“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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
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
STEBBINS–FAYETTE COUNTY LINE
EAST OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
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.
EAST OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
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…?”