But Rob caught the arm of the jouster.
“No,” he said urgently. “There’s too many.”
“Christ, we have to do something…”
“I know. Come on.”
Rob dragged him toward the prop shed, which was bolted to the side of the greenroom trailer. Rob fished the key from his pocket, jammed it into the padlock, threw the lock and chain into the mud, and yanked the doors open. With only a quick worried glance at the jouster, Rob began pulling items from the shed. He pressed a broadsword into the jouster’s hands and then, almost as an afterthought, pulled a rondache shield from the rack and handed it to him.
“The fuck, man,” growled the jouster, holding up the sword, “it’s not even sharp.”
“Yeah, but it’s fucking heavy.” He grabbed his own long-sword—an exquisite replica of the ninth-century Viking Sæbø sword—and another of the round shields. Then he and the jouster turned and began running.
Some of the strangers were sprinting or staggering across the field toward them. They howled like animals. Their bodies were pale and wrong, and some of them had terrible wounds on their faces and arms and throats.
“Jesus Christ!” cried the jouster as two of them closed on him, racing forward with waxy white fingers.
The jouster was frozen in shock and indecision, so Rob shouldered him out of the way. He smashed one of the strangers in the face with the shield and struck the other one across the face with the flat of his sword.
The blows were heavy, backed by a lot of muscle and mass, powered by fear and a surge of adrenaline. The strangers staggered, slipped in the mud, and fell.
And then they got back up again.
Rob blinked in confusion.
The strangers snarled, revealing teeth that were smeared with blood so dark it was almost black. Then they launched themselves at him.
Once more Rob swung the rondache at one of the strangers. The shield was made of leather-covered wood with plates of metal studded with nails. Although the swords were unsharpened, the shields had to be fully functional or the performers would be crippled if they failed to block. Rob drove the metal edge of the rondache into the biting mouth of the closest attacker, and suddenly black blood and pieces of teeth filled the air. The man went down, but he writhed in the mud, trying to get back to his feet. Rob pivoted and brought his sword around in an overhand cut that packed muscle and gravity into the blow. Even without a sharpened edge, the second man’s head burst apart, showering Rob and the jouster with brain matter and more of the black blood.
They reeled back, spitting out the blood, gagging at the horror of what had just happened.
Then they heard feet slopping in the mud and they turned to see a dozen of the strangers running toward them.
Rob and the jouster exchanged a brief look.
For years they’d played the roles of warriors—swordsmen and knights, Viking raiders, Roman soldiers, even pirates. They’d each fought in thousands of duels, and on their off days they fenced with their peers. They were superb swordsmen and each of them held weapons with which their hands and reflexes and minds were perfectly attuned.
So despite the absolute madness and unreality of this moment, deep in the hearts of each of them some ancient voice cried out a challenge. A warrior’s call to arms. A bellow that would not have been out of place on the medieval battlefields of feudal Europe. As they yelled, their mouths began to curl into fierce smiles as if remembering those ancient days of bloodshed and glory.
With swords in hand, thy rushed forward to meet the charge, hacking and smashing.
The crowd of zombies swept over them in seconds.
But oh, how glorious those seconds were.
CHAPTER NINETY-NINE
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Dez said, “What in the big green fuck was that all about?”
“Goat has the drives and I just told him that he needs to upload the contents and get them out.”
“I didn’t hear that,” said Dez.
“I did,” said Sam Imura. “And it was mighty damn clever. You think your friend understood what you were saying?”
“Positive.”
“Good.” He took the phone from Trout and removed the cable he’d jammed into it as soon as he realized who was on the other end of the call. The cable was plugged into a small computer strapped to Imura’s forearm, and the captain spent a few seconds tapping keys.
“What’s that?” asked Dez. “You running a trace?”
“Trying to. We already pinged the satellite Goat used earlier when he broadcast Billy’s messages from here. And…” His voice trailed off as he read the display. Then he snapped his fingers and one of his people hurried over with a different sat phone connected to a portable battery pack. Sam snatched the phone and made a call, which was answered immediately. “Sir … we may have caught a break. Goat Weinman is still alive and we’re reasonably sure he has the flash drives in his possession. The call was too short to get an exact fix on him. He’s in Pennsylvania, closing in on the suburbs of Pittsburgh. We need a team monitoring the frequency of his sat phone, and we need people watching the Net. Goat is going to upload videos of Homer Gibbon. Interviews. They should be large files, which means fairly long upload times. Once the first is up we need to capture his computer signature and backtrack him. He may try to upload the Volker files at the same time, so we have to put together a pattern search that includes as many keywords as we think might be in the Volker files. I suggest the Latin names of the parasites. They’re not likely to be in any other uploads tonight. Search on those and then feed that to the ground forces. We’ll need all local and state police in on that, too.” Sam listened for a few seconds, and then said, “No, sir, I don’t think that’s an option. The storm’s getting worse. There’s no way a chopper’s going up in this, which means that my team is too far away. I’m handing the football back to you.” He listened again. “That’s not how I see it, Scott. I do have my priorities straight. I’m not in a position to be of use in the manhunt, but there are other fights worth fighting.”
