Dead of Night

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“This is Magic Marti at the mike with an update on the storm that’s currently chowing down on our area. A hurricane warning is in effect for Stebbins and Fayette Counties. Take my advice: if you don’t have to go out, don’t. I have an updated list of school and business closings…”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The radio crackled while Dez was still two miles from the hospital. She snatched up the mike.

“Unit Two.”

“Dez? What the heck’s going on out there?” blurted Flower. “They’ve upgraded the storm again and they want to start moving the kids to the elementary school. All the stores in town are closing at noon, and I can’t get the chief on the radio.”

The elementary and middle schools in Stebbins were regional, pulling in busloads of kids from all over. Early closings meant long delays as parents had to scramble to get out of work and drive to pick up their kids. That meant that the kids were usually kept in the school auditoriums or lunchrooms for hours. But with a storm coming, only the elementary school was rated as an official shelter. It was on high ground at the end of Schoolhouse Lane. All of the middle school kids had to be bussed there, and all of the parents rerouted. It was a logistical nightmare under good conditions. Today it would be insane.

“I can’t help with that, Flower. Things are pretty crazy right now. You’re going to have to bring in the volunteers to handle bussing the kids over to the Little School.”

“Are you at the hospital yet?”

“Almost.”

“Well … what should I do with the lieutenant from the state police?”

“Say again?”

“Lieutenant Hardy’s on the other line. He keeps asking to talk to the chief, but—”

“Patch him through, Flower,” said Dez, “I’ll bring him up to speed.”

“Thanks! Meet him on channel eight,” Flower said, sounding greatly relieved.

Dez dialed over to eight, which was one of the secure lines. There was a burst of squelch and then a strong male voice spoke.

“With whom am I speaking?”

“This is Officer Desdemona Fox, Stebbins County PD.”

“Officer Fox, good. This is Lieutenant William Henry Hardy, State Police, Troop B. Are you with Chief Goss?”

“No, sir. He’s at a crime scene—”

“The Hartnup scene?” interrupted Hardy.

“Yes sir.”

“He isn’t answering his radio.” Hardy said in a tone that seemed to suggest that he was deeply offended that a police chief from a one stoplight town would dare to dodge his call. “I can’t seem to make contact with him.”

“He had a radio when I left him, Loot. Maybe fifteen minutes ago. Aren’t your boys on site yet?”

Just as she said that, three state police cruisers rounded the corner and shot past her, lights flashing, sirens blaring. She’d have heard them if it hadn’t been for the wail of the ambulance.

“Correction, Loot … three units just passed me en route to the scene.”

“Very well. I’ll get a full report from them,” said Hardy, sounding only slightly mollified. “In the short term, what can you tell me?”

Dez was expecting this and she made sure she phrased it as blandly as possible. She gave him straight facts without any speculation or color. Hardy listened without comment until she was finished.

“My condolences on the loss of your colleagues, Officer Fox,” he said. The comment lacked any real emotion, but Dez gave him a couple of points for good manners. “The officer who was overcome — was there any indication of erratic behavior beforehand?”

“None,” Dez said.

“Very well. I’ll be in touch.” Hardy disconnected without another word.

“Dick,” she grumbled. The hospital was four blocks away. Maybe she’d get some answers there.

The radio buzzed again and Flower was back on the line.

“Dez,” said Flower, “we have a regular police call, too, and I don’t have any other units. It’s a carjacking. Guy said a naked man rushed him when he braked for a light. Beat him up, took his pants, and drove off in the car. Can you believe that? Took his actual pants. And get this … the guy who attacked him bit him!”

Dez nearly drove into a telephone pole. “Say again?” she demanded.

“That’s what I said. The guy bit him, and it’s pretty bad, too. Hospital doesn’t have any ambulances to send. They’re all at Doc’s place. So, I need you to take his statement at the hospital.”

Christ, thought Dez, another bite?

Then she thought about the set of bare footprints that led out of Hartnup’s.

“What’s the location?”

