Each of the monitors was set to local news in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Newark, Omaha, Chicago, and Miami. The cities with the largest populations where there were outbreaks. The cities most heavily hit by Lucifer. The cities over which Reaper missiles had been detonated a handful of hours ago.
Until now there had been a pattern to the outbreaks. A predictable speed.
Until now there had been a splinter of hope buried in Dick Price’s soul.
Until now.
In those areas where Reaper was interacting with Lucifer, the rate of infection had shot up. The degree of murderous ferocity had doubled. Tripled. The reporters on the ground were letting the pictures tell the story that they were no longer able—or perhaps willing—to report.
The cycle of bite to infection to death to reanimation was now so much faster.
Too fast.
Way too fast.
The infection was out of all control.
Out of any possibility of control.
Reaper, inadequately tested, not at all ready for deployment, had been used by the military in a desperate gamble to introduce mutation to a perfect weapon. If something was perfect then any change would, by definition, create flaws in that perfection. That was the logic, and it was as flawed as the science.
Dick Price stared at the screen and now he understood the last secret in Volker’s science. The most important secret.
Lucifer, for all its power and aggression, had not been perfect.
Better than all generations before it, but far from perfect.
Until now.
Until something allowed—even encouraged it—to mutate further. That one step further until it was, without doubt, perfect.
Until Reaper.
The phone fell from Price’s fingers and shattered on the floor.
The woman kept screaming.
Everyone else began screaming.
It seemed like the only possible response. The only appropriate response. So Dick Price screamed, too.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO
ROUTE 81
NEAR HUNGRY MOTHER STATE PARK
SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA
The traffic on the highway started off as bad, became worse, became impossible. Dez and Trout crouched in the exit well and studied the road through the big windshield. Jake DeGroot was behind the wheel of the first bus, and Dez touched his arm and pointed to a small side road blocked by a chain and a sign saying that it was reserved for forestry service vehicles only.
“There,” she said. “Let’s get out of this shit. Pull off.”
“What about the chain?” asked Trout.
“Fuck the chain,” she said. “Jake, get us out of this shit and I’ll deal with the chain.”
Jake edged the bus that way, but the traffic was jammed tight and moved forward an inch at a time. He hit the horn, got nothing, then jammed his hand down on it in a continuous blare. Still got nothing.
Jake shook his head. “It’s too tight, there’s not enough room.”
Dez snarled and jerked the handle that worked the door, snatched up a combat shotgun and jumped out.
There was a big Tundra to the right of the bus, blocking their way. Dez used her scuffed knuckles to rap on the driver’s window.
“Hey, buddy, how about pull off so we can get through?”
The driver, a big man with a John Deere cap, refused to even look at her. He had snow-white hair and a mean-looking face. The man riding shotgun was equally muscular and twice as ugly. He felt for the pistol in his pocket.
Dez tapped again, much harder. “Yo! Dickhead, you deaf or something?”
The driver raised one hand, forefinger extended and still didn’t look at her.
“Dez,” called Trout as he stepped down from the bus, “be careful.”
Dez ignored him. With a grunt of angry effort, she slammed the shotgun’s stock into the driver’s window. It imploded, showering the driver and the man in the passenger seat with safety glass.
That did it.
Both doors opened and the two men got out.
“The fuck you think you’re doing, you cu—”
That was as far as he got before Dez Fox hit him across the face with the rifle stock. The blow ripped a bloody gash in the man’s jaw and whipped his head around so hard that he spun into the side of the Tundra. His forehead hit the open doorframe and he dropped right onto his kneecaps.
The other man came running around the car, fists raised to smash Dez.
Billy Trout shoved the barrel of his borrowed pistol into the man’s ear.
“Touch her and I’ll blow your fucking head off,” he said.
He heard himself speak the words, felt his mouth say them, and he did not recognize the voice. It was him and it wasn’t. There was such cold honesty there and in that moment he knew that he would, if he had to, shoot this man.
It sickened him to realize that he’d come to this point.
But it made him feel stronger, too.
For maybe the first time since this thing started.
His arm was out straight, the gun in his fist, and it was rock steady.
Dez turned and saw the gun and then looked at him. Into his eyes. A tiny smile flickered across her lips. There and gone.
To the passenger, Dez said, “You’re going to help your butt-buddy into your car, and then you’re going to pull off and let us pass. That’s not a request. We got a couple hundred kids in those buses.”
The man with the gun to his head looked terrified. He licked his lips. “We have to get out, too. I got a kid at home. Barney has three kids. We’re just trying to get home.”
Dez’s eyes stayed hard. “All you had to do was pull over and let us pass. The fuck’s wrong with you?”
“God … don’t touch me,” begged the man, shrinking back from her. “Please. Don’t touch me.”
