

It did not matter at all.

Moonshiner vanished beneath a tidal surge of the dead.

“Get onto the bus!”

Someone was yelling that over and over again, but Trout couldn’t tell who it was. It might even have been him.

Hands reached out and grabbed Trout, pulled him, lifted him, and then he was out of the rain, inside the bus.

But where was Dez? He began thrashing, fighting the hands, struggling to get to the window to see if he could find Dez. Guns were still firing. The dead moaned like demons.

“Go, go, go!” yelled a voice.

Sam Imura.

Where was Dez?

God, thought Trout as the darkness began to drag him down, where was my Dez?

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

Lydia Rose was too short to see over the milling crowd.

She saw the bloody man enter the club and saw Tom throw a bottle at him, but then everything went totally to hell. People screamed and screamed as they ran for the exits. They collided with one another and tripped over tables and chairs. Lydia was buffeted back by the crowd and fell hard against the corner of the stage. Five feet in front of her a frat boy in a Pitt sweatshirt lay sprawled like a starfish, eyes open, mouth slack, as at least forty people ran over his body. Not leaping across it, but stepping on the college kid’s stomach and legs and chest. Then a skinny white woman with beaded dreads hooked a foot in the frat boy’s armpit and pitched face forward to the ground. A dozen others fell atop her, wrenching a terrible scream from her collapsing lungs.

Lydia crawled onto the stage, where Jeremy was yelling at the crowd to get out, which they were already trying to do, and alternately yelling at the bloody man to stop biting the woman.

It seemed to Lydia to be such a strange thing to yell.

If the guy was biting someone, then how likely was it that he’d be reasonable enough to take Jeremy’s suggestion to heart? What was he supposed to do? Let her go, spit out what was left of her throat, give a rueful apology and buy a round for the house?

She got to her feet and from the stage platform was able to see what was actually happening there at Trickster’s.

She saw.

She screamed.

Beside her, Jeremy was still yelling at the crowd. Across the club, Tom Segura was running from the bloody man and throwing chairs at him. Most of the chairs were hitting the guys who were trying to throw punches at the intruder.

The bloody man snatched one of the chairs out of the air and swung it into the face of a burly football player who was winding up a haymaker. The football player went down hard.

Two other guys piled atop the bloody man, punching him with both fists. Lydia lost sight of the killer for a moment, then she heard a piercing shriek, and one of the guys reeled back clutching a hand from which blood spurted from the stumps of two fingers that were now missing beyond the first knuckles. The second guy rolled off, clutching his throat, and Lydia couldn’t tell what the bloody man had done to him. Punched him?

Tom waded in as the killer was rising to his feet, swinging yet another chair, but someone stepped into the path of the swing, and for a moment Lydia couldn’t understand what she was seeing.

It was the woman who’d been bitten.

Her face and clothes were splashed with her own blood and there was a black, ragged hole in the front of her throat, but she bared her teeth and leapt at Tom like a cat. They both went down and Lydia lost sight of her friend.

Then she was moving. She snatched the microphone stand from in front of Jeremy and leaped off the stage. She was only five-one and the mike stand was taller than she was, but Lydia took it in a two-handed grip and swung it with all the force and focus of a Major League ballplayer. The chrome shaft made a glittering arc and the heavy black base hit the woman who was atop Tom right in the side of the head. There was a meaty crunch that sent such a shockwave up the length of the stand that it shivered it right out of Lydia’s hands. She staggered backward and collided with someone. She felt hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her backward. Lydia pivoted and swung her right arm as hard as she could to dislodge the grabbing hands. She didn’t need any Galahad to pull her to safety. Lydia knew how to fight, mean and dirty, and she wasn’t about to let some psycho bastard hurt Tom.

But as she spun she looked up into the face of the man who’d grabbed her.

A tall man.

Bare-chested.

Ugly and powerful.

Covered in blood from eyes to knees.

A man who smiled at her. A man whose dark eyes looked her up and down.

“Nice,” he said. “Juicy.”

And they he lunged at her, teeth snapping.

It’s not funny, she thought. This isn’t funny.

Those were her last thoughts and then all she saw was a big, black nothing.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

It was too dark down in the hole and there were too many monsters, so Billy Trout fought his way back to the surface. He came awake with a cry.

For a moment he did not know where he was. The world seemed to be moving.

The ceiling was low and curved and seemed to be made out of metal.

He heard voices.

Prayers and whispers.

People crying with dry, broken sobs that seemed to cling to the ragged edge of sanity. Other voices, younger and more plaintive, called for mothers and fathers and were not answered. One voice kept repeating the word “no” in a relentless monotone.

Pain was the next thing Trout became aware of. Intense pain, and in many places. His nose, his chest, his ribs. His shoulder.

Oddly, his back no longer hurt, as if somehow whatever had been dislocated before had slid back into place. What a small and random mercy that was. It felt cheap and out of place when so many others were so badly hurt and needed comfort more than he did.

A shape moved above him and it took Trout several seconds to focus his eyes.

Woman shape. Blond, haggard, filthy.

Beautiful.

“Dez…” he breathed.

Dez Fox bent and kissed his forehead, and his eyes, and his lips. Then she bent and whispered into his ears. “Don’t ever leave me, Billy Trout. Don’t you dare.”

He constructed what he hoped was a smile. “Not a chance.”

The bus — for that’s now what he realized it was — jounced and bounced as it rolled. Trout tried to sit up and nearly passed out again. He took a ragged breath and tried it again, this time with her help.