“The victim is at the diner. Murph is going to take him to the hospital.”

“Okay, we’ll try to get his statement there.”

Half a block away the façade of the hospital loomed out of the gloom.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Trout walked side by side with Selma, and neither of them spoke until they stood in the lee of the sagging barn. Crows lined the pitched roof and thirty kinds of birds flew in and out of holes in the rust-colored wood. There were no animal sounds from inside, and Trout suspected the barn had been in total disuse for at least twenty years.

“Okay,” Trout said, “we’re officially out in the sticks. Let’s talk.”

Selma fished in the pocket of her robe and produced a pack of unfiltered Camels and a lighter with the logo of a Pennsylvania casino. Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs. Selma kissed a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and stuck out the corner of her lower lip to blow smoke up and over her face.

“Ask your questions,” she said.

“Are you Homer Gibbon’s aunt?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“How well did you know him?”

“Seen him once in a while. Mostly when he was like seventeen and older. After he ran away from foster care the last time.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Selma puffed, shrugged.

“Could you be a bit more specific?” Trout asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe back in ninety, ninety-one.”

“That was after he had committed several murders.”

“Alleged murders,” she corrected. “He was never convicted for anything back then.”

“Alleged,” Trout conceded. No reason to argue that point. “Did you know about his … um … activities?”

She made a face. “Ever heard the expression ‘country don’t mean dumb’?”

“Sure.”

“You’re asking a question that you’d ask a stupid hayseed who didn’t know shit from Shinola. Is that how this is going to run? You going to treat me like I’m poor unedumacated white trash.” She leaned on the deliberately mispronounced word, giving it a heavy rural twist. “If I say I knew what he was up to then I’m an accessory. I look old, but do I look stupid?”

Trout grinned, unapologetically. “No, ma’am,” he said, “you don’t.”

“Show some respect.”

Trout found he suddenly liked Aunt Selma. “Sorry.”

She nodded and took a long drag.

“Did you have any contact with Homer Gibbon after he was arrested for murder?”

“No.”

“No letters? E-mails? Christmas card?”

“Homer strike you as the kind of guy who buys Christmas cards?” she asked, smiling.

“Actually,” Trout said, “he tried to send valentines to the jury during his first trial.”

“Publicity stunt. Probably cooked up by his lawyer to make him look crazy.”

Probably true, Trout thought.

“So, you had no contact with him after his first arrest?”

“No.”

“At all?”

“No.”

“Then why did you place the request to have his body brought here to Stebbins for burial?”

She shrugged. “Family.”

“Sorry, Selma,” said Trout, “but that’s thin. Not to offend, but it doesn’t look like you have two dimes to rub together. Between the fees, transportation, mortuary costs, and a crew to dig a grave, you have to be shelling out five, six grand.”

“Four and change.”

“Still a lot of money.”

“Only if I was interested in saving it.” Selma picked a fleck of tobacco from her tongue and flicked it into the wind. “You have any family?”

“A sister in Scranton,” he said. “Distant cousins somewhere in upstate New York.”

“When’s the last time you saw your sister?”

Trout had to think about that. He and Meghan had never been close. They swapped cards at the holidays, but the last time he’d actually seen her?

“Couple of years ago.”

She arched an eyebrow. “A couple?”

“Okay, four years ago.”

“So, you’re not close. If she died, would you go to her funeral?”

“Sure.”

“You say that without thinking about it. Why?”

“She’s my sister.”

Selma nodded, and Trout got it.

“Well, yeah, okay,” he said, “but she’s a nurse and a mother. She’s not a serial killer.”

“Neither was Homer last time I saw him. He was a scared, lost young man who hadn’t gotten much of a break or a kind word from anyone. His mom gave him up when he was just born — and let me tell you, that leaves a mark — and he was in and out of foster care until he ran away. You ever do a story on foster care, Mr. Trout?”

Trout said nothing.

