Charlie flung his pipe at the leading zombie, pivoted like a dancer and sprinted for the line of parked cars. Trout lost sight of him, and a moment later he saw Dez turn away. Charlie had either made it to safety or not.
The big front-end loader was still by the gate. The entire cab was covered in zombies like bees on a honeycomb, but the driver kept rolling forward, kept raising and lowering the heavy bucket. The movements were so erratic, though, that Trout couldn’t tell if he could ever see out of the control cab.
Dez fired at the front rank of zombies as the soldiers reached her. Then the others turned and suddenly they had a shooting line. They fired as they walked backward. The dead kept coming, and the gap between the soldiers and the infected was rapidly closing. Fifty feet.
Forty.
Thirty.
Trout could see from the looks on their faces that they knew they weren’t going to make it.
That’s when the first of the buses came hurtling past the line of shooters and plowed into the dead.
It was a wonderful, heroic, desperate move.
And it was absolutely the wrong thing to do.
School buses are tough, but they are not built for head-on collisions with masses of people. The bus struck the wall of zombies and slammed to a stop. Everyone inside was thrown forward. The driver’s airbag burst out and slammed the driver backward. The windshield cracked in a thousand places.
“Shit!” yelled Trout and he began running toward the bus.
Running hurt.
Every step was screaming agony.
He took that pain and ate it. He fed on it. He devoured it whole and used its fiery heat to drive his legs and propel him off the dock and around the back of the bus to come up on the side farthest from the zombies. He jerked the door open and saw that the driver—the farmer who’d driven tractors all his life—was out cold. The airbag, designed to deflate after impact, was sagging. Trout grabbed the driver, hauled him out of the seat, shot the handle to close the door, and slid behind the wheel. Kids and adults were both screaming. Zombies were pounding on the cracked windshield. It was not going to last. He backed the bus up to get a better angle to go around the swarm.
There was a series of loud thumps on the side and then on top of the bus, and to his horror Trout realized that bodies were scaling the side of the bus. He started accelerating and was about to jam on the brakes to try and jolt the dead off the roof when he heard a fresh barrage of shots.
From above.
He looked to where Dez and the solders had been but they were gone. Then he understood. When the bus crashed, Dez and Sam and the Boy Scouts had clambered atop the bus, out of reach of the dead.
Could the dead climb, too? He had no idea.
He began moving forward again, but the dead were closing in and forming an impenetrable wall. With every few feet he had to slow down or risk another collision. The windows would never withstand another hit.
Then there was that engine roar again and the front-end loader came smashing through the wall of dead. The digging teeth of the big bucket crunched into the backs of the zombies, shattering spines, snapping their bodies backward. The dead still swarmed over the cab, but one by one they pitched off. Almost as an after echo Trout heard gunshots from above. Dez and the others were clearing the dead off the cab so that the driver could see what he was doing.
Trout felt movement beside him and Jenny DeGroot was there, staring out the window in astonishment, pointing at the driver.
“Uncle Jake?” she gasped.
Trout understood. The big, burly man in the loader’s cab was Jake DeGroot. He wore a fierce, strange grin as he worked the levers that brought the bucket up and down, up and down. From above Trout heard Dez screaming two words.
“Turn around! Turn around!”
Jake either heard it despite the din of gunfire, moans, and engine roars, or he simply grasped the need of the moment. He began backing and filling, backing and filling, making a big, bloody, bone-breaking, meat-burst turn amid and atop the milling dead. They were legion, but the diesel monster with the hydraulic bucket was unstoppable. It completed its turn and began rolling toward the front gate, crushing everything in its path. As more of the dead swarmed up onto the cab, Dez and the soldiers shot them down.
The gunfire from above was continuous.
The front-end loader roared out with a voice like a dragon; Jake lowered the bucket so that it scraped along the surface of the ground as the tons of unfeeling yellow-painted steel, splashed now with red and black, hit the wall of unfeeling flesh and bone. The front-end loader paused but for a moment as it pushed through tons of slack meat, then the bodies fell to either side, creating a chute through which twelve yellow buses passed.
When the loader reached the road it turned right, and Trout followed.
Trout caught a flash of red off to the far side of the lot and saw Charlie Matthias’s red Le Mans go rocketing out of the gate, turn left and head west. Within seconds the vehicle was dwindling into the distance.
In rumbling convoy, they left the warehouse behind. The dead followed in their hundreds, but even at the slow speed of the loader, the shambling mass of infected fell farther and farther behind.
Soon they were not following at all.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Scott Blair and the president stood side by side in front of the big screen. There were now dozens of smaller windows open to show live streams of ongoing battles, of troops moving into position, of swarms of the dead moving through towns and cities, of the mass exodus of whole populations trying to flee the outbreak.
The reports were coming in from all over.
The latest incidents were in Oregon and New Hampshire. Anywhere a car could drive or a plane could fly.
Which was everywhere.
