Sam caught his reflection in the mirror bolted to the back of the motel room’s door. The man he saw looked small, old, and guilty even though he hadn’t yet done anything except take a call from an old friend. But then he thought about what was at stake. He thought about his family back in California. His dad, his stepmom, his brother, and his infant half-brother. They were three thousand miles away from this, but with something like Lucifer 113 distance wasn’t a guarantee of safety. All it did was buy some time.
Time before what?
Before the inevitable or something that might already be over.
There was no way to know. No way to be certain.
Except to gather his team, saddle up, and cross the Q-zone into Stebbins County. The one place on earth that no one in their right mind wanted to go.
“The fuck are you doing?” he asked himself.
His reflection looked pale and sickly and it offered no reply.
Then Captain Sam Imura stood up, reached for his gear bag, slung his sniper rifle over his shoulder, and headed out to war.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS ON ROUTE 653
BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
“Please…” he begged. “Don’t … please…”
Goat was crammed into a cleft formed by his overturned table, a couple of chairs, the wall, and a tourist who sat bleeding and weeping. He huddled into his niche, arms wrapped around his head, knees drawn up tight as if the bones of his limbs offered some real protection for what was happening. The air in the Starbucks was filled with screams and prayers.
And laughter.
Low, thick. Wet.
“Please,” Goat whimpered. He thought desperately about Volker’s information, uploaded to his email accounts but not sent. Not shared.
And with sudden screaming clarity he realized that he and Billy had made a serious mistake. That information should have gone out. Goat’s instinct had been to send it, but he hadn’t. It was in attachments. It was just sitting there. As useless as he was.
God …
Despite the carnage around him, Goat cut a sly, frightened look at his laptop, which lay on the floor not five feet away. How long would it take to locate the email and forward it to the listservs of reporters to which he belonged. How long?
Five seconds?
Less.
That’s all the time it would take to maybe save the whole fucking world.
A handful of seconds.
Goat felt himself begin to move, shifting away from his worthless hiding place, edging toward the laptop.
Then the laughter stopped.
“Hey,” said a voice, “I know you.”
The world seemed to freeze around Goat and for a terrible moment even the screams seemed muted as if those words had flipped a switch on everything. Goat didn’t look up, though, too frightened to risk acknowledging anything.
“Yeah,” continued the voice, “I seen you somewhere, ain’t I?”
Goat held his breath, refused to move.
Then pain exploded in his thigh as something hit him with jarring force. A cry burst past the self-enforced stricture in his throat, and he rocked sideways, suddenly whipping his arms out like defensive stabilizers. Despite his need not to see this man, Goat’s eyes opened and there he was. Standing right there, looming over him, bare-chested, ugly, covered in glistening red, eyes dark and wild, smiling mouth full of promise.
“Fucking-A, I knew I knew you,” said Homer Gibbon. “You were there when they killed me.”
Behind Gibbon and all around him was pain and horror.
People were broken.
Broken.
Arms shattered, mouths gaping to reveal broken teeth, handfuls of hair torn out from customers who had tried to run but were one step too slow. Everyone was bloody. Every single person.
Some of them lay sprawled, dead or dying.
But even as he thought that, Goat knew he was wrong.
Dying maybe. Dead?
Not really.
Death, as Goat had known it his whole life until yesterday, was no longer a fixed point in reality. It was no longer a doorway that, once entered, could not be passed again. All of that had changed.
Because of Dr. Volker.
Because of something called Lucifer 113.
And because of this man.
This monster.
Homer Gibbon.
When Goat didn’t answer, Homer kicked him again. Same spot, only harder.
Gibbon wore no shoes but he knew how to kick. And from the laugh that bubbled out of him, he enjoyed it. The way some kids like kicking cats. A small cruelty that spoke with disturbing eloquence about this man. Even if Goat had not known what kind of monster Homer was, even if Goat had not sat through weeks of testimony by clinical psychologists and forensics experts at this man’s trial, he would have deduced important truths about him from that kick and its accompanying laugh.
“I asked you a question, boy,” said Homer, his voice colored by an accent that sounded southern but was pure rural Pennsylvania. “Want to see what happens if I have to ask you again.”
“Y-yes…” stammered Goat.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I was there.”
Homer kicked him again. Even harder. Goat screamed in pain and tried to turn away to protect the spot on his leg that now burned as if scalded.
“You was there when what?” demanded Homer.
“Yes,” said Goat in a small, fractured voice, “I was there when they killed you. At the prison. At the execution. I was there.”
Homer nodded in satisfaction. “What’s that make you? Some kind of news reporter?”
Behind Homer one of the wounded people was crawling toward the door. Her shirt was torn, revealing a bra with little blue flowers on it. Most of her right shoulder looked like raw hamburger. Goat hadn’t witnessed the attack specifically on her, but he recognized the bite. Even from ten feet away Goat could see a thick black goo mixed in with the blood, and in that goo tiny threadlike worms wriggled. Dark lines ran crookedly from the torn flesh, delineating the pattern of her veins and blood vessels. Even though the bite had just happened a few minutes ago, the infection was spreading at incredible speed.