“Yeah, I bet you have. So, you know what kind of meat grinders they are. Half the foster parents are in it just for the paychecks and they don’t give a flying fuck about the kids. The other half are pedophiles who shouldn’t be around kids. You think Homer got to be the way he was because he had bad wiring?” She tapped her skull. “Fuck no. He was made to be what he was. The system screwed him every bit as much as those baby-raping sonsabitches they call foster parents. Don’t try to tell me different because then you’d be lying.”

“No,” he said. “I know what those places are like. A lot of kids get torn up in there and that makes them victims of the predators and victims of the system.”

“And it turns them into predators themselves,” observed Aunt Selma.

“Not all of them,” said Trout. “Not even most of them.”

“Enough of them. Enough so that people became used to them being killers and when that happened it stopped being an aber … aber … what’s the word I’m thinking of?”

“Aberration?” Trout supplied.

“Yes. And then they say that since most people don’t turn bad then those that do have done so because of choice.” She threw her cigarette into the cold dirt and ground it under her heel. Trout noticed that she wore bedroom slippers with little hummingbirds on them. A touch of innocence? Or a memory of innocence lost? Either way it made Trout feel sad for her. He wondered how much of her life was forced on her and how much was choice? And that made him wonder if a person who is forced into bad situations over and over again when they’re too weak or helpless to do anything about it will eventually make bad choices of their own simply because they’ve become habituated to them.

He’d have to talk to a psychologist about that. It would make a great motif to string through the whole story, be it a book or a screenplay.

“Are you saying that none of what Homer did was his fault?”

Selma did not answer that right away. She took out her Camels and lit another and puffed for a while, one arm wrapped around her ribs, the elbow of the other arm propped on it, wrist limp so that the hand fell backward like someone considering a piece of art in a gallery. Only this wasn’t an affectation, he was sure of that. She was really thinking about his question. Or, he thought a moment later, carefully constructing the content of her reply. On the roof of the barn one crow lifted its voice and sliced the air with a plaintive cry that was disturbingly like that of a child in pain.

“No,” she said at length, “that wouldn’t be the truth and we both know it. Homer may have been pushed in the wrong direction, but over time … yeah, I think he got a taste for it.”

“And yet you wanted to have him buried here.”

Selma nodded. “Yes.”

“Why?” Trout asked.

“You asked that already.”

“You never actually answered the question.”

“He’s family.”

“Okay, but it’s not like this is your ancestral home. You were born in Texas. Homer was born in Pittsburgh. Why here?”

“It’s the family place now.”

“Is there more of the family around?”

She shook her head. “I don’t expect you’d understand, Mr. Trout.”

“I’d like to.” He intended it as a lie, but he surprised himself by meaning it.

She smoked her cigarette and stared at the line of gray clouds that had begun to creep over the far tree line.

“I’ve got cancer,” she said.

Her comment startled Trout. “What? I mean … God, I’m sorry. Is it very … advanced?”

“I’m a corpse,” she said. “I’ll be dead by Christmas.” She waggled the cigarette between her fingers. “Three packs a day for forty years.”

“I’m … sorry.”

“Fuck it. The warnings are right there on the side of every pack. I knew what I was getting myself into. Slow suicide. Knowing that these coffin nails would kill me one day made them taste a little better.”

Trout said nothing.

Selma cocked her head and looked up at him. “I won’t pretend that I’m anything but what I am, Mr. Trout, and being a whore and a madam is far from the worst things I’ve done. I’ve lived down in the gutter since the day I was born. Shoved into the life but chose to stay there. My choice. I make no apologies and I’d spit on anyone who said they felt sorry for me. This is my life, and I had some good times, too.” A tear glittered in the corner of one eye and she wiped it away irritably. “I can’t fix anything I ever done. Most of the people I wronged are long dead, so there’s no way to make any kind of amends, even if I wanted to. I don’t regret most of it, but there’s one thing … one single thing that I wish I hadn’t done. Or, maybe it’s a thing that I wish I had done.”

“What’s that, Selma?” Trout asked softly.