There was even an unconfirmed report of an attack in Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. A Delta flight from Pittsburgh touched down there. The news reports were erratic, wild. And probably true. England, Italy, Germany, and Russia had fighter-bombers on deck, waiting for go orders to make preemptive strikes.
Blair had no doubts that those orders would be given.
Just as new stories went viral on the Internet, infecting the world at the speed of social networking, so now could a biological threat spread globally at the speed of modern travel. Planes, trains, and automobiles.
And wind.
The devil was in the wind now, and the earth itself was exhaling the parasites into the global weather pattern.
Soon Lucifer would be everywhere.
An aide came hurrying over and handed the president a paper, which he read, sighed, and handed to Blair. It was from Dr. Price. The Reaper counterparasite was in full development now. The first batches were being loaded into rockets for deployment over Pittsburgh.
“We’re going to use a monster to fight a monster,” said the president. “How wrong does that sound to you, Scott?”
“We have to try something. We have to try everything.”
“Yes, I suppose we do.”
One of the small windows showed an aerial surveillance feed of a line of yellow buses rolling through the forested hills of West Virginia. The president touched the image, brushing the vehicles with the tips of his fingers.
“All those children,” he said. “The children of Stebbins and the children everywhere…”
“Sir?”
“They will never forgive us for this,” said the president.
Blair’s mouth was a tight and bitter line. “Maybe they shouldn’t.”
The door burst open and Sylvia Ruddy came running in, her face flushed, eyes wide with a fierce excitement.
“Mr. President! Oh my God, Mr. President!”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE
ZABRISKE POINT BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION AND PRODUCTION STATION
DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
All of Z-point had become a
hive, filled with techs and aides and support staff who ran everywhere in a mad scramble to prepare all samples of Reaper, and to kick the manufacturing process into high gear.
Dick Price was the only person who stood still and silent.
There was a big glass window separating him from the main production floor of the station. Everyone on the far side of that three-inch-thick glass wore hazmat suits. He was in his immaculate white lab coat. To his right was a bank of security monitors and three of them showed exterior views of the helipad carved high onto a mountain far away from any possibility of civilian ground or air traffic. A powerful Chinook was lifting ponderously from the pad. In the air beyond it were three more. Waiting to land. Waiting to off-load viable organic vectors.
A nice name for people who had been transformed by Lucifer into something else.
The military kept bringing more of them here to Z-point in the hopes that among the samples would be evidence of mutation or variation. Within mutation lay potential. Mutation suggested that Volker’s monster was not unchangeable. Anything that could, in time, be changed could, in time, be understood and defeated.
In time.
Price felt icy lines of sweat trickle down his spine.
Three of the monitors had been switched to live news feeds.
Pittsburgh was in flames.
The whole city. Burning.
There were outbreaks in Philadelphia, New York, D.C., Atlanta. A dozen other cities. And now there were reports in Paris, London, and Madrid.
The experts the press trotted out decried these reports on the grounds that no disease could spread that fast. And that was true enough if this was the beginning of the twentieth century instead of well into the twenty-first. Any disease could spread at the speed of transportation.
A lot of planes flew out of Pittsburgh in the hours after the fuel-air bombs shot the parasites into the atmosphere and transformed Lucifer from a serum-transfer pathogen to an airborne pathogen.
A whole lot of planes.
Beyond the glass wall his people worked like crazed ants to produce and pack the Reaper mutagen.
Price was too numb to pray that Reaper would work.
The tests on the Volker infected were ongoing, but it would be months before any reliable conclusions could be drawn. He’d told the president that. He’d told the generals that.
It might work was a million miles away from it will work.
It was even farther from we should try it.
If only they had Volker’s notes …
He prayed to a God he’d long ago ceased to believe in. He prayed with every fiber of his being that there was still time to find that research and to study it for a doorway out of this hell.
On the monitor the second Chinook was now landing on the pad and the first was already dwindling in the distance.
His cell rang and it jolted Price out of his horrified daze. He fished it out of his pocket and saw that the scramble alert was active. He punched that button and held the phone to his ear.
“Th-this is Price.”
“We have it,” said a breathless Scott Blair.
“What?”
“The reporter who had them gave them to his cameraman and he sent it all via DropBox to his email accounts. The cybercrimes team cracked it and downloaded everything. I’m sending it to you now.”
Price closed his eyes and swayed. He murmured three words he would have mocked anyone else for saying.
“Thank you, God…”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY
ROUTE 80
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
When they were sure it was safe, the convoy stopped in the middle of the road.
Trout nearly collapsed over the wheel. Strange, bad lights were bursting all around him and he saw darkness trying to close in around the edges of his vision. He took several long breaths and gradually—gradually—reclaimed himself.
Jenny jerked the door open and went running toward the front-end loader. Big Jake DeGroot climbed down, snatched her up and swung her around. She was like a toy in his massive arms. Their simple joy seemed to put a tiny swatch of color into the day.