That’s when Trout noticed that no one else had gotten out of their cars. With all of the traffic stalled for so long, somebody should have gotten out. There were always people who viewed traffic jams like this as impromptu tailgate parties. But everywhere he looked, everywhere Dez looked, the people were hunched inside their cars, the windows up, eyes wide with fear, faces locked into expressions of desperation. Trout almost laughed at the absurdity of it. These people were fleeing in slow motion. Unwilling to get out of their cars, they sat there, waiting for the traffic to move, maybe praying for it to inch forward, and every single one of them terrified at the thought of contact with the people around them. Who was infected? Was the thing on the radio here?
Slow motion panic.
It was a brand-new concept, and it kept turning over and over in Trout’s mind until he couldn’t help but laugh.
Dez shot him an angry, worried look. So did the frightened passenger, and the people in the closest cars.
The only sound on the whole road was the sound of that laugh.
And, without support to prop it up, Trout’s laughter slowly collapsed. Almost into sobs, but he coughed his throat clear and stepped back until he sat down hard on the entrance step of the bus, the pistol hanging limply from his hand.
“Billy?” ventured Dez. “You okay?”
He wanted to explain it to her, to see if she’d laugh, too; but he didn’t. It would be too much like telling a dirty joke in church.
“Don’t hurt him” was all he said.
The passenger looked from Trout to Dez.
“Move the car,” said Dez quietly.
The man nodded. He picked up his friend and helped him around to the passenger side, belted him in, closed the door, and came around to the driver’s side. While he was doing all of that, Dez leaned in and used her palm to brush the glass off the seat. She stepped back to the let the man slide in behind the wheel.
“I’ll lose my place in line,” he said.
Dez shook her head. “No, you won’t.”
She backed away from the car and turned in a slow circle to look through win
dshields at the other drivers. The shotgun was in her hands, barrel sweeping along at the level of headlights and grills.
“We’re getting off this road,” she said, pitching her voice very loud. “This car is going to pull off to let the buses out. Anyone else in the way needs to do the same. Once we’re out of here, you can all fill in, but the cars that move get their places back.”
Trout thought it was one of the most surreal things he’d ever heard. It was like Dez was announcing the rules before a school-yard game of dodgeball. It was all done in an otherwise absolute silence.
Dez seemed also to realize how absurd it was and Trout saw different expressions war on her face. Dez took a breath and in her best cop voice, her voice of officialdom and authority, said, “This thing isn’t here. No one in these cars is infected. If they were we’d know it already. You’re safe. Your families are safe. Stay in your cars and when the road clears out keep heading south. There’s a big safety camp in Asheville, North Carolina. Head there. You hear me? Head there.”
No one said a thing. The windows stayed up. Hands gripped steering wheels. Eyes were fixed on her.
“You’ll be okay,” shouted Dez. “Everyone will be okay.”
Nothing. Not a word, not a toot of a horn, not even a nod from the watching people.
In a quiet voice, Trout said, “Come on, Dez. You did what you could.”
Behind her the Tundra revved its engines and began a turn between the tightly packed cars. At first it looked impossible in the nearly bumper-to-bumper crush. Then the car in front of it rolled forward a couple of feet; and the car behind it did the same. Even with that it was still tight, but the Tundra began the turn. Dez walked past it to the forest service road. She swung the shotgun up, aimed it at the lock and blew it to shiny metal splinters. The chain fell away and the sound of the blast echoed along the road.
Trout watched people flinch, but otherwise they sat in their eerie, watchful stillness.
The shoulder was blocked with cars, too, but with Dez calling directions and banging on hoods with the shotgun, the cars shifted by slow, painful inches forward and at angles until after ten excruciating minutes there was a lane just big enough for the bus. She waved to Jake, who put it in gear and crept with infinite slowness around the wall of cars on his right. At one point his bumper scraped the trunk of a VW, but if the driver of the car cared about it, he kept it to himself.
“Come on, come on,” Dez said between her teeth as she walked backward, guiding Jake’s turn. Trout had gotten out of the bus to watch the other side.
The stillness of everything else except the big yellow bus continued to gnaw at his nerves. As the first bus finally cleared the road and rambled through onto the access lane, he realized what it was. Nothing about this fit into any workable scenario for a world he understood. This slow-motion panic, the absolute fear of human contact, the weight of the disaster that pressed down on them, the terror of what might be behind them—all of that was new. Sure, there were corollaries to different elements of it, but as a whole this was a new thing. A new pattern. And he greatly feared that it was part of a new world.
Or, perhaps, a new world order.
A new age of the world. He was sure it was something like that, though his mind rebelled at a specific definition because it all felt too big, too grandiose.
Except that it wasn’t.
It was unprecedented.
This was no longer the world he and Dez and the children on the bus and the people in these cars knew.
Since the release of Lucifer 113 it had become a different world. And in every bad way that mattered, it seemed to him that this new world did not belong to these people. Or to any people. This world now belonged to the Devil.
Maybe it wasn’t the biblical Devil, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure if that distinction even mattered.
Lucifer, by any definition, in any form, owned this world now.
