Except …
Except that’s not how the scene played out.
The bottle hit hard, hit with real force, hit hard enough to make a clunk that Tom could hear over the woman’s gurgling screams. Then it ricocheted off of the killer and hit the woman square in the right eye.
The bottle fell to the floor.
The killer dropped the woman right on top of it.
He turned to Tom.
And smiled with bloody teeth.
Tom thought, “Oh … shit.”
Or maybe he said it aloud. He wasn’t sure, because after that he was screaming louder and more shrilly than Jeremy.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Mr. Blair!” yelled a young officer, one of the sharpshooters from the military intelligence group. “You need to see this.”
Blair hurried over and bent to look at something on the officer’s laptop.
“What is it?”
“We were able to pick the IP address of Gregory Weinman’s computer from the files he uploaded to the Net. Well, sir, he just uploaded a new batch.”
“Is it more of Trout’s ramblings?”
“No, sir. There are several files, including what appears to be interviews with Homer Gibbon. The autodating on the video files say that the interviews were all done in the last few hours.”
“Christ!”
“And there’s more. Weinman posted a message, a plea that appears to be directed to us. To the military. He’s asking us to find him because he is with Homer Gibbon and Gibbon is spreading Lucifer.”
“Did he provide an exact location?”
The officer smiled. So strange a thing under the circumstances.
“Yes, sir, he did.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
The pain was immediate and excruciating, and Billy Trout screamed. He thrashed and beat at the woman, trying to shake her loose. The little girl shrieked, too, her voice as shrill as a seagull’s, and she began beating her tiny fists all over Trout’s face. She smashed his nose and hit him in the eye.
And then another screaming, howling thing plowed into them. It hit the zombie with so much force that teeth snapped off at the gum-line and the creature fell away. Trout instantly rolled the other way, shoving the child from him. He flopped onto his stomach and saw Dez Fox sitting astride the infected woman, fingers knotted in what was left of the woman’s hair, lifting her head and slamming it down on the concrete over and over again until the back of her skull exploded and sprayed the wet ground with brain tissue and black blood.
The little girl shrieked again and tried to rush to her mother’s defense, but Trout caught her wrist and pulled her kicking and screaming down to where he lay.
Trout was screaming, too, trying to determine how bad the bite was, trying to wriggle out of his jacket to see how soon he was going to die. The hysterical little girl kept hitting him, making it impossible to do anything. Then suddenly Dez pivoted off of the dead zombie, plucked the little girl off of him and then started tearing at Billy’s sportscoat. She yanked it down and tore his arm from the sleeve, then pawed at his shirt to find the bite.
“Am I dead?” Trout cried. “Oh, God, Dez … am I dead?”
And she kept saying, “Don’t you leave me, Billy Trout, don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking leave me, too. I’ll fucking kill you if you leave me…”
The lightning flashed and Dez used its brief light to bend close.
“God, please don’t let me be dead,” he wailed.
Dez straightened, glared at him and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It rocked his head sideways and he snorted blood from his broken nose. Then she grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and half-hauled him off the ground.
“It didn’t break the skin you stupid motherfucker.” She shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “I could fucking kill you, you stupid son of a bitch.”
Then people were crowding around them, pulling her back, lifting him to his feet, taking the little girl away from the horror that lay on the ground. Trout saw Sam there, firing a pistol instead of his sniper rifle. Moonshiner was with him, too. Firing, firing, firing.
There was an awful sound behind them and Trout turned to see another section of fence collapse and a wave of the dead come rushing into the lot. At least a hundred of them. Some fell with the fence, but the others climbed over them, shambling or running. Screaming their hunger, moaning louder than the storm. Sam fired and fired. There was no time to aim now.
Moonshiner yelled for them to get back. He dropped a spent magazine and reached for a replacement.
Which he did not have.
There was one terrible moment when his questing fingers spider-walked across his belt and harness and found nothing.
“Shit!” he said. He reversed his rifle in his hands and swung it like a baseball bat as the mass of zombies came swarming at them over the fence. Another section fell. And another. Hundreds of the dead were closing in on them.
The bus engines roared and fists pounded on the horns. Children screamed somewhere behind them. Trout kept swimming in and out of consciousness, aware that he was being half-carried, half-dragged along, but with no idea who was helping him. He saw Dez and Sam standing shoulder to shoulder, firing into the onrushing sea of the infected, trying to buy Moonshiner time to retreat.
And then the dead were on him.
“Noooooo!” howled Sam.
The big soldier swung the rifle once more and two zombies staggered back with shattered faces, but a dozen more launched themselves at him. Sam fired over and over again, killing an infected with every shot. So did Dez.
It did not matter at all.
Moonshiner vanished beneath a tidal surge of the dead.
“Get onto the bus!”
Someone was yelling that over and over again, but Trout couldn’t tell who it was. It might even have been him.
Hands reached out and grabbed Trout, pulled him, lifted him, and then he was out of the rain, inside the bus.
