He leaned closer to Homer Gibbon, wanting to see the killer’s face clearly in the whitewash of headlines. As each of the big interstate truckers whisked by he saw that evil face in a stark strobe. Each blink, each flash image, was identical. Inert, eternal, irredeemable.
He said, “Fuck you.”
Then he grabbed the steering wheel in both hands, shoved it to the left with all his strength, and sent the Escalade careening into the headlights of a monstrous eighteen-wheel Freightliner pulling a full load of steel I-beams. Right into eighty thousand pounds driving at eighty-two miles an hour.
Although the impact opened a thousand red mouths in the flesh of Homer Gibbon, they whispered no secrets; and the Black Eye went forever blind.
PART FOUR
FIRST NIGHT
“… So, when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.”
—John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
No one at the bar knew his last name. When asked he said that his name was John. It wasn’t exactly true, but true enough.
John sat at the end of the bar, drinking red wine, making it last, paying for it with money he’d taken from the biker he’d killed. He would have more money when he sold the motorcycle. John was not a biker type. He disliked machines and especially loud ones. Noise irritated him. It was hard enough to listen to all of the voices in his head without those kinds of distractions.
The bar was quiet, especially this early in the day. The bartender, two other early-bird customers, and John. He’d come in as soon as it opened, found his favorite stool, and sat down to watch the news. So many wonderful things were happening in the world.
Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio had all clearly been touched by the hand of God.
He wondered if that meant that it was starting.
The Fall.
The collapse of the false world of idolatry and sin.
It was something for which he’d prayed every day of his adult life.
It was something he always believed would happen one day.
The Fall.
Then the news station interrupted its own broadcast to play another video clip from a reporter named Gregory Weinman. The reporter, who was somewhere in the affected area, had been sending videos all night, and at first the press had dismissed them as elaborate fakes and the worst kind of practical jokes.
As the night burned away and the morning dawned with fear and promise, the reaction to those reports changed. Now they were being trotted out as hard news. News that terrified everyone at the bar.
Except John, who found them so incredibly comforting.
The TV reporter warned that the footage they were about to show was disturbing and contained images not suitable for children. John saw the predatory gleam in the reporter’s eyes. Then the footage began, showing a man that John immediately recognized as the supposedly executed serial killer Homer Gibbon as he went into a 7-Eleven and began attacking people.
It was all very messy and crude. John did not like biting. He always preferred knives.
Knives held within them a purity of purpose. They were instruments of God’s will. John had several of them in special pockets he’d sewn inside his clothes. He was never without his knives.
The video played out and then it cut to the interior of a car as Homer Gibbon spoke about why he was doing what he did.
He spoke about seeing with the Black Eye.
He spoke about hearing the secrets of the Red Mouth.
The Red Mouth.
That was something John understood, though he had never used the exact phrase before. Red Mouth. How perfect. How apt.
He mouthed the words, and they felt like ambrosia on his tongue and lips.
He knew right then that he would forever use those words to describe what he, in his holy purpose, had done so many times and would continue to do if God willed it.
Then Homer said something else that struck to the very core of John’s personal faith.
“In the Bible Jesus talked about how the meek were going to inherit the earth. I forget where he said it, but it was important, and I think this is what he was talking about. The way people are when they wake up after I open the Red Mouths in their flesh…”
“Yes,” said John.
He said it a little too loud, a bit too emphatically, and the two other patrons turned to him.
“What?” asked one of them. “You agree with that bullshit?”
John said nothing.
“I asked you a question,” demanded the man, sliding off his stool. “I have friends in Pennsylvania. I have some family there.”
John considered how to play this. He could construct a response that would dial the man’s outrage down to a simple misunderstanding. He could do that because he’d done that sort of thing many times before, and with sharper people than this. He’d managed conversations with psychiatrists and parole review panels.
And yet …
On the screen Homer Gibbon continued to talk about the meek inheriting the earth, and about how he was helping them have eternal life. About how it was God’s will for a peaceful planet. A world without war, without hate. A world of the silent, mindless, meek. A world of people emptied of everything except the grace of a loving and generous God.
John understood and agreed with everything Homer Gibbon said.
“Yo, asshole,” said the loudmouth, moving down the bar toward John. “I’m talking to—”
His last words were gone, trapped inside the man’s chest, unable to get past the blood that now filled his throat. The man stared in uncomprehending horror at the glittering steel that seemed to have appeared as if by magic in John’s hand.
The other patron and the bartender gaped at what was happening, their incomprehension every bit as great as the dying loudmouth.
“John?” asked the bartender. “What the hell did you just do?”
Explaining would take too much time, and John did not believe either of these men would truly understand.
He killed them both.
They tried to make a fight of it. As if that mattered.
As they lay bleeding, with red mouths opened in their flesh, John watched the face of Homer Gibbon.
This was the face of the chosen of God, the rock upon which a new church was being born in the farmlands of Pennsylvania.
