But there was no answer.
None at all.
Which was too much answer for everyone in the Situation Room.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Billy Trout was no damn use at all to anyone. He knew it and everyone else knew it. Too much of him was bruised or strained, which meant he couldn’t drag bodies—and body parts—out of the buses, and he couldn’t work the janitor’s power-hose to wash away the black blood. It was gruesome work and he was not sorry that he couldn’t help.
Instead he set up his camera and began filming it. That and everything else.
With the jamming off, he put together a new field report, explaining the facts as he knew it, with many of the blanks filled in by Sam Imura.
It surprised Trout how forthcoming Sam was, and he pulled him aside for a moment to ask about that. They stood by a window that looked down on the parking lot and the rows of big yellow school buses.
“I’ve interviewed a lot of cops, soldiers, and federal types in the past,” Trout said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever had one actually spill the goods without either going off the record or prosecuting a personal agenda. In a nutshell, what gives?”
Sam shook his head. “I come from a long line of realists. My dad’s one. He’s a cop in California, in a small town out near Yosemite. He was never the kind to pad the truth or get behind an ‘official’ story. Dad believes that the truth is the truth.”
“No one I ever met in Washington agrees.”
“They can’t,” said Sam. “They’re politicians, and politics is about leverage, not about the truth. Not sure I ever heard a politician ever give a straight answer to anything. Everything’s agenda-based with them.”
“Okay, but you work for a bureaucrat.”
“Sure, but Scott Blair’s a lot like my dad. He’s not very well liked in D.C. because he always wants to cut to the bottom line.”
“He’s the one who wanted the president to bomb us back to the Stone Age?”
Sam met his eyes and nodded. “Yes, he was.”
“Nice.”
“Tell me something, Billy. Considering what’s happened and how things might be if POTUS followed Scott’s recommendation … do you think he made a bad call? Or do you think the president was right to cave and send the bombers back to the barn?”
“That’s unfair. You’re asking me to say whether it’s right or wrong to kill six hundred kids.”
“Take fairness out of the equation. Look at it for exactly what it is, a problem of survival. Not of a few, but survival of the species. Take a step back and look at the real problem, the big picture, Billy, and tell me what we should have done?”
“First, tell me the absolute truth … is it really that bad out there?”
“Yes.” Sam said it without hesitation.
“Are we in danger of losing control of this whole thing?”
Sam’s face turned to stone. “Billy, we may have already lost control of this thing. The math is so bad. There are so many ways this can go bad on us, and almost no way that we can put this genie back into the bottle.”
“You’re saying we’ve lost? Christ, Sam, is that what you’re saying?”
“I … don’t know. There are still some cards we can play. And the spread will hit some natural barriers. Rivers, mountains, lakes, bridges. All of those are potential chokepoints or they can act as firebreaks. Can we get ahead of it? I don’t know. Not unless we up the game.”
“Up it from fuel-air bombs? Shit, what’s the next upgrade after that?”
Sam said nothing.
Billy looked down at his hands. “Oh, man…”
“So, again I ask you, Billy, last night, what should we have done last night?”
It hurt so much for Trout to say it, but he managed to get the words past the stricture in his throat. “You should have killed us.”
“Yes,” said Sam, “we should have killed you. And God help my soul for saying and believing that.”
They sat in silence for a moment, each of them looking at the world through that lens.
“Then why are you helping us now?” Billy asked again.
Sam nodded to the buses down in the lot and the dozens of people scrambling to prepare them for an escape. “For me and my guys it’s like being cut off behind enemy lines. Sure, we could make it back to the front, but I have a feeling that this is going to change from a gunfight—which is what we do—to a war we’re only going to be able to fight from the air. Providing the storm ever stops. In a mechanized war, we’re not much better than five extra sets of hands. It’s a waste of our specialized skill sets.” He gave Trout a rueful grin.
“And here?”
“You kidding me? Six hundred kids, two hundred civilians, and a horde of flesh-eating monsters? We might actually get to be bona fide heroes. And wouldn’t that make a nice change.”
“You’re joking.”
Sam held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Only a little.”
Down in the lot the four members of the Boy Scouts were helping with the preparations. Trout had been introduced to them only by their combat call signs and what little he could deduce about their personalities. The woman, Gypsy, was a problem solver and apparently the second in command. Moonshiner was gruff and lacked obvious warmth, unlike Boxer who seemed to wear his heart on his sleeve. Shortstop was the most detached of the bunch, very pragmatic but aloof.
“What about your team?” asked Trout, nodding out the window. “Are they on the same page as you?”
Sam nodded. “They usually are. We tend to think like a pack of…”
He stopped speaking and leaned close to the window as lightning flashed and flashed again. The soldier’s body went suddenly rigid with tension. Then he tapped his earbud.
“Team Alert, this is Ronin. I have eyes on the street beyond the north fence. We have potential hostiles. Repeat, potential hostiles.”