Trout thought he heard Blair yelling as Sam ended the call. The captain handed the sat phone back to his soldier.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve actually been a big help.”
“If it works out,” said Trout.
“Sure, if it works out.”
“Now what?” asked Dez bitterly. “You and your goon squad waltz off and leave us ass-deep in the alligator swamp?”
Sam smiled. He had a lot of very white teeth. “Actually, Officer Fox, I was rather hoping that I could help you get a few hundred kids the hell out of this particular ring of hell.”
Dez and Trout stared at him.
“What?” they asked in unison.
“You said that you wanted to load the buses and take the kids somewhere safe? Well, if you could use five very well-armed bodyguards, consider us part of your team.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
THE NORTHERN LEVEES
FAYETTE COUNTY
Jake DeGroot realized that he couldn’t hide in a wet hole all night.
They might find him.
The soldiers. And the …
He had no word for the other things. Things like the girls. Like his friends. Like Burl.
Just because they hadn’t found him so far didn’t meant they wouldn’t.
Or couldn’t.
He had no real idea what they could or couldn’t do.
He had to move. To get out of the hole.
Before that.
And before he froze to death.
Jake knew that it wasn’t really cold enough for that, but the water was cold enough to numb him. He remembered seeing something about hypothermia on an old episode of Survivorman. His teeth chattered constantly, shivers swept over him in waves, and he didn’t like the way his heart was beating. No, he didn’t like that one bit. He was a big man, and the last thing he needed now was a heart attack. Or slow feet because his
nerves were in some kind of shock.
But leaving the pit … That was so scary. It made his balls want to climb up inside his body. It made him want to cry. Or scream.
Or go to sleep.
That was the other problem.
Between working hard all day yesterday and last night, and then lying here for hours in the cold, he was getting weirdly drowsy. He kept nodding off and then jerking awake when his face fell into the water.
“Got to get out of here.”
He didn’t know he was going to say it out loud until he’d said it. His voice sounded ridiculously loud and very strange. There was a sharp note of panic in his voice. A whine that was almost a sob.
He didn’t like that, either.
“I’m losing my shit here,” he told himself, trying to make his voice sound normal and reasonable. It didn’t.
The rain was heavy, relentless. The ditch was so completely filled that the whole area was becoming a small lake.
“You’re going to drown here, you dumb fuck.”
There was anger in his voice now. That was better.
Better.
Even so it took Jake another three minutes to will his right arm to rise out of the water. Not because it was so numb with cold—which it was—but because he was numb with terror. There was no light except what flashed across the sky, and all that showed him was water, mud, and the bodies left behind by the soldiers.
Burl.
“Move, goddamn it. Move, move, move, move.”
His right arm came up slowly, rising to the surface, then above it, and finally out toward the mud beyond the ditch. The rain immediately washed the mud from his hand, and when the next lightning flashed he was horrified to see how pale he was. Blue-white. Corpselike.
Like one of them.
“It’s the cold, asshole,” he told himself. “It’s just the cold.”
He reached for higher ground at the edge of the pit, but his fingers sank into the mud and found nothing to hold. He tried again and did nothing more than splash and stir the water in which he lay.
“No,” he said, and that note of panic was back in his voice, stronger and sharper than before. Jake tried it with both hands. Nothing. He tried to kick against the near edge of the ditch, but his feet sank to the ankles. It took real effort to pull his feet out again. The right one came first, plopping free of the mud, but as he pulled the left one out he felt his shoe slide over the bulb of his heel.
Then he heard the sound.
Off to his right, on the other side of Big Bird, his yellow front-end loader.
It was a splash, but it was too heavy to be rainwater.
He froze and listened.
Another splash.
And another.
Each one just a little louder and more distinct than the last. Coming closer to where he wallowed in the mud.
“Oh, Jesus…”
At the sound of his voice the sounds of splashing paused for one moment and then began again. Not faster, but faster. Coming around the end of Big Bird. Coming in his direction.
He heard the other sound then.
The moan.
Jake almost screamed, knowing it for what it was.
One of them.
Stay or go, stay or go? He was trapped inside a bubble of indecision for a terrible long moment. Then the splashes got even louder, and suddenly Jake was moving. His whole body thrashed and twisted like a beached dolphin. He pawed at the mud and kicked and wormed his way up the edge of the pit.
Closer and closer. The moan louder. A single voice raised in a plaintive cry.
Jake was halfway out of the pit when he saw it.
It was a man. A stranger. Dressed in a business suit, jacket torn, tie askew to expose a ravaged throat.
For an awful moment their eyes met. The man in the mud and the thing in the rain. Then with a cry like a wild animal, the creature rushed at him, hands outstretched. Jake screamed and tried to scramble away, got halfway to his feet, and then it was on him, slamming into him, knocking them both down so they slid back into the muddy pit under the front-end loader. It clawed at Jake, trying to grab him, trying to pull him toward teeth that snapped and clacked.