Behind him, children were snuffling and crying. With fear and perhaps with relief.
Thumps atop the bus told Trout that Dez and the soldiers were climbing down. He hauled himself out of the seat and staggered outside to find Dez.
She was the first to come down and she ran to him and wrapped her strong arms around him. She was stained with gunpowder residue and sweat, and Trout could not help kissing her lips and her face over and over again. Then he held her as Gypsy and Boxer climbed down.
Trout looked up, waiting for Shortstop and Sam.
Waiting.
“No,” said Dez, and there were tears in her eyes. Gypsy leaned her head on Boxer’s shoulders and they sobbed quietly together.
He stared at her without understanding what she meant.
“What—wait, Dez, where are they? What happened?”
“Didn’t you see? Back at the loading bay?”
“See what?”
“They died, Billy,” she said wretchedly. “Both of them. We climbed up onto the bus, but they didn’t have time. Those bastards were all over us. God, Billy. I tried to pull Sam up. I tried…”
She sobbed brokenly and beat on his chest. It hurt, but he did not care.
Sam Imura?
Gone?
Trout didn’t know how to process that. Imura was so tough, so capable. Trout was sure that he was the leading man in this drama, the hero that would save everyone.
Gone. Off screen.
Simply edited out of the story.
Shortstop, too, and Trout realized that he didn’t even know the man’s name. But Sam … even though the soldier had only been with them for a few hours, he’d become a friend. They trusted him. They knew him.
Now he was gone, and Sam was gone.
The heroes of the story were gone and Trout had not even seen it. Somehow that was worse than if he’d witnessed it. These men was simply gone from the world. Dragged down. Consumed.
No … worse …
Even now the thing that had been Sam Imura would have risen. What was left of him would have risen and maybe it had been part of that horde of things that had pursued the convoy.
It was too horrible to imagine.
It was all too horrible.
Who would be the heroes now?
He held on to Dez, who was frayed and worn and nearly spent.
Who was going to ride to the rescue now?
While the sun burned through the last of the clouds and painted the landscape with yellow light, Dez and Billy clung to each other and wept.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE
ZABRISKE POINT BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION AND PRODUCTION STATION
DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Dick Price and his senior staff sat in a silent line, each of them bent forward, their faces washed to a pale blue by the lights of computer monitors. On each computer pages of data flashed by. Research notes. Developmental procedure records. Laboratory tests on animals. Formulae. Data on the transgenesis of a dozen parasites. Dosage tables. Biological warfare applications. Modifications for use on death row prisoners. A complete medical history of condemned serial murderer Homer Gibbon.
It was all there.
All of it.
One hundred and ninety-two thousand pages of information.
Some of it was in Russian. Some in Lithuanian. Some in Polish. Some in Latin.
Some in English.
Some written in the hieroglyphics of molecular chemistry.
Parts of the data were old, scans of handwritten documents dating back to the early 1970s. Other parts were very recent, as new as five days ago, which meant that it was one day before Homer Gibbon had been given Lucifer 113 instead of the drugs meant to kill him during the court-mandated lethal injection.
Two days before Homer Gibbon woke up in the mortician’s suite at Hartnup’s Transition Estate.
Three days before the army dropped their fuel-air bombs.
Four days before Pittsburgh was overrun and subsequently burned.
Five days before the mass outbreaks that turned Manhattan into a war zone. Before Paris was carpet-bombed by the French Air Force. Before the prime minister of Great Britain ordered all of the bridges spanning the Thames to be blown.
Five days before the Air Force began exploding missiles packed with payloads of raw Reaper over Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, and a dozen other cities. Each bomb was precisely timed to detonate in the path of prevailing winds that would carry it over large portions of the most densely populated areas.
That was today. The Reaper mutagen was in the wind now and soon they’d all know if it would slow Lucifer’s spread. Or, if God had any mercy left for His children, stop it.
Price’s team had worked without sleep for days. Reading Volker’s information, making sense of what was clearly the work of a man who was both brilliant and insane.
An actual mad scientist.
Price had tried to laugh at that, to find one moment of comic relief in which the irony would vent some of the crushing tension. But he couldn’t. When he’d tried to laugh he cried instead.
Scott Blair kept calling. Over and over and over again, demanding answers.
Demanding hope.
Price’s cell rang again and Price snatched it up with a snarl and very nearly smashed it on the floor. Instead he pushed the green button with a trembling thumb.
“P-Price…”
There was no immediate reply.
“Hello?”
The only thing he heard from the other end of the all was the sound of someone quietly weeping.
“Mr. Blair?” said Price gently. “Scott…?”
He heard a sniff and then Scott Blair’s voice. “Price … Jesus Christ, what have you done?”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
Before Blair could answer someone screamed. Price and everyone turned away from their line of computers and saw one of the techs—a woman whose name Price couldn’t remember in that moment—standing before the bank of TV monitors on the far wall. She wrapped her arms over her head and sank slowly to her knees. She kept screaming.