So fast, thought Goat, it’s happening so fast.
It was nothing Mother Nature could ever have created. Nothing natural could spread infection at that rate. Lucifer 113 had been genetically engineered to be a perfect rapid-onset bioweapon, and the modified parasites took hold inside the bloodstream with all the deadly speed of a neurotoxin.
Homer turned, following Goat’s line of sight, and again there was the low, wet laughter.
“Fuck yeah,” he said. “That’s right. That bitch is one of mine now.”
“One of yours?” asked Goat weakly.
Homer turned back and then squatted down in front of Goat, arms dangling off the tops of his knees like a gorilla. “You gonna lay there and tell me you don’t know what’s happening? You’re a reporter and you want to tell me you don’t know what I done in Stebbins? You going to fuck with me like that?”
“N-no…”
Homer reached out and patted Goat on the cheek. Three pats, each one harder so that the last one was a full slap that rocked the reporter back against the table. It was not as hard as the kicks had been, but hard enough, and Goat’s head banged off the wooden table. He twisted sideways, once more curling into a fetal ball, collapsing against the side of the badly injured customer who’d been sitting there weeping and bleeding.
It was then that Goat realized two very bad things.
The first was that the man was no longer weeping. Or breathing for that matter.
And second was that his eyes were open.
Wide open.
Staring right at Goat.
Black mucus ran from between the man’s slack lips. There was nothing in his eyes. No pain, no confusion over the way in which everything had suddenly gone wrong for him, no spark of anything. The eyes saw Goat, though; that
much was certain.
The dead man opened his mouth to show his teeth.
Behind Goat Homer Gibbon chuckled.
“Look who woke up hungry,” he said.
He was still chuckling when the dead customer lunged at Goat, grabbed him by the shirt and hair, and pulled him toward those blood-streaked teeth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Desdemona Fox pushed herself back from Billy. The movement was abrupt, as if she’d suddenly reached the limit of the grief she allowed herself, though Trout knew it was more than that. People were watching. Civilians. And Dez was the only person of any authority left, even if that authority no longer carried any official weight. There was, after all, no Stebbins County Police Department anymore. All of the other officers and even all of the support staff were as dead as the mayor, the town selectmen, the director of public works, and the chief of the fire department. There was, in fact, nothing left of Stebbins except the small knot of people here and the real estate on which they stood.
Even so, Dez had to play her part. She knew, as he did, that her badge and gun, her uniform and the personal power everyone knew she had, formed the rails in a frail fence between order and chaos. If she lost it, then these people would likely lose it, too. And if that happened, then none of the children upstairs had a chance.
Not one chance.
Dez kept her face averted while she went through the mechanical process of removing the magazine from her Glock and thumbing in fresh rounds to replace those she’d fired. She did not bother to pick up her spent brass. Everyone stood mute as they watched this, and when she slapped the magazine back into place they all flinched. The face Dez showed them as she holstered her gun was composed, hard, uncompromising, and totally closed. If anyone noticed the drying tear tracks on her face they dared not mention them.
Dez nodded to two men who stood slightly apart from the group. “Bob, you and Luke get some of those big plastic trash bags from the kitchen. We have to wrap the bodies and get them out of here.”
The men stared at her and then past her to the room where the killing had been done. They didn’t move.
“Now,” she snapped, and they flinched again.
Bob opened his mouth, maybe to protest or maybe to ask a question, but then he caught the look in Dez’s eyes and answered with a curt nod. He tapped Luke on the arm and they turned and hurried across the gym floor.
Dez appraised the rest of the group.
“Listen to me,” she said in a quiet, dangerous tone. “The rest of you are going to search this place. Again. I don’t know who searched down here, but because some assfuck didn’t look in a closet or a closed office another kid’s dead. You hear me? Someone killed that kid and I’m not talking about the dead son of a bitch who bit him. For now I don’t give a shit who searched down here. But we need to search this whole building again and that means every nook and fucking cranny. You hear me? And if another kid gets hurt because one of you jerkoffs didn’t do your job, then God help you because when I get done with you there won’t be enough left to feed to the fucking zombies. Anyone think I’m joking, anyone has anything to say about that, say it now and I’ll shove it down your throat with your teeth. This isn’t a debate. Now move!”
They scattered like scared birds. As they moved away, Trout saw that their eyes were now filled with a different kind of fear. Not of the dead but of the living. Of her. Everyone in town knew Dez Fox. Most of the people in Stebbins didn’t like her, and Trout knew that a lot of them wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire, but no one could say that she wasn’t a good cop. There were a lot of stories floating around town about how Dez treated wife beaters and child abusers. None of those stories were exaggerations, Trout knew.
Add to that the things she’d done here in the school. She and JT, her partner. Partner, mentor, best friend. Father figure.