Jake punched it, hitting the infected man in the face, in the throat, in the chest, but it was hard to find the balance and resistance to throw a solid punch. Jake was six-eight and more than three hundred pounds and this man couldn’t have been more than two hundred, but in the mud and water they were evenly matched.
Except that the thing did not react to any of Jake’s punches. Jake felt cartilage collapse beneath his knuckles as he hammered at its nose and throat. He felt bones crack in the face and temple and ribs. And he felt pain explode in his fingers and knuckles and wrists as the impacts took their toll while the struggle reawakened shocked nerve endings.
But the thing kept fighting as if pain was not even connected to its existence.
And maybe it wasn’t.
This thing was like Burl and those girls. It couldn’t have been alive. Not with the injuries it had. And yet it was fighting. It was a monster.
A monster.
He rammed his forearm under its chin and pressed the damned thing down into the mud. Inch by inch he pulled himself atop until finally he straddled it, pinning its arms down, battering its head deeper and deeper into the mud.
“Die you motherfucker!” he shouted, then choked on spit and snot and mud.
Jake kept shoving it down, using his massive body to try and smother it, bury it. Mud filled its mouth. The bones of its throat crumbled to nothing. And yet … those hands kept flailing beneath Jake’s shins. Buried in mud and drowned, battered to a wreck, it kept flailing.
Jake sobbed with helpless terror. He fought a thing that could not be whipped and his own understanding of the world began warping at the edges, pieces flying off it until everything seemed distorted and surreal.
Something inside Jake’s head broke.
Not a bone, not anything physical.
Something much deeper.
Something in his mind that was stretched to its farthest limit could not stretch any further and it snapped.
The blackness became blacker still as his eyes filled with dark poppies that blossomed like fireworks. He heard a weird tearing sound in his ears and an animal growl that he could feel coming from his own throat. The growl turned into a roar as Jake reared back and tore the dead thing out of the mud, then grabbed its chin and a fistful of hair and with more raw power than he had ever put into a single action ever in his life, he wrenched the head around. Bones exploded inside the savaged throat and still Jake turned. The body stopped struggling, and still Jake turned. His mind began falling into a dark, red well and still Jake turned.
And then he was pitching sideways, all resistance gone, the hair and chin locked inside his hands, but the creature’s torso flopping the other way.
Jake plunged into the waters, still holding the head.
He lay there for a moment and in that moment he heard, saw, felt, and tasted nothing. There was nothing. Only a vast blackness.
Then …
Water seeped past the spasm in his throat and he inhaled it.
With a wracking, aching, gargling cry he came awake again. Lightning flashed and its reflection lit the underside of the front-end loader’s bucket. Jake saw what he held in his hands and with a choking cry of disgust he flung it away, and then he was scrambling again, thrashing his way out of the pit, away from the headless thing, away from the reality of what he’d just done.
The screams that made it through the coughs were high and shrill and inhuman.
He got sloppily to his knees and tried to run, but gravity and balance were at war and all he could manage was a sloppy lope on all fours. He fell, got up, fell again, and finally managed to get to his feet, and there he stood, wide-legged, wide-armed, letting the rain assault him as he screamed.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGT
ON, D.C.
“Where the hell is General Zetter?” thundered the president.
General Burroughs had a phone to his ear, but he said, “There’s no technical problem, Mr. President. We pinged the lines and everything’s working. However no one is picking up.”
“Get some-damn-body on the phone,” the president insisted. “I want to know what the hell is happening.”
Aides scrambled to call secondary contacts.
“Sir—sir—” yelled one. “I have one of the helicopter pilots on the line. Lieutenant Mills. Putting the call on the speaker.”
“… ah, Christ this hurts … Jesus…”
“Lieutenant Mills,” said the president loudly, “this is the president. I need you to give me a sit rep.”
“Sir? Sir…?”
The pilot’s voice was filled with panic and pain.
“Listen to me, son,” said the president, “I need you to take a breath and tell me what is happening. Can you do that?”
They heard the man take a long, hissing inhalation. Then in a voice that was a fraction steadier, the pilot said, “It’s … it’s all falling apart.”
“Are you injured, son? Can you tell me that much?”
“The bites … damn, you never think they could hurt this bad.”
The president closed his eyes. “Son … do you know what happened to General Zetter?”
There was a very long pause filled only with rapid breathing that was close to hyperventilation. Then in a substantially weaker voice, the pilot said, “He wasn’t bitten. I’m sure about that. None of them were.”
“Who wasn’t bitten?”
“The general. Everyone in the command truck. I was with them. I was on the ground by then. We weren’t anywhere near the fighting. Nobody was bitten. But … but … oh God. We thought he was sick, you know? From the dust cloud after we dropped the fuel-air bombs. We thought it was just from breathing the ash. But, damn it, nobody was bit. Not until … not until it all went to shit. General Zetter, Captain Rice. All of them. They went apeshit. Ah, jeez … I think they clipped the artery. The tourniquet’s not doing shit. Oh God, oh God.”
“Where is General Zetter?” asked the president.