“Where are we?”

“Center of town,” she said. “Doll Factory.”

Trout saw Sam Imura sitting with Gypsy near the front of the bus. They sat in identical postures, forearms on knees, heads bent. In weariness or defeat?

No, he realized. In grief.

“Moonshiner?” Trout asked quietly.

Dez shook her head. “No.”

“Damn.”

“We … we lost Uriah Piper, too. And Mrs. Madison. Ten others.”

He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the way those words twisted her mouth. “Any of the kids?”

“No,” she said. Tears cut silvery scars through the grime on her face. “We saved the kids, Billy. We saved them.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

Homer Gibbon said, “You get it all done? You upload all the film we did? The interviews and such?”

“Everything,” said Goat weakly. “Everything’s out there.”

It was true. All of the video files had been uploaded to YouTube, with crosslinks on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Goat could only imagine the feeding frenzy.

He’d also sent Volker’s notes out. By now it had been received by thousands and thousands of news sources. He even sent it to the White House, the CDC, and the Department of Homeland Security. Maybe it would do some good.

But he had his doubts.

While he waited for Homer, Goat checked the online news services. Lucifer 113 was already spreading beyond Stebbins. The president was set to address the nation, and the Emergency Broadcast Network had replaced most of the regular stations.

This was it. This was the actual end.

Volker had called it a doomsday weapon, and tonight was the first night of the end of the world. Goat was sure of it.

He was certain for two reasons.

First, because of the news stories of the infection spreading. He didn’t know — nor, apparently did the reporters — whether the “viral outbreak” as they were calling it, could be contained and eradicated. Maybe it could. There were some pretty extreme measures the government could take.

The other reason Goat believed that the doors to hell were swinging open — the reason that filled him with true despair — was the insight he’d had while waiting for Homer to come out of the comedy club. It was a process. It was an analysis of character motivation, and Goat dissected it the way he would with actors playing roles in a movie. His training, after all, was movie direction.

“I think I understand now,” said Goat.

Homer grunted. “What?”

“I understand. I get it.”

The killer glanced at him. “What is it you think you get?”

“Your plan.”

“My plan? I don’t have a plan.”

“Okay, let me put it another way,” said Goat. “I think I understand what the Red Mouth is telling you to do. I think I can envision what the Black Eye wants everyone to see.”

Homer smiled. It looked like a genuine smile, too. “You had a vision?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what? Did the Red Mouth start whispering in your ear?”

“Maybe,” said Goat, “it sort of came to me.”

“What do you mean? What are you seeing?”

“You’re just going to drive across country, stopping every once in a while for a bite, and then keep going. You want to spread this thing as far and as wide as possible. You want to kill the whole fucking world, don’t you?”

Homer thought about it for a while as they drove on through the rain. “Yeah, that about says it.”

“Is any of that stuff about the meek inheriting the earth true? Was any of that what you believe or was it all bullshit for the camera?”

Homer’s smile was slow and sly. “Does it really matter, boy?”

“I need to know.”

The lights of the big rigs in the opposite lane illuminated Homer Gibbon as he smiled again and shrugged.

“Wait … that’s it?” demanded Goat. “You put me through all this shit and then you brush me off with a fucking shrug?”

“What’s it matter to you?” asked the killer. “It’s all going to work out the same whether it’s true or not.”

Goat made a disgusted sound low in his throat.

“Dr. Volker told me what I am and you know what that is, don’t you, boy?”

Goat said nothing.

“I’m a fucking zombie. I’m already dead. You ever wonder why I move like I got arthritis? You don’t know your basic medicine? I got rigor mortis. That means I’m already rotting. I may hear the Red Mouth speak to me, but when I look into the future with the Black Eye, you know what I see? I see me fucking dead and gone, motherfucker.” Homer suddenly struck the steering wheel with the heel of his palm. “That’s what I fucking see. Me. Dead. So I figured what the fuck. I might as well turn this into a party town. If I got to go then everybody’s got to come with me. Every-fucking-body. And, yeah, to answer your question, I do believe. And what I believe is that life’s a bitch and then we all fucking die. But not alone, boy. Not alone.”

Homer punctuated his remarks with a brutal laugh. Totally without mirth or humanity. A dead man’s laugh. A killer’s laugh.

“It’s the end of the world, boy. Just like the song says. And you know what? I feel just fine.”

Goat stared at him and something in his head seemed to break. To snap. To tear open. Maybe it was the Black Eye opening so he could see his own future. Maybe it was that. If so, the future that Goat saw was that of a desolated world. It was a wasteland of disease and rot, and there, standing amid an endless crowd of unmoving, unthinking, undying dead, was his own body. Robbed of life, of hope, of any possibility of anything. It was the ugliest thing he could imagine. Bleak and pointless.

He leaned closer to Homer Gibbon, wanting to see the killer’s face clearly in the whitewash of headlines. As each of the big interstate truckers whisked by he saw that evil face in a stark strobe. Each blink, each flash image, was identical. Inert, eternal, irredeemable.

He said, “Fuck you.”

Then he grabbed the steering wheel in both hands, shoved it to the left with all his strength, and sent the Escalade careening into the headlights of a monstrous eighteen-wheel Freightliner pulling a full load of steel I-beams. Right into eighty thousand pounds driving at eighty-two miles an hour.

Although the impact opened a thousand red mouths in the flesh of Homer Gibbon, they whispered no secrets; and the Black Eye went forever blind.