“When my sister Clarice got knocked up, she came to me and asked if I’d take the baby. She was really far gone, even then. Her hurt went so deep that she lost herself in her own darkness and she knew — like anyone else knew — that she was never going to find her way out.”

“Who was the father? Where was he in all of this?”

Selma gave a bitter laugh. “He was any one of a hundred ten-dollar tricks. Even if she knew his name there was no way he’d ever do the right thing because nobody ever does the right fucking thing.”

“So she asked you to take the baby?”

Another tear formed and this fell down her cheek, rolling and stuttering over the thousands of seams in her skin. “I had a place and I had a little bit of money. I was running ten whores, and I could have made them take care of the kid in shifts. I could have done that and it wouldn’t have been no skin off my nose. It would have been nothing to me.” Two lines of tears fell together. “But it might have been everything to Homer. Nobody would have laid a hand on him. None of those foster parent fucks would have stuck their dicks in him. No one would have whipped him with electrical cords or burned him with cigarettes or made him kneel on pebbles.” Selma suddenly grabbed Trout’s sleeve. “Homer might have had a chance, you see?”

“Yeah,” he said thickly. “I see.”

“And all the hurt he did to other people. All those killings. The bad things he did to women and little kids. He might not have done any of that…”

“You don’t know that, Selma. He might have had this in him from birth.”

She pulled her hand away from his sleeve and gave a derisive shake of her head. “A bad seed? Bullshit. I don’t believe in that. Babies don’t carry sin.”

“I’m talking a chemical imbalance or—”

She shook her head again. “No. It was the system that made him into a monster. It’s their fault. Theirs and mine.”

They stood in the cold wind, watching the sunny day grow gradually darker.

“So,” Trout began slowly, “bringing him back here…?”

“Homer never had a home,” she repeated. “I didn’t give him anything before. Now … at least I could do that much. A home … and maybe some peace.”

Trout had a hundred other questions he wanted to ask, but he left them all unsaid. They tumbled into the dirt like broken birds as he looked into those lambent green eyes. Windows of the soul, and hers looked in on an interior landscape that was ravaged by storms and blighted beyond reclamation.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

She nodded. Tears streamed down her face, but she set her jaw. Trout watched as she stubbed out her second cigarette and lit the third.

Without another word he turned and walked slowly back along the road to the Explorer. This story was solid gold, no question about it, but he knew with absolute certainty that it was going to break his heart to write it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Dez braked hard and jolted to a stop in front of the emergency room entrance and was out of the car before the ambulance passed her and pulled into the turnaround. Orderlies, nurses, and a doctor were running in a pack and converged with Dez as the back door of the ambulance opened and JT jumped out.

They brought the stretcher down, dropped the wheels, and then the swarm turned and ran with it into the hospital amid a flurry of technical medical jargon neither JT nor Dez understood.

Instead of taking Diviny to a regular curtained bay in the emergency department, they wheeled him into the trauma bay, which was a large semi-operating room intended for a single patient. Dez and JT stood in the open doorway, not wanting to enter but needing to know something — anything — that would make some sense of this.

An argument broke out between the doctor and paramedics over the vitals, and the doctor — an Indian man whose name tag read Sengupta — was loud and condescending. He ordered the nurses to “take a proper set of vitals, goddamn it.”

They did. Or, at least they tried. They cut through Diviny’s clothes and stuck EKG leads onto his chest. They tried taking his temperature by the ear and later rectally. They put him on an automatic blood pressure machine and clipped another oximeter to his fingers. They used a Doppler device to try to take a pulse.

Sengupta was soon yelling again.

“Check the damn machines!” he snarled.

They did. Then he went and checked for himself. New blood pressure machines were wheeled in. New thermometers were used. Half a dozen stethoscopes were pressed against Diviny’s chest and abdomen.

And then the noise and confusion in the room suddenly melted down into a hushed silence as the medical professionals stood around the table. Some stared at Diviny; the rest looked to each other for confirmation or explanations. No one said anything for at least half a minute.

