He did, however, feel it.
But only for a moment.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
ROUTE 653
BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
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
THE Q-ZONE
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
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
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
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
WHAT THE FINKE THINKS
WTLK LIVE TALK RADIO
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
“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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
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
TOWN OF STEBBINS
ONE MILE INSIDE THE Q-ZONE
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.”