“God help us,” he murmured as the line of buses moved slowly past. He saw the pale faces of terrified children, and the blank and vacant eyes of those for whom terror was a minor milestone left behind in a distant country. “God help us.”
But if anyone listened to that prayer, no voice offered even the ghost of a promise to Billy Trout.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE
HUNGRY MOTHER STATE PARK
SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA
They bumped and thumped along the access road for nearly five miles until they came to a forest service station near the crest of the mountain. There was a small building and a large parking lot with various pieces of heavy equipment. A road grader, flatbeds for hauling downed trees, a dump truck piled with gravel.
There were no people and no personal cars.
Dez, Boxer, and Gypsy approached the building, guns up and out, but they found nothing. The door was open, the lights were on, but the station was deserted. Jake led the way and the buses pulled into the lot and lined up in a row. Somehow Trout found it disturbing that the row was so neat. Each of the adults driving the buses parked in a precise line with the other vehicles. There was something wrong about that, but he couldn’t decide what it was.
A disconnection from reality, perhaps. He kept it to himself.
The last vehicle in the convoy was a flatbed truck they’d stolen from a construction site a few miles from Sapphire Foods. Jake had loaded his Big Bird onto it and one of the parents helped him and drove the big rig. He parked the rig with the same precision.
Maybe they’re trying to impose order on chaos, thought Trout. That was probably it, though it felt a bit like tidying the furniture and vacuuming the rugs during a house fire.
Trout got off the bus and waited for Dez to come out. He watched the parents and teachers begin lining up the kids for trips to the bathroom in the station. Some—those that couldn’t wait—were escorted to the tall grass on the far side of the parking lot. Jake, his niece Jenny, and a few of the adults who had guns, began fanning out to stand perimeter watch. As if that was something they’d always done. As if that was somehow normal.
It is now, he told himself. And that wrenched the knife in his heart another quarter turn.
Dez came out of the station, looked around for him, then came over, her shoulders slumped, face haggard.
“Anything?” he asked. “You were in there a while.”
“There’s a radio,” she said.
“And?”
She simply shook her head.
They walked together to the edge of the drop-off. He could barely walk and needed to lean on her for the seventy paces to the bench that offered a beautiful view of the mountains and the sky. On any other day it would be breathtaking.
Down below, the traffic on the highway crawled.
“At least it’s moving,” said Dez.
“Yeah, there’s that.”
Neither of them could manufacture any convincing optimism.
“What did the radio say?”
From where they sat they could hear the sobs of the children and the constant murmur of adult voices as the parents and teachers did everything they could to convince the kids that it was all going to be all right.
Trout marveled at how similar a promise sounded to a lie. Or was it all just wishful thinking?
“Dez?”
She removed the walkie-talkie from her belt and turned up the gain. It babbled at them in a dozen overlapping voices. Military and civilian authorities, and even some militia groups whose shortwave signals were breaking into the flow. It was all hysterical and most of the voices were asking for backup, for relief, for medical attention, for emergency services, for help.
For answers.
“The radio’s the same. No one has any answers,” she said. “Most people don’t know about Homer or Volker or any of that. All they know is that there’s a plague and nobody seems to be able to stop it. There’s a lot of bullshit, too. People saying it’s the Rapture, shit like that.”
“Maybe it’s true.”
??
?Don’t start, Billy.”
“Sorry.”
He bent forward and put his head in his hands. Some of the glass cuts on his scalp and arms hadn’t yet been seen to, and he didn’t care. Dez sat beside him, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, her arms mottled with powder burns, her knuckles as raw and red as her eyes as she methodically reloaded her pistol and shotgun.
Slowly, painfully, Trout raised his head as a flight of six fighter jets screamed overhead into the northeast.
“Thunderbolts,” said Dez automatically.
“Where do you think they’re headed?”
“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “Charleston, maybe.”
He nodded.
There were more than a hundred thousand people in Charleston.
Maybe, he corrected himself. He didn’t really know if that was true anymore.
Dez got up and went back to the bus, then returned with a bottle of water, his camera bag, and a map. She set the bag down in front of him.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“In case you want to use it.”
He shook his head.
They left it there as she opened the map and spread it out over their laps.
He studied her blue eyes for a few moments. He saw so many things in those eyes. A fear so deep that it looked like it was cracking the hinges of her sanity. He saw ghosts in her eyes. JT, the dead children, her colleagues and neighbors in Stebbins, the people who had died on the buses. Each of them had left its specter in her mind, polluting her, driving fissures into her. Trout knew with absolute certainty that if Dez had to live on this edge for much longer, she was going to break. Those qualities that made her so strong—compassion, her love for the children, her need to save as many as she could—they were each failures waiting to happen. A person cannot be sustained on a diet of their own failure, even if that failure is not their fault. This thing was so big, so vast that it even consumed people like Sam Imura. What hope did Dez really have?
He almost took her in his arms, almost made the unforgiveable error of offering comfort and a shoulder to someone who was right there at the edge of her control.
Billy Trout almost made that mistake, but he didn’t.