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
STEBBINS–FAYETTE COUNTY LINE
NORTH OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
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 glo
w 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 capabl
e 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.
SOUTH OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
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.