JT was outside, his body infected by a bite and torn by heavy-caliber machine-gun bullets. He’d sacrificed himself to help clear the school of the infected, and he’d gone down fighting to keep the infected children from being mauled by the dead before the military could use their guns to end all pain for them.
Trout wrestled with that, understanding on one level that the slaughter was necessary and even merciful in a twisted way, but on all other levels it was perverse. No matter from which angle it was viewed, the innocents were the victims.
Now the last surviving children of Stebbins County were here in this building. No more of them should have died.
The men hurried away, splitting into two-person teams, not saying anything until they were in the stairwell on the far side of the cavernous gym. All of them were bigger than Dez. Most of them were tough, hardened farmers and factory workers, some were even combat veterans. No one said a damn word to Dez Fox.
Dez stood there and watched them go. Trout saw that her whole body was trembling. Rage and pain.
He wanted to take her into his arms again.
That would probably earn him an ass-kicking, too.
So instead he said, “Dez—what do you want me to do? How can I help?”
It took a long time before she reacted, as if she was off in some distant place and there was so much distance to travel to get back to where he was. Her head turned slowly until she faced him, but even then there was no immediate recognition in her eyes.
She said, “What?”
“How can I help?” he repeated gently.
“I…” she began, but faltered. She shook her head, then without another word, Dez crossed the big empty room and vanished into shadows.
Billy Trout stood watching the emptiness of the open doorway to the stairwell.
“Shit,” he said softly.
He found a chair and dragged it over to a spot near where the child and the dead Mr. Maines lay. He didn’t want to see them, but he felt it was important to stay with them until Bob and Luke returned with their makeshift body bags. When he tried to understand this self-imposed vigil he found no useful answers. No insights.
He checked his sat phone to see if there was anything from Goat, but got no signal down here in the basement. It made him wonder how the story was spreading. Was it time to do another broadcast.
This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse.
That was what he’d said. It hadn’t sounded silly at the time. He meant it to be shocking. Now it sounded strange to Billy. It was less than one hour since the military attacked the school.
And yet it felt like forever. Like he and Dez and the others had always been here; like this was one of those nightmares he sometimes had where he felt trapped in a twisted funhouse experience that never ended.
Reporting live from the apocalypse.
Shock tactics or straight reporting?
The line seemed badly blurred right now.
Goat had told him that the whole thing had gone viral, but Trout didn’t know what that actually meant in terms of the survival of the people here and the handling of the outbreak. Was it all over?
Was his part in it over?
Trout was a career reporter, even though that career had dumped him back into his hometown of Stebbins. A one-stoplight dirt stain on the Pennsylvania map. Rarely had he gotten so much as a whiff of a significant story. Even his coverage of the execution of convicted serial murderer Homer Gibbon was not star-making. There were too many better-known reporters there. At best the pieces he filed for Regional Satellite News were folded into stories by bigger—and very likely better—journalists around the country.
But now he was the story, and that was a paradigm shift so radical it stripped all the gears.
He sat on the rickety folding chair, staring at the shadows, listening to the sounds of an old building settling into its own grave. He could still feel the dried tear tracks on his own cheeks. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the school, out there in the black night, he could hear the heavy drone of helicopters, the menacing thr
op-throp-throp of their blades.
“Ah, Dez…” he said softly. He thought about what this was doing to her. Hurting her, aging her.
Desdemona Fox was the most beautiful woman in the world to Trout. Tall, fit, powerful, blond, with great bones and every curve on his personal must-have list. Curves he knew more intimately than anyone. Granted he was far from the only person—or even the most recent person—to have explored that landscape, but he was the one who loved them and loved her. Not in that order.
They’d been an item more times than he could count, and they’d both logged mileage in breaking each other’s heart. The last time had been a doozy. He’d proposed marriage and the next day he walked in on her with a biker. That was her reply to the proposal. Classic Dez. Why cross a bridge when you could burn it?
Since then, she’d been a raging bitch to him. And, to hear others tell it, she’d been a raging bitch to the whole world. Even more viciously defensive than normal, which was saying quite a lot. There was, however, a corresponding increase in her efficiency as a police officer. She wrote more tickets, arrested more drunks, broke up more bar fights, and kicked more ass than before, all of it with a nasty fuck-you smile on her pretty lips.
Then the devil came to Stebbins County.
Even now Billy found it hard to reconcile the fact that his town was being destroyed by something conceived half a world away during the Cold War. It was spy movie stuff. It was horror movie stuff.
He wondered what the death toll was here in town. Seven thousand people had lived here. Were all of them dead now?
Was that even possible?
Add to that the kids bused in from neighboring districts and the parents who had come to get them out of the path of the storm. What was that—another thousand, maybe two?
Someone else’s madness had brought wholesale death to town.
Except in Stebbins County “death” wasn’t death anymore.
He put his face in his hands. Not to weep, but to try and hide.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO