“Survivors,” said Blair. “People in cars or trucks. Either bitten or people who breathed in the ash. We know that some escaped the containment. We have to shut down the highways and the airports. Trains and buses, too. We need roadblocks. If we have to, we can blow the tunnels and bridges on the major highways.”
The president nodded, and phones were snatched up to make those calls.
“Sir,” said Ruddy, “I think we need to initiate the Emergency Broadcast Network.”
Another nod.
“I’ll draft a speech to the nation,” she said, and hurried out.
After she was gone, the president turned slowly to face his tableful of generals.
“Talk to me about nuclear alternatives,” he said.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
BESSEMER COURT
WEST STATION SQUARE DRIVE
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
“You said you need to connect to the Net, right?” asked Homer.
Goat looked up from his laptop. He was cutting Homer’s diatribes into video bites that would be short enough to be watch in their entirety.
“Yes. I have several bits ready to go up on YouTube. Why?”
Homer tapped the windshield, and Goat peered through the whisking wipers to see the words “FREE WI-FI” glowing in blue neon on the front of a redbrick building.
“How long’s this gonna take?” asked the killer.
Goat hedged. “Video files are big,” he said slowly. “Takes a while for them to upload and—”
“You need both hands to do that shit?”
Goat immediately flinched back, pulling his hands back as far as he could get them from the murderous madman. But Homer laughed. A deep, creaking bray.
“I ain’t gonna eat your hands, you dumb shit,” he guffawed. “Jesus. You’re fucking hilarious sometimes.”
“Why—why did you ask?”
“’Cause I want to go inside for a minute and I want you here where I get back.”
“I don’t—”
Homer reached into the backseat and produced a coil of heavy, hairy twine. It was brown and the spiky hairs made it look like a vast, coiled centipede. “Took this out of that last place. Useful shit. Gimme your left hand. C’mon, give it here unless you want me to take it.”
With great reluctance, Goat slowly extended his trembling hand. Homer caught his wrist with fingers that were as cold and damp as worms but as strong as steel. He jerked Goat’s arm toward the steering wheel and then began looping the hairy twine around wrist, steering column, and between the spokes if the wheel. He tied sophisticated knots in the twine, looped more twine, tied additional knots, and then pulled on the ends until the bulb of each knot was compressed into a tiny, rock-hard nugget.
“That ought to do ’er,” he said, admiring his work. He gave Goat a friendly grin. “You only need one hand to jerk off with, right, boy?”
“I—”
“You set about putting my story out there for people to see and hear. You do that while I go see some folks about something I need.”
“What is it? What are you going to do? What is this place? Why are we here?”
Homer’s friendly grin became lupine. “You ain’t figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out?”
“What I am.”
“I … know what you are. I mean I understand what Dr. Volker did to you. I know about Lucifer 113.”
“I ain’t talking about no zombie bullshit, boy. Try again.”
Goat licked his lips. “I understand about the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. Is that what you mean?”
The killer sat there for a long moment, his eyes flicking back and forth between Goat’s as if looking for something first in the left, then the right, and over again. It was like the flickering of a candle. “You listened to everything I said and you sat as a witness to everything I done tonight, and you still don’t understand. That’s a damn shame, boy, ’cause I thought you were going to be my apostle. I thought you were like Luke and John and all those holy men who wrote the Bible. I thought I could use you to tell the truth. The real and gospel truth.”
The shift in Homer’s voice and phrasing was immediately chilling. Instead of the faux homespun shit-kicker lingo, these few sentences were spoken in a slow, more precise manner. Goat had noted it only once before, when Homer discussed the way the Red Mouth spoke through him to tell the truth. He wanted to replay that clip, to listen once more to what the man said then because now he felt—no, he was absolutely certain—that it was far more important that the pseudoreligious rant of a psychopathic killer. He saw the dangerous look of cold disappointment in Homer’s eyes and knew that he needed to do something right now.
He said, “I’m trying to understand,” he said, making his words come out with equally slow and sober gravitas. “I want to understand. But the apostles—how many of them understood right away? They had to think about it, to witness it, to let it speak through them, right?”
Goat was Jewish but he’d seen enough movies to know the basic New Testament story. He’d even watched parts of that old Jesus of Nazareth miniseries during a filmmaking class. He grabbed for every detail he could snatch out of memory.
“Peter … the one who was Jesus’s right-hand man. He didn’t get it at first, but look what happened. He’s the role model for the pope, right? He was a fisherman and don’t they say that the pope wears the shoes of the fisherman?”
He wasn’t sure if this was exactly true or if it was something else from another movie. It sounded more or less right.
“And all the others,” Goat continued, keeping the rhythm of it going, “they became true believers. And Paul, what about Paul, remember him? He was kind of a prick and a bad guy and then something happened to him on the road to Damascus and suddenly he’s writing most of the New Testament.” He paused, giving the moment a dramatic beat, choreographing it, directing his own performance. “You want me to tell your story, and I agreed to do that. If you need me to understand the secrets and mysteries of it, then you have to give me time to process it. To think it through. To let it speak inside my head and heart.”