It was Boxer who turned first, snatching his rifle from where it lay under a jacket and out of the rain. He brought it up and snapped on the top-mounted light. The beam cut through the rain and the openings in the chain-link fence, and there, filling the street, were silent figures who moved with slow, implacable steps.
“Give me numbers,” ordered Sam.
“Christ, boss, I got forty of them. Shit, no, there’s more coming.”
Gypsy’s voice cut in. “We got more coming in from the west and…” Her words trailed away.
Boxer turned, saw what she saw, and said what Sam and Trout were only now just beginning to see.
“They’re soldiers,” said Boxer. “Oh, goddamn, it’s the National Guard. They’re all … they’re all … ah, shit.”
“Got to be fifty of them,” said Moonshiner.
Moonshiner popped a flare and sent it high into the air.
There were not fifty.
There were hundreds of them.
Torn, bleeding, shambling, and hungry.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
The experts did one threat assessment after another, each time rebuilding both outbreak and response models to fit new data.
With each new assessment the president felt the world slip away from him. He sat in his chair, fingers balled into fists on the tabletop, staring at speaking mouths and screens filled with data.
Scott Blair looked every bit as bad. He hung up from a call and rubbed his eyes. Or was he wiping at tears? The president couldn’t tell.
Blair held up a trembling hand and the room fell into a flawed and troubled silence.
“That was Dr. McReady. She’s with the NBACC field team in Fayette County. They reached General Zetter’s command post. It was deserted except for several infected. The, um, infected were all members of the Guard command staff.”
“How the hell is that even possible?” demanded General Burroughs. “If they’
d been overrun we’d have known about it.”
“That’s why Dr. McReady called. Her team was able to subdue and examine the infected at the command center. A few had been bitten, but most showed no signs of violence. No bites, nothing.”
“Then what in hell happened?” asked the president.
Tears broke from the corners of Blair’s eyes. “Dr. McReady thinks that the bombs reduced many of the infected to particulate matter and ash. Those particles still contain parasitic larvae, and the storm winds are spreading them throughout the region.”
There was a beat and for a moment some of the people around the table seemed unable to comprehend the implications.
The president wiped at his own tears. “Say the rest, Scott. Tell them.”
Blair placed his palms on the table and leaned heavily on them, his head hanging down between hunched shoulders.
“Lucifer 113 has gone airborne,” he said.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR
THE NORTHERN LEVEES
FAYETTE COUNTY
Jake DeGroot came back to himself slowly.
So slowly.
With pain and realization and horror.
He stood in the rain and slowly looked around, trying to remember what world this was. Fifty feet away the yellow bulk of Big Bird stood like an anchor that held him to the world.
He gasped and spat out the awful tastes in his mouth, and wiped his face with the back of one big hand.
His first clear and cogent thought was that this was not an isolated event. It couldn’t be. The girls had been hurt—Killed? Was that the word?—somewhere else and had walked onto the construction site. That meant whatever this was didn’t start here. This wasn’t some old Indian burial ground or any of that horror movie stuff. This was something else, and whatever it was, it was happening out there.
Out … where, exactly?
The second thing he thought was that they knew about it.
They.
The government, or at least the National Guard. Those were soldiers who shot Burl and the others. Soldiers.
That meant that this thing was really damn big.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
He listened to his voice. There should be panic there, that desperate whine, but it wasn’t there. He sounded like himself. The way he should.
It was the second thing that anchored Jake DeGroot.
It helped him take a real breath.
“Think it through,” he told himself, liking the sound of his voice.
He didn’t have much family in the area. Only a niece, Jenny, who lived in Bordentown.
He could go there.
But no. Jenny was a single woman and a teacher.
With the storm, the single teachers volunteered to work at the region’s emergency shelter. The Stebbins Little School. The kids would have all been picked up, but the cops would have moved the old folks to the school. And some families from the flooded areas. The school had cots and food and a generator.
That’s where Jenny would be.
And suddenly he was very afraid. Not for himself this time. Jake thought about Jenny. She was a tiny little thing. It took everything Jake had to stop that one guy.
Jenny?
She could never …
Before Jake even realized he was doing it he began running for his car, slapping his pockets for his car keys.
And not finding them.
They’d been in his jeans pocket.
He looked back at the pit under Big Bird.
They must have fallen out. Down in the water. Down in the mud.
Jake swallowed a lump the size of a fist.
“No fucking way.”
Even if he could work up the nerve to crawl down there where the dead man was, what were the chances he would find those keys in all that mud and water. After all that fighting and thrashing. His car was useless to him. Even if he knew how to hotwire it, there was no time and no tools.
His heart started to sink, but then he raised his eyes. Just a few feet.
And stared at the big metal monster.
Big Bird.
“No,” he told himself. It was too clumsy, too slow. And the school was too far.