“You are my god,” he told the killer on the TV. “And I will be a saint of your church.”
Smiling, filled with great joy, Saint John wiped his knives clean and stepped out into the morning sunlight, knowing with total certainty that the noisy, cluttered, sinful world was about to fall. It was all going to become quiet.
As God so clearly intended.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN
ROUTE 40
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
The buses painted a long line of yellow through the gray of the predawn morning. Dez, Trout, and Sam sat in a huddle in the front of the lead bus. They passed a few cars, but they were all driving too fast. Panic speed, thought Trout. A UPS truck lay on its side at a crossroads and several figures were hunkered down around a ragged red thing that twitched even as it was consumed. Off in the distance, on the far side of a massive cornfield, a farmhouse burned, flickering its souls to the winds.
They found an armoured personnel carrier standing alone and empty on the shoulder of the road. Sam and the remaining members of the Boy Scouts got out to check it. Dez went with them and Trout, weak and trembling, stood in the open doorway of the bus. There was no blood on the APC, no scattering of shell casings, nothing to indicate a battle. However, it was completely empty. No crew, no bodies, no traces of how it came to be abandoned there. Boxer, Shortstop, and Gypsy came back with armloads of ammunition and
extra guns. Sam tottered back carrying a heavy metal case of fragmentation grenades.
They stripped the APC of everything of use, and all of it done in a hasty silence. Then they piled back into the buses and the convoy began rolling.
The landscape that whipped by seemed murky and deserted to Trout, though his gut told him otherwise. Twice he saw figures in the woods, pale and silent, watching the buses as they passed.
Inside the bus things quieted down. Many of the children were asleep, dragged into troubled dreams by shock and exhaustion. Others sat and watched the forest with the fixity of attention of a bunch of plastic mannequins. Dez followed the line of Trout’s stare and took his hand to give it a gentle squeeze.
Sam sat nearby thumbing bullets into a stack of empty magazines. His eyes were shuttered windows.
Jenny DeGroot came and squatted down in the aisle. She had somehow conjured hot coffee. “It’s instant,” she apologized, handing out steaming Styrofoam cups.
Trout took his with a greedy sigh. “I don’t care if it’s boiled gutter water.”
He burned his tongue on the first sip, didn’t care, blew on the surface and took another sip.
Sam Imura sat with his head cradled between his palms, eyes unfocused as he stared into his own thoughts.
“I was sorry to hear about your friend,” said Trout.
“Moonshiner,” murmured Sam, nodding his thanks.
“What was his real name?” asked Dez.
“Staff Sergeant Bud Hollister. Good ol’ boy from Alabama.”
Dez nodded. “He had biker tats. He used to ride?”
A memory put a faint smile on Sam’s hard mouth. “He rode with the Outlaws before he moved from ’Bama.”
“Rough boys,” said Dez.
“Very. He rolled out with them when he was sixteen lying about being nineteen. He was with them until just before his eighteenth birthday, then got arrested for some petty stuff. Judge offered him a choice of jail or enlistment. Not that he stopped kicking ass and taking names as a soldier. Running joke was that he had Velcro on his stripes because he kept losing them.”
Trout cleared his throat and cut a look at Dez. “Lots of that going around.”
“Bite me,” muttered Dez. “You can live small and boring or you can go and tear a piece off for yourself.”
Sam grinned. “You and Moonshiner would have gotten along fine.”
“He wasn’t half bad-looking.”
“Hey, I’m sitting right here you know,” Trout reminded her.
Dez ignored him. She held out her cup. “To Bud ‘Moonshiner’ Hollister. A true American ass-kicker.”
“And a good man,” added Sam, touching his cup. Trout did the same and they drank in silence for a while.
“After we get to Asheville,” asked Trout, “what will you do? Stay there or go back?”
“Back is a relative term. I’m not part of the regular army, so I don’t have to report back. I’ll stay in touch with Scott Blair and if he needs me to do anything special, something that could help, then I’ll do that.”
“And if there’s nothing you can do?”
Sam shrugged. “My family is in central California. Dad and stepmom. Brother who’s twenty and in the police academy, and a stepbrother who’s eighteen months old. Dad’s a cop, too, but he’s getting up there. Been driving a desk for the last ten years. Mom’s an E.R. nurse. If this thing continues to spread, then I’m going to want to get to them and help keep them safe.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Trout, and Dez nodded. Sam made no comment. The conversation dwindled down to a shared, moody silence.
Trout stared out the window as he sipped the last of his coffee, then he frowned. “Hey,” he said, “I thought we were going to North Carolina.”
“We are,” said Dez.
“Then why did we just pass a sign for Fort Necessity? You planning on visit a historic battlefield during a flight to safety? I don’t know, Dez, I doubt the gift shop is open this early.”
“We’re not going to the fort,” said Dez irritably. “We’re going to Sapphire Foods. It’s a mile past the fort on Route 40. I told you about it. The big food distribution warehouse.”
