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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
“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
TOWN OF STEBBINS
TWO MILES INSIDE THE Q-ZONE
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 y
oung 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.