Then he was running through the mud toward the machine.
The key for Big Bird was still where he’d left it, right in the ignition. He twisted it and the big diesel engine roared to life with a growl so loud that it sounded like a dragon rousing from a troubled slumber. He pulled the door shut, sealing himself inside the Plexiglas cab. He turned the heat to high, shifted hard, and began moving through the mud. The Cat’s top blacktop speed was forty, and the mud cut that down to less than half.
The school was eleven miles away, almost due south.
“I’m coming, Jenny,” he said aloud, and the fact of having a purpose, of having someone else to fight for, made his whole body feel as hard and powerful as the steel of the machine in which he rode.
He did not hear the crunch as the left rear tire rolled over the corpse in the mud. Nor when the right rolled across the nearly submerged body of Burl.
Or, if he did, Jake refused to allow himself to acknowledge it.
“I’m coming, Jenny.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
“Everyone back to the school!” screamed Dez, but the adults were already dropping hoses and running. She ran behind them, shoving the slower ones, chasing them all to safety. “Check the doors. Keep the kids away from the windows. Move … move.”
Moonshiner and Shortstop laid their rifles atop the front and rear hoods of a burned-out police car. Boxer climbed atop one of the buses and Gypsy went into another one and pointed her gun out the window. Only Sam and Trout stood their ground.
“We’d better get inside,” warned Trout, but Sam didn’t move.
“There are so many of them,” he said softly.
Dez ran back to join them, her Glock in a two-handed grip, face set and hard.
“You want to fight them here?” she asked incredulously. “There are too many ways they can come at us.”
The dead were closing in. The nearest ones were fifty feet beyond the fence.
“It’s your house,” said Sam. “It’s your call.”
“There’s more coming across the yards,” called Boxer, pointing. They turned and saw more of the infected staggering through the lines of connected yards to the east.
“Dez,” said Trout, taking her by the arm, “this is stupid. There are too many of them. Let’s get inside.”
But Dez pulled her arm free. “No.” She turned to them. “Listen, Billy, Sam—we can reinforce the building and hole up, but for how long? The supplies we have won’t last. Sam, can you guarantee that the army’s coming back for us?”
The answer was on Sam’s face. “This is falling apart. I don’t think anyone can make promises right now.”
“What are you saying?” asked Trout. “That we could be stuck here for weeks?”
“Billy … I’m saying if this keeps going the way it’s going, then no one will be coming for us.”
“Until when?”
Sam shook his head. “We could lose this war.”
“War? It’s an outbreak…”
Sam pointed to the dead soldiers who were approaching the fence. “Not anymore.”
Trout felt his blood turn to ice. He cut a look at Dez, who looked horrified, but she was nodding to herself.
“How long can your team hold them on the other side of the fence?” she breathed. “How much time can you buy us?”
The soldier’s mouth tightened. “How much time do you need?”
“An hour,” she said. “Maybe less.”
“To do what?” demanded Trout.
“To do what we started out to do. Get all the supplies and everyone in the school onto the buses.”
“And then what?”
“We get the fuck out of here.”
“And go where?”
/>
“I don’t know,” she said. “Philly? New York?”
“No,” said Sam. “Go south. Go to Asheville.”
“North Carolina?” asked Dez. “Why there?”
“Because the storm is heading east. Roads will be bad and they’ll be blocked. Because everyone running from this will be going east. And we can’t go west because when we pinged Goat Weinman’s satellite phone it was clear he was heading northwest. Maybe to Pittsburgh. We should go south and get into the mountains.”
“Sure, but why Asheville?” asked Trout. “Why there specifically?”
Sam hesitated for a moment. “There is a government installation there.”
“Since when?” Dez asked skeptically. “I never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have. It was built during the Cold War. The mountains there are honeycombed with miles and miles of labs, living quarters, the works.”
“That’s just an urban legend,” said Trout. “I read about that. It’s not real.”
“It’s real. In the event of a nuclear exchange it was deemed a save zone because it’s outside of the prevailing drift patterns for likely nukes.”
“Hey,” called Gypsy, “somebody out there want to make a fucking decision? We’re going to be dancing with these things pretty soon.”
Sam touched Dez’s sleeve. “It’s there. Trust me.”
Dez met his eyes, searching them for truth and trust. Then she nodded. “Okay.”
“Good,” said Sam, looking relieved. “We’ll hold them as long as we can. You better get your asses in gear. Hurry!”
Dez spun and ran for the building. They could hear her shouting orders before she was even inside.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
The president stood up slowly and walked the length of the room until he stood in front of the big screen. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, appearing to stare into the middle distance.
“Mr. President,” said Scott Blair, “we’re starting to get reports of random attacks in other places. Harrisburg, Gettysburg…”
“How?” asked Sylvia Ruddy. “How is that possible? None of the infected could walk those distances, and the winds can’t have reached there yet.”