Goat opened Skype and punched in the number for Billy’s satellite phone. But a message window popped up: NO SIGNAL.
He tried it again, making sure he got the number right.
Same message.
“Oh, shit…” he murmured.
The last message from Billy said they were going to take the infected outside. Since then … nothing. What was going on? Had they gotten to him? Had the helicopters come back?
Goat’s fears said yes, but his gut told him no. There was something wrong, but he didn’t think Billy was dead.
Not yet.
He was, however, absolutely positive that the government was screwing around. That it was responsible for this silence.
Cursing under his breath, Goat turned toward the counter to ask the barista if the router was down. Headlights flashed in his eyes as a car pulled into the lot. Goat flicked a glance through the window. A metallic green Nissan Cube. Ugly. Same make and color as the one he’d seen parked in front of the house of Homer Gibbon’s old Aunt Selma. It made him think of that, and how it all started.
Then his mind ground to a halt as the driver’s door opened and a man got out.
A tall man. Bare-chested despite the cold.
A grinning man, with a tattoo of a black eye on each flat pectoral.
This.
Was.
Impossible.
Goat wanted to scream but he suddenly had no voice at all. He wanted to run, but he was frozen in place.
The man walked the few steps between car and door in an awkward fashion, as if his knees and hip joints were unusually stiff.
Goat’s fingers were on the keyboard. Almost without thinking, his fingers moved, tapping keys as the bare-chested man pulled open the door and stepped into the Starbucks. The few remaining customers turned to look at him. The barista glanced up from the caramel macchiato she was making. She saw the bare chest and the tattoos. She saw the caked blood and the wicked smile.
The man stood blocking the door. Grinning with bloody teeth.
Goat’s fingers typed eight words.
The barista screamed.
He loaded the address of the press and media listserv into the address bar.
The customers screamed.
Goat hit Send.
Then he, too, screamed.
In Bordentown. Homer Gibbon.
Quarantine failed.
It’s here …
CHAPTER TWELVE
COMMUNICATIONS COMMAND POST #2
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
“It’s working, sir,” said the radio specialist.
The captain in charge of communications for the National Guard detail on the eastern edge of Stebbins County was a small, fussy-looking man with the face of a geek. Even with the uniform he didn’t look like a soldier; and in his own heart he wasn’t. He was an electronics nerd who joined the Army to get free training and to play with more interesting toys than he could afford working at Best Buy.
The unit in which he sat cost more than thirty million dollars, and it was his.
More or less his.
The captain leaned over the specialist’s shoulder and looked at the gauges, dials, and meters, then down at the digital readout on the computer monitor. It was arcane to anyone who didn’t live and breathe electronics. To him it was a language he understood better than English. A language that was precise, without ambiguity.
The information on all those meters told him that no communication signal was getting into or out of Stebbins except those on very precisely fixed channels. The blackout was immediate and complete. Stebbins County went dark, taking with it the border towns of Portersville, Allegheny Falls, St. Johns, and Bordentown. All landlines, cell towers, and Wi-Fi were silent. No cell phone, no landline, and no damn satellite uplink.
Everything was being jammed.
He smiled.
“Good,” he said, as he reached for the phone to tell Scott Blair that Billy Trout wasn’t reaching anyone.
Not anymore.
And neither was anyone else.
PART TWO
BROKEN DOLLS
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
—Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Trout tried Goat a dozen more times and hit the same wall every time. Then he went looking for Dez and couldn’t find her. Disturbed and depressed, he drifted back to where the kids had been gathered. It was uncomfortably subdued for the number of young kids there.
“Coffee?”
Billy Trout turned to see one of the younger teachers, Jenny DeGroot, holding a tray on which were a dozen paper cups. Steam rose and clouded the petite woman’s glasses and put a flush on her cheeks. Trout fished for her name.
“Thanks, Jenny,” he said and took a cup.
She nodded and he stepped out of the way as she entered the big classroom. He hadn’t liked the glazed look in Jenny’s eyes. Too much shock, not enough hope. Way too much fear. It made him wonder what was in his own eyes.
He sipped the coffee and winced. Not because it was hot but because it tasted exactly like reconstituted horse urine. Possibly the worst coffee he’d ever tasted, and he’d worked in a newsroom for twenty years. He caught Jenny watching him from across the room and Trout hefted the cup in a salute and pretended to smile in appreciation of the taste.
A second sip only confirmed the bad news from the first taste. Horse urine with just a hint of hog feces. Maybe not as tasty as that.
He drank it anyway, standing in the doorway to the art room. The classrooms on this floor had been separated by partitions, but they’d all been pushed aside to create a space nearly as big as the auditorium. Even so, it was crowded. JT had estimated eight hundred survivors, but Billy had done his own count. The math was both more and less encouraging. There were eight hundred and forty-three people here. But that was all there was left of the population of Stebbins and its surrounding villages. Eight hundred and forty-three alive.