Those were lines from an old movie, an art film about socialism in Paris, but he was pretty sure it was one Homer would never have seen. Goat twisted them to fit, pitching his tone to have a smoldering passion waiting to bloom. Or at least that’s how he imagined it if he was directing someone for this scene. He hoped he was actor enough to pull it off.
Homer Gibbon said nothing as the slow seconds ticked by. Then he reached out and touched Goat over the heart with the tip of his index finger.
“If you open your heart to the Red Mouth, you will see with the Black Eye.”
Goat swallowed. “I-I want to. Just give me time.”
The killer gave him a single, slow nod and let his finger trail down Goat’s body, over his stomach and groin, along his thigh and up cover the edge of the laptop. “You better use this thing to tell my truth, or I will—”
“Homer,” said Goat quickly, taking a terrible risk, “don’t. Look at me. Use the Black Eye to look into my eyes. See me. You don’t need to threaten me anymore. We’ve crossed a line, Homer. We’re somewhere else now.”
The moment stretched and stretched, and then Homer withdrew his hand. He reached for the door handle, but paused to pat Goat’s bound left wrist. “The rope stays on. Trust, like faith, is earned.”
Then he got out of the car and began walking, bare-chested and erect, through the rain to the building with the FREE WI-FI sign.
Goat sagged back and had to fight to keep from hyperventilating. It was an even harder struggle to keep from pissing in his pants.
Then he was in motion. Even one-handed he was fast on a laptop. He accessed the system preferences and found the Wi-Fi, connected to it, and began uploading the files. But as he did so a small window popped up telling him that his email was sent.
Email?
It was only then that he remembered the message he’d composed
way back at Starbucks.
In Bordentown. Homer Gibbon.
Quarantine failed.
It’s here …
“Oh my God,” he breathed, realizing that no one knew.
Then he thought back to the violence on the road, the helicopters, the explosions.
People knew.
But they didn’t know that Homer was loose, that he was on the road.
That he was free.
Goat used the webcam on his laptop to record a quick and desperate video message. He had no idea how much time he had—or had left—so he made it short. He gave their location, and explained what Homer had already done. He emphasized that Homer had killed people, and had wounded others. He referenced Lucifer 113 and that Homer was, for all intents and purposes, the patient zero of this plague. He ended it with a statement that was both a call to arms for the authorities and a desperate cry for help.
It took several agonizingly slow seconds for the video file to upload to his media listservs, including the one that had all of Goat’s White House correspondent colleagues. Then he posted it on YouTube and immediate deleted the file from his computer.
He kept glancing out the window at the building into which Homer had disappeared. It was a club of some kind.
What could Homer want in there?
He checked the video files of the interviews with Homer. Most were so big that they were still uploading, but many of the shorter ones were already up. He sent the same batch of them to his listserv using DropBox and WeTransfer, dumping all of the raw footage into the media cauldron, praying someone would watch it, understand its reality and importance, and act on it.
With all of that done, Goat scrolled through the video clips until he found the one in which Homer used the same eerie tone of voice. He watched it all the way through. It wasn’t long, but it hit him like a punch to the throat.
He watched it again.
And again.
It was on the third viewing that the whole truth broke through.
The awful truth.
He suddenly knew why Homer was here.
Just as he knew why Homer had stopped those other times. He knew why Homer killed, and he knew why Homer sometimes spared lives. It wasn’t mercy and it wasn’t any of his humanity connecting with individuals.
It was something else.
Something horrible.
Something far worse than anything Homer had ever done, before or after he’d become the monster that he now was.
Homer wasn’t on any vengeance kick. He wasn’t hunting for his former foster parents. No, that was too mundane and cliché a motive for a person who was hearing the kinds of voices Homer heard.
No, what Goat realized with perfect clarity was that Homer, knowing and accepting what he was, what Volker had done to him, had embraced it. He hadn’t killed everyone at the 7-Eleven, but now that made sense. He hadn’t killed them all, but he’d infected them all.
The same with the people back at Starbucks. He killed some and fed on some, but his real agenda was spreading the infection. Like some kind of nightmare blend of John the Baptist and Johnny Appleseed, Homer was on the road to spread the word of his god. To spread the gospel of the Red Mouth and the Black Eye.
To create the paradise that he’d envisioned, that he’d spoken of. A world inherited by the meek. By the mindless dead. By those raised up, as Jesus had been.
At least according to Homer’s view of the cosmos.
It was a horrible plan, but a very practical one. A workable one.
Behind them, at the 7-Eleven and the traffic jam on the road, the infection was probably already spreading. Outside of the quarantine zone.
Goat snatched up his camera and babbled all of this into a live stream. He saved it and posted it on Facebook.
Then he logged onto Foursquare, the social media app for sharing your location.
“Find us,” he begged. “Find us.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
“Okay, listen up,” said Sam into the team channel. “This is a holding action. We don’t fire until and unless there’s a danger of a breach. Watch the fences. If they start putting pressure on it, we use selective fire to drive them back, or we drop enough to block access. This is a target-rich environment but that’s also a good way to burn through too much ammo. Check your targets. Headshots only. Unless you’re pressed, take time for accuracy. Make ’em count.”
