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
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
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
THE NORTHERN LEVEE
FAYETTE COUNTY
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? Yo
u 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.