More than seven thousand dead.
Or whatever passed for dead now that the world didn’t make sense anymore.
“Infected,” he told himself. It was a much safer word than “zombie.”
He sipped the bad coffee.
Inside the combined classroom, hundreds of children were huddled into groups, their bodies wrapped in blankets or coats. The surviving teachers and other random adults—school staff, a few parents, and stray survivors—sat with them, trying to give comfort when there was no comfort left to give.
Everyone in that room, Trout knew, was in shock. Some were in denial. Some were completely broken. Across the room, by the teacher’s desk, a man in a business suit sat holding a little girl and rocked back and forth. Trout knew him. Gerry Dunphries. The little girl, though, was the youngest of the Gilchrist kids. Trout had no idea where Gerry’s daughter was. She attended this school, but she wasn’t here in the room.
She had to have been at the school, though. Or on one of the buses.
That thought, that knowledge, was dreadful.
He watched Gerry rock back and forth with the girl. His eyes were nearly unblinking and he kept murmuring the same snatch of song over and over again. A piece of a lullaby. Something old, but something that was as broken as he was. Only a piece of song, the lyrics mangled and mostly forgotten, the tune stretched thin by repetition, like a piece of old cassette tape that had been played so long the emulsion was wearing off.
Trout wondered if the girl heard any of it. Neither of her parents was here. Nor were her two brothers. Her eyes were fixed and focused, looking out at the world, but—he was absolutely sure—seeing and hearing none of it.
Broken, both of them.
Like so many others.
Even before the military had opened fire on them, these kids and the adults were teetering on the edge. The infected had attacked the buses, had dragge
d hundreds of kids out and torn the life from them. Parents and teachers had fought to protect their children, but as they succumbed to bites, they became the very things they’d tried to stop. They had become the monsters that preyed upon the children.
Trout prayed to God that no trace of the original personality was left in any of the living dead, though he knew that his prayer was a hopeless one. Yesterday he and Goat had interviewed Dr. Herman Volker, the former Cold War scientist—now working as a prison doctor—who had created the Lucifer 113 pathogen. Volker had told him that his latest version had been intended as a way of punishing convicted serial murderers. Volker’s sister and her children had been savagely killed by such a monster in East Berlin, long before the Wall fell. Volker had spent years working as a Soviet scientist—ostensibly serving the State but actually developing his ultimate revenge. The pathogen, based on genetically altered parasites and a witch’s brew of chemicals, kept the consciousness alive even after the body died. It was Volker’s desire that any prisoner executed for mass murder be conscious of his fate even while his body rotted in the grave. It was a horrible punishment, though had it only been used on its intended subjects—in this case the serial killer Homer Gibbon—Trout might have privately wished Volker all the success he could get.
But that’s not what happened.
Gibbon was infected with the pathogen during his execution by lethal injection, but instead of going immediately into a numbered grave on the prison grounds, a previously unknown relative had come to claim his body. Aunt Selma. Many years ago Selma had helped her heroin-addicted sister take the infant Homer to a shelter. At the time Selma considered taking the baby and raising him herself, even though she was the madam of a whorehouse. She did not, however, and instead Homer went into the system, going from one foster family to another. Some of those families cared for him, but others abused him. The abuse happened too soon, too early in Homer’s life to give him any chance of normalcy. In that meat grinder of a system, a true monster was born. Homer earned his conviction and his sentence, and no one was going to mourn him.
Except Aunt Selma. Driven by regret, by the last spark of her conscience, she claimed his body with the intention of burying him on the family farm where he might have some rest after a life in hell.
But the pathogen was already at work. Homer’s mind was alive in the dying body.
And the parasites that made up the substance of Lucifer 113 were alive, too.
Alive and hungry.
They kept his mind alive, they woke him up, and they awakened in him a hunger that was unlike anything nature could ever have created.
Trout was only now putting the pieces together of what happened here in Stebbins. He knew from Dez Fox that Doc Hartnup, the town’s mortician, had been killed along with Doc’s cleaning lady. Both of them reanimated, though, and from what Dez said, the first victims of Homer Gibbon did not demonstrate any awareness of self or recognition of other people. They were mindless monsters.
Zombies, to use Dr. Volker’s word.
And yet the doctor had insisted that the pathogen kept the consciousness alive, that in each of those zombies was a kind of helpless passenger. Aware of what his or her hijacked body was doing but totally unable to exert control. All it could do was feel the flesh rot and witness what the body did.
It was the most horrible thing Trout had ever heard.
And it was loose in Stebbins County.
It had consumed the town of Stebbins.
As he stood there looking at the traumatized man holding the traumatized little girl, he wondered what had broken each of them. Was it simply the shocking deaths of the people they loved? Certainly that would be enough.
Or was it worse?