“Ah yes, the one where your ex-boyfriend works. If he’s still an ex-boyfriend.”
“Don’t start, Billy.”
“It’s a good call,” said Sam. “We got less than half the supplies out of the school.”
Trout knew that it was a good idea but he didn’t want to admit it. He fished for an objection. “What if they won’t let us take anything.”
“We’ll ask nicely,” Sam suggested.
“Charlie will give me what I want,” said Dez.
“Charlie? Charlie who? And why would he give you anything? Would that be a matter of him committing a crime?”
“We’re in a state of emergency.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Charlie likes kids. He always has. He coaches the boxing and wrestling teams at the PAL in—”
“Whoa, wait, are you talking about that Charlie?”
Dez colored and said nothing.
“Are you freaking serious, Desdemona Fox? Him?”
“Who?” asked Sam, but he was ignored.
“He’s a scumbag, a thug, and very likely an actual criminal,” said Trout.
“He’s not that bad.”
“Your nose grew six inches when you said that.” Trout shook his head in genuine disbelief. “I know you’ve dated some lowlifes over the years, Dez, but how drunk were you when you thought dating Charlie Pink-eye was a good idea?”
“He doesn’t like to be called that.”
“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like. Charlie’s a psychopath. So’s his brother and so’s his dad. Didn’t his old man kill Charlie’s mother?”
“It was never proved. Might have been suicide. But what does that matter, Billy? We’re not going there so I can give him a blow job. We need supplies and I know that if I explain the situation, he’ll help us. And if we need to, he’ll let us stay there.”
Trout began to fire back a crushing reply, but the driver called out, “We’re coming up on it.”
The bus rounded a curve in the road and there it was. A tall double fence encircled a plot of land that had to be a mile per side. The heavy-gauge rolling gate was peeled back on its hinges, the pipe frame twisted into a useless curl. The vehicle that had hit it, a Staples delivery truck, was still wrapped inside the gate like a spider caught in a web. The driver’s door was open and splashed with black blood.
“No … no … no…” said Dez under her breath.
In the middle of the property was a massive one-story building made from dull gray stone blocks. As Dez had said there were no windows at all, but along one side there were bays for fifty trucks. A dozen trucks were backed into bays. There were a dozen cars parked haphazardly in the lot, some crumpled together. One sat there burning in the dying drizzle.
“Oh … shit…” breathed Trout.
There were zombies everywhere.
Dozens of them.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY
151 FIRST SIDE
FORT PITT BOULEVARD
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
Alex Jay Berman stood on the balcony of his high-rise apartment and watched Pittsburgh burn. His wife held his hand and her grip was like a vise. So tight that he knew she would never let go.
Never.
Screams rose up from below, and Alex bent forward to look down. Twenty-three stories below, moving through patches of sunlight and shadow, the crowds surged. From up here it was impossible to tell who was infected and who was not.
Or at least not yet.
Everyone was in motion.
Cars and trucks moved through the crowds and from up here they looked like leaves buffeted along atop a moving stream. Alex wondered how many of those people the vehicles rolled over. Up hear you couldn’t hear the sound of breaking bones.
Only the screams.
And the gunfire.
And the explosions.
Those were continual.
The rains had dwindled to nothing and then faded as the sun burned through the clouds. The sky above was pretty and blue. A bright blue. Like the summer skies of his boyhood. Pretty. Birds fly up there, far above the sounds of dying from below.
Behind him, on the other side of the closed French doors, fists beat on the glass. Small sounds made by small fists.
Alex did not turn to look. He had done many things in his life, some brave, some crazy, but he was absolutely sure it would take a greater insanity and far more courage than he possessed to turn and look through that glass. He could not do that.
His wife sobbed.
Once, a deep sound that was filled with everything either of them ever needed to say.
Except for one more thing.
Alex turned to his wife and smiled at her.
“I love you,” he said. “And I always will.”
Her tears glittered like jewels in the sunlight.
Still holding hands they stepped off the balcony ledge.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE
SAPPHIRE FOODS
ROUTE 40
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
“What do we do?” asked the driver of the bus.
The lead bus idled in the short curving driveway, the others were still around the bend. So far the infected in the parking lot had not reacted to the bus. They were all close to the building, which was hundreds of yards away.
“We have three choices,” Sam said quickly when Dez joined them. “First choice is we bug out now and take our chances with the supplies we have. It’s less than a day to Asheville.”
“Sure,” said Dez bitterly, “if the roads are clear. If people are going apeshit—and you know damn well they are—then those roads could be jammed and those buses can’t exactly go off-road. It could take a day or it could take a week. And we don’t have a week’s worth of food and water. Nothing close to it. Most of that stuff got left behind at the school.”
“Okay … second choice is my team draws the dead off to one side, away from the building while you park the buses and off-load everyone through the loading bays. Then we make this home base.”