But where was Dez? He began thrashing, fighting the hands, struggling to get to the window to see if he could find Dez. Guns were still firing. The dead moaned like demons.
“Go, go, go!” yelled a voice.
Sam Imura.
Where was Dez?
God, thought Trout as the darkness began to drag him down, where was my Dez?
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN
TRICKSTER’S COMEDY CLUB
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
Lydia Rose was too short to see over the milling crowd.
She saw the bloody man enter the club and saw Tom throw a bottle at him, but then everything went totally to hell. People screamed and screamed as they ran for the exits. They collided with one another and tripped over tables and chairs. Lydia was buffeted back by the crowd and fell hard against the corner of the stage. Five feet in front of her a frat boy in a Pitt sweatshirt lay sprawled like a starfish, eyes open, mouth slack, as at least forty people ran over his body. Not leaping across it, but stepping on the college kid’s stomach and legs and chest. Then a skinny white woman with beaded dreads hooked a foot in the frat boy’s armpit and pitched face forward to the ground. A dozen others fell atop her, wrenching a terrible scream from her collapsing lungs.
Lydia crawled onto the stage, where Jeremy was yelling at the crowd to get out, which they were already trying to do, and alternately yelling at the bloody man to stop biting the woman.
It seemed to Lydia to be such a strange thing to yell.
If the guy was biting someone, then how likely was it that he’d be reasonable enough to take Jeremy’s suggestion to heart? What was he supposed to do? Let her go, spit out what was left of her throat, give a rueful apology and buy a round for the house?
She got to her feet and from the stage platform was able to see what was actually happening t
here at Trickster’s.
She saw.
She screamed.
Beside her, Jeremy was still yelling at the crowd. Across the club, Tom Segura was running from the bloody man and throwing chairs at him. Most of the chairs were hitting the guys who were trying to throw punches at the intruder.
The bloody man snatched one of the chairs out of the air and swung it into the face of a burly football player who was winding up a haymaker. The football player went down hard.
Two other guys piled atop the bloody man, punching him with both fists. Lydia lost sight of the killer for a moment, then she heard a piercing shriek, and one of the guys reeled back clutching a hand from which blood spurted from the stumps of two fingers that were now missing beyond the first knuckles. The second guy rolled off, clutching his throat, and Lydia couldn’t tell what the bloody man had done to him. Punched him?
Tom waded in as the killer was rising to his feet, swinging yet another chair, but someone stepped into the path of the swing, and for a moment Lydia couldn’t understand what she was seeing.
It was the woman who’d been bitten.
Her face and clothes were splashed with her own blood and there was a black, ragged hole in the front of her throat, but she bared her teeth and leapt at Tom like a cat. They both went down and Lydia lost sight of her friend.
Then she was moving. She snatched the microphone stand from in front of Jeremy and leaped off the stage. She was only five-one and the mike stand was taller than she was, but Lydia took it in a two-handed grip and swung it with all the force and focus of a Major League ballplayer. The chrome shaft made a glittering arc and the heavy black base hit the woman who was atop Tom right in the side of the head. There was a meaty crunch that sent such a shockwave up the length of the stand that it shivered it right out of Lydia’s hands. She staggered backward and collided with someone. She felt hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her backward. Lydia pivoted and swung her right arm as hard as she could to dislodge the grabbing hands. She didn’t need any Galahad to pull her to safety. Lydia knew how to fight, mean and dirty, and she wasn’t about to let some psycho bastard hurt Tom.
But as she spun she looked up into the face of the man who’d grabbed her.
A tall man.
Bare-chested.
Ugly and powerful.
Covered in blood from eyes to knees.
A man who smiled at her. A man whose dark eyes looked her up and down.
“Nice,” he said. “Juicy.”
And they he lunged at her, teeth snapping.
It’s not funny, she thought. This isn’t funny.
Those were her last thoughts and then all she saw was a big, black nothing.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN
DOLL FACTORY ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
It was too dark down in the hole and there were too many monsters, so Billy Trout fought his way back to the surface. He came awake with a cry.
For a moment he did not know where he was. The world seemed to be moving.
The ceiling was low and curved and seemed to be made out of metal.
He heard voices.
Prayers and whispers.
People crying with dry, broken sobs that seemed to cling to the ragged edge of sanity. Other voices, younger and more plaintive, called for mothers and fathers and were not answered. One voice kept repeating the word “no” in a relentless monotone.
Pain was the next thing Trout became aware of. Intense pain, and in many places. His nose, his chest, his ribs. His shoulder.
Oddly, his back no longer hurt, as if somehow whatever had been dislocated before had slid back into place. What a small and random mercy that was. It felt cheap and out of place when so many others were so badly hurt and needed comfort more than he did.
A shape moved above him and it took Trout several seconds to focus his eyes.
Woman shape. Blond, haggard, filthy.
Beautiful.
“Dez…” he breathed.
Dez Fox bent and kissed his forehead, and his eyes, and his lips. Then she bent and whispered into his ears. “Don’t ever leave me, Billy Trout. Don’t you dare.”