Had they looked into the dead eyes of their own family members—wife, children, siblings, parents—and somehow saw the screaming ghost of the people they knew. Trapped like victims behind the windows of a burning building.
Had they seen that?
Billy Trout prayed that was not the case.
He knew that if—God forbid—anything happened to Dez, if she was infected and became one of those things, and if he looked into her beautiful blue eyes and saw the person he loved there, trapped in the body of the monster she became …
He didn’t know how to even think about that without screaming.
But he knew what he would do if such a thing happened.
He wouldn’t run. And he certainly wouldn’t—couldn’t—take the headshot that would bring her down.
No, Trout was absolutely sure he would simply drop whatever weapon he held, that he would stop fighting, that he would let her take him.
Slowly, slowly, Trout backed out of the doorway and turned away. He wandered down the empty hall, careful not to step in any of the pools of disease-blackened blood, mindful of the tiny larva that wriggled in the mess. He kicked shell-casings away with shuffling feet.
When he reached the end of the hall he stopped and leaned against the wall. The satellite phone hung from his belt and he removed it and once more punched in the number for Gregory “Goat” Weinman. The phone rang.
And rang.
Goat did not pick up.
From down the hall, through the open doorway to the art room, Trout could hear sobs and the eerie echo of a broken man singing a broken lullaby to a broken little girl.
Billy Trout leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out of this.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE OVAL OFFICE
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Scott Blair was admitted to the Oval Office and was pleased to find himself alone with the president.
“You made your changes?” asked the president, holding a hand out for the speech.
“I did, Mr. President.” He handed over the papers and waited while the president read through it. Then POTUS removed his glasses and sat back in his chair to appraise him.
“This is what you want me to say?”
“This is what I think needs to be said.”
“What about the Trout video?”
“Our people are tearing it to pieces online. By morning it won’t be any part of the official story.”
“What about the popular story?”
“We’ll manage it and we’ll weather it.”
The president smiled. “You’re beginning to sound like Sylvia.”
God forbid, thought Blair, but managed a bland smile. “We have to protect the administration if we’re going to win this.”
“We beat this, Scott. Not sure why everyone else thinks so and you don’t.”
Because I don’t have my head up my ass, he almost said, but managed to think it through first. Instead he said, “I know you and Simeon Zetter are friends, and I know you trust him…”
“Implicitly.”
“Understood. I, however, do not trust anyone implicitly. It’s my job not to make assumptions.”
“Are you saying that’s what I’m doing?”
“I’m saying that’s what everyone is doing, Mr. President. We are all in shock because of this, and we are all cognizant of the implications of last night’s events. Heads will roll here in Washington, even with the spin control we’re using. Heads will have to roll. Dietrich will take the most heat, but everyone knows that a soldier follows orders. Unless we intend to crucify him as a rogue who exceeded all authority including a presidential order—which would put him in jail—then we’ll have to hang others out to dry. That’s a political fact.”
The president shifted uncomfortably in his seat, but he did not disagree.
“But all of that is secondary, Mr. President. I can’t stress enough how strongly I believe that this matter is not over.”
“General Zetter is in Stebbins, Scott. You’re not.”
Neither are you, you officious moron, thought Blair.
“Sir,” Blair began slowly, but the president cut him off.
“I’m not ordering another attack on Stebbins.” br />
“I understand that, sir, but to put it quite simply, Simeon Zetter is nearing the end of his career, and even though he was formidable in the field once upon a time, I think now he’s become more of a politician than a soldier. He is supporting you and your presidency. I don’t know that I entirely trust his assessment of the situation in Stebbins, because we have to accept the possibility that he is wrong about containment, we must—absolutely must—get Dr. Volker’s research notes.”
“I thought you said we’d find Volker.”
“We will, but we haven’t yet, and every minute we spend looking is time not spent preparing for contingencies.”
The president considered, nodded. “Did you have something in mind?”
“Yes. Trout has that research on Volker’s flash drives. Sir, I would like to—”
“Stop right there, Scott. I know what you want to do. You want the Guard to storm the school and take those drives away from Trout. I won’t do that. What I have done is order General Zetter to obtain the drives. This he will do. End of discussion.”
Blair wondered if he could throttle the president before the Secret Service could stop him.
“Now … is there something else you’d like to discuss, Scott?” asked the president.
“Yes, sir,” said Blair tiredly, “but it concerns General Zetter. If … I may speak candidly—?”
The president steepled his fingers. “Go ahead,” he said guardedly.
“I think we need an independent assessment of the state of things in Stebbins County. We need unbiased eyes on the defenses, the deployment of resources. We need someone who has experience in ultra-high profile biohazardous situations—which, by the way, no one under Zetter’s command has. We need a diagnostician, not a general practitioner.”
The president pursed his lips, considering the point. “Do you have someone in mind?”
“Yes,” said Blair, “there’s a man we both trust, and he’s already in the area.”