Behind them Dez and Uriah Piper had set up chains of people to bring out the hundreds of boxes of food, water, and supplies. The chains split off to feed the stuff into a dozen Type C Blue Bird school buses. Uriah Piper was running from bus to bus to start engines and check fuel levels. A couple of teachers were busy siphoning gas from buses that were too low in fuel to make a long run or too badly damaged. Each bus had a standard capacity of seventy-seven passengers and the driver, which meant that a dozen of them would easily transport the eight hundred survivors of Stebbins County with room for boxed supplies.
Jenny DeGroot had found a can of spray paint and was writing a message on the outside wall of the school, but Trout couldn’t read it at that distance. Probably a note about where the buses were going. Smart, he thought.
Trout, too dinged up to help, was recording everything and, he hoped, streaming it out to the Net. He wanted people to know. Unfortunately, he had no laptop, so he couldn’t check to see if anything was showing up on the Web.
Sam came over and looked Trout up and down. “Do you have a gun?”
“No. I’m not very good with one.”
“You’re worse without one.” He bent and removed a small automatic from an ankle holster and held it out to Trout. “Beretta 3032 Tomcat. Seven-round box magazine. Less than a pound and fits into any pocket.” He showed Trout how to use the thumb safety. “Better to have it and not need than need it and not have it.”
“One of Dez’s favorite lines.”
Sam smiled. “Dez … is she your lady? Girlfriend? Wife? Something?”
“Something. We’ve been a couple more often than you’ve had hot dinners, but recently we’ve been on a break.”
“A ‘break’?”
“As in she keeps threatening to break parts of me I don’t want broken.”
“I joined the army because war is easier than love,” said Sam.
“Very wise words.” Trout glanced over at Dez. “She’s a foul-mouthed redneck who is, politically speaking, to the extreme right of Glenn Beck, but even with all that I love her. Always have.”
“That street go both ways?”
Trout sighed. “Not lately.”
“Ah.”
“I mean … apocalypse and all. Not a hearts-and-flowers sort of thing.”
“I hear ya.”
“Tell you what, though,” said Trout. “For all of her rough edges—she has the biggest heart. She’d die for any one of those kids, and for most of the adults, too. No, that’s not quite right. She’d happily and mercilessly kill for those kids.”
Sam nodded. “A warrior rather a soldier.”
Trout cocked an eyebrow. “There’s a difference?”
“Soldiers are called to serve and when their service is done they go home. A warrior lives on the battlefield. It is home.”
Trout studied him. “Yeah … that’s Dez.” He weighed the gun in his palm, nodded thanks, and put it into the pocket of his stained and torn sportscoat.
“Listen, Billy, I think I’d better tell you some things. I heard from my boss, Scott Blair.”
“Good news, I hope.”
“I wish … but, no. Lucifer has become an airborne pathogen now.”
“Ah … jeez…”
“Our bioweapons people are scrambling to mass-produce a different parasite that might render the infected inert. Not sure if it’ll kill them or not. I don’t think they’re sure.”
“How soon will they try that?”
Sam shook his head. “Not soon eno
ugh. I told Scott that we’re heading to Asheville. He said he’ll call ahead to make sure we get an open door.”
“Can we trust him?”
“People should have trusted Scott from the jump.”
Trout took his point, and nodded. “They still want me dead?”
Sam gave a half-smile. “No, just the opposite. They want you to get out any information you can. Scott thinks it might help some people, especially if things keep going the way they’re going.”
“Sam…” Trout said tentatively, “how bad are things? No bullshit, how bad?”
“I wasn’t joking before when I said that we were losing this war. They may have to drop nukes to stop this.”
“Are you fucking crazy? Are they?”
“It’s being looked at as the scenario resulting in the lowest number of casualties.”
And it was then that the full enormity of it hit Billy Trout. Until then, despite everything he’d seen and all that he knew, it had been a local issue. It had been a Stebbins County thing.
Now he understood.
Now his own words came back to pummel him, to lash at him.
Reporting live from the apocalypse.
“Boss!” yelled Boxer. “They’re coming!”
They spun around and saw that a mass of them were at the fence, and the chain links and piping were starting to bow inward under the combined weight of more than fifty bodies.
“Can you really hold them?” begged Trout.
Sam unslung his rifle. “Tell your girlfriend to hurry.”
The Boy Scouts took careful aim, and fired.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE
PITTSBURGH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
“Did you hear?”
Captain James Yakima looked up from the flight log at his copilot for the nonstop to Paris.
“Hear what? The riots or the storm?”
“Both, I think,” said Beecher, the copilot. “They’re shutting us down.”
“Shutting who down? Our flight?”
“The airport,” said Beecher. “At least that’s the rumor.”
“Goddamn it,” growled Yakima as he dug in his pocket for his cell. He punched in the number for his boss at Delta and had to wait six rings before the call was answered. “Carol, what’s this crap I’m hearing about the airport getting shut down?”