He constructed what he hoped was a smile. “Not a chance.”
The bus—for that’s now what he realized it was—jounced and bounced as it rolled. Trout tried to sit up and nearly passed out again. He took a ragged breath and tried it again, this time with her help.
“Where are we?”
“Center of town,” she said. “Doll Factory.”
Trout saw Sam Imura sitting with Gypsy near the front of the bus. They sat in identical postures, forearms on knees, heads bent. In weariness or defeat?
No, he realized. In grief.
“Moonshiner?” Trout asked quietly.
Dez shook her head. “No.”
“Damn.”
“We … we lost Uriah Piper, too. And Mrs. Madison. Ten others.”
He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the way those words twisted her mouth. “Any of the kids?”
“No,” she said. Tears cut silvery scars through the grime on her face. “We saved the kids, Billy. We saved them.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
Homer Gibbon said, “You get it all done? You upload all the film we did? The interviews and such?”
“Everything,” said Goat weakly. “Everything’s out there.”
It was true. All of the video files had been uploaded to YouTube, with crosslinks on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Goat could only imagine the feeding frenzy.
He’d also sent Volker’s notes out. By now it had been received by thousands and thousands of news sources. He even sent it to the White House, the CDC, and the Department of Homeland Security. Maybe it would do some good.
But he had his doubts.
While he waited for Homer, Goat checked the online news services. Lucifer 113 was already spreading beyond Stebbins. The president was set to address the nation, and the Emergency Broadcast Network had replaced most of the regular stations.
This was it. This was the actual end.
Volker had called it a doomsday weapon, and tonight was the first night of the end of the world. Goat was sure of it.
He was certain for two reasons.
First, because of the news stories of the infection spreading. He didn’t know—nor, apparently did the reporters—whether the “viral outbreak” as they were calling it, could be contained and eradicated. Maybe it could. There were some pretty extreme measures the government could take.
The other reason Goat believed that the doors to hell were swinging open—the reason that filled him with true despair—was the insight he’d had while waiting for Homer to come out of the comedy club. It was a process. It was an analysis of character motivation, and Goat dissected it the way he would with actors playing roles in a movie. His training, after all, was movie direction.
“I think I understand now,” said Goat.
Homer grunted. “What?”
“I understand. I get it.”
The killer glanced at him. “What is it you think you get?”
“Your plan.”
“My plan? I don’t have a plan.”
“Okay, let me put it another way,” said Goat. “I think I understand what the Red Mouth is telling you to do. I think I can envision what the Black Eye wants everyone to see.”
Homer smiled. It looked like a genuine smile, too. “You had a vision?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what? Did the Red Mouth start whispering in your ear?”
“Maybe,” said Goat, “it sort of came to me.”
“What do you mean? What are you seeing?”
“You’re just going to drive across country, stopping every once in a while for a bite, and then keep going. You want to spread this thing as far and as wide as possible. You want to kill the whole fucking world, don’t you?”
Homer thought about it for a
while as they drove on through the rain. “Yeah, that about says it.”
“Is any of that stuff about the meek inheriting the earth true? Was any of that what you believe or was it all bullshit for the camera?”
Homer’s smile was slow and sly. “Does it really matter, boy?”
“I need to know.”
The lights of the big rigs in the opposite lane illuminated Homer Gibbon as he smiled again and shrugged.
“Wait … that’s it?” demanded Goat. “You put me through all this shit and then you brush me off with a fucking shrug?”
“What’s it matter to you?” asked the killer. “It’s all going to work out the same whether it’s true or not.”
Goat made a disgusted sound low in his throat.
“Dr. Volker told me what I am and you know what that is, don’t you, boy?”
Goat said nothing.
“I’m a fucking zombie. I’m already dead. You ever wonder why I move like I got arthritis? You don’t know your basic medicine? I got rigor mortis. That means I’m already rotting. I may hear the Red Mouth speak to me, but when I look into the future with the Black Eye, you know what I see? I see me fucking dead and gone, motherfucker.” Homer suddenly struck the steering wheel with the heel of his palm. “That’s what I fucking see. Me. Dead. So I figured what the fuck. I might as well turn this into a party town. If I got to go then everybody’s got to come with me. Every-fucking-body. And, yeah, to answer your question, I do believe. And what I believe is that life’s a bitch and then we all fucking die. But not alone, boy. Not alone.”
Homer punctuated his remarks with a brutal laugh. Totally without mirth or humanity. A dead man’s laugh. A killer’s laugh.
“It’s the end of the world, boy. Just like the song says. And you know what? I feel just fine.”
Goat stared at him and something in his head seemed to break. To snap. To tear open. Maybe it was the Black Eye opening so he could see his own future. Maybe it was that. If so, the future that Goat saw was that of a desolated world. It was a wasteland of disease and rot, and there, standing amid an endless crowd of unmoving, unthinking, undying dead, was his own body. Robbed of life, of hope, of any possibility of anything. It was the ugliest thing he could imagine. Bleak and pointless.