Oh, shit, thought Dez; and she realized how much hope she was placing on a proper medical examination.

Then the doctor began firing a new set of orders. “I want a CHEM-7 panel. Electrolytes and renal function tests. Do a liver function test, ABG, CBC with diff … serum-urine tox screen. Check for everything: alcohol, Tylenol, aspirin, cocaine, heroin, any other narcotics, amphetamines, marijuana, barbiturates, benzodiazepines. Get me a UA culture and sensitivity, as well as blood cultures, cardiac enzymes. And let’s get a chest X-ray and a CT scan. Get IVs going.”

He turned to the paramedic. “Who brought him in?”

Don pointed to Dez and JT, and the doctor stepped away from the table and headed toward them, herding them outside with wide arms, like a shepherd herding goats. They backed out into the hall.

Sengupta had a dark, scowling face and very intense eyes. He loomed over them, taller even than JT’s six one. “What happened to this man?”

“I don’t know—” began Dez, but he cut her off.

“Then tell me what you do know.”

She nodded and launched in. Sengupta interrupted constantly, digging into the story for little bits of information. Dez could see him becoming more and more frustrated because even though they had a lot of details, none of them seemed to want to assemble into a reasonable picture of any kind.

Sengupta drained them dry and then stood silent, looking from them to the swinging vinyl doors that separated the hallway from the trauma room.

“Doc,” asked Dez, “what’s wrong with him?”

The doctor didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Did you see anything unusual? Containers of chemicals? Unusual poisons? Anything like that?”

“Just the stuff Doc Hartnup keeps in the mortuary,” said JT. “Don’t really know what he has in there.”

“Is there a landfill near the mortuary? Anyplace where a toxic leak might—”

Dez shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

“Did Officer Diviny drink or eat anything while he was there?”

“No,” they both said.

“I don’t think he was even inside the mortuary building,” said Dez.

“Okay, okay…” The doctor chewed his lip. “I’m going to call Poison Control and have them get some people out there. I would like you to contact Chief Goss and ask if anyone else has become sick, or is acting strangely. Anything, even small symptoms.”

“Is that what this is?” JT asked. “A toxic spill?”

Again the doctor didn’t answer.

“Could it be a disease of some kind? Or an insect bite?”

“We … should wait until we get some test results.”

Sengupta started to turn away, but Dez touched his arm. “Doc … what about the vitals? The paramedics couldn’t get any and I didn’t see your team get any. What’s that about?”

The doctor’s eyes were hooded and he repeated, “We need to see the test results. Now please, officer…”

Dez sighed and stepped aside. Sengupta went back inside the trauma room and the vinyl doors swung shut in Dez’s face. She tried to peer through the window, but it was virtually opaque. All she could see were figures milling around.

She stepped back and turned to JT.

“This is some shit, Hoss.”

“I need to sit down,” he said, and he staggered over to a row of ugly plastic chairs and collapsed onto one. Now that the urgency of the moment was over, exhaustion hit them like body blows. JT bent forward with his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his palms. Dez stood and watched him, afraid for a moment that he was crying. He wasn’t. After a moment he rubbed his palms over his face, rubbed his eyes with his fists, and sat up.

“This is definitely some shit,” he said.

“I know,” she said, “and it’s not over. While we were en route Flower called to say that they were bringing in a bite victim. We’d better go find him and get a statement.”

JT stared at her, his brown eyes filled with fear and confusion. “What’s going on?”

Dez looked down the hall toward the nurses’ station, and instead of checking on the bite victim she sat down next to JT. There was a clock on the wall across from them and the second hand chopped its way through a minute of silence. It seemed to take an hour.

“You want to talk about this?” she asked, her voice idle, the question loaded.

He shook his head. “Not now or ever.”

They watched the second hand.

Then JT said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it damn well doesn’t,” Dez agreed. It felt as if there was a war going on inside her body. She could feel the shakes wanting to kick in, trembling there at the edge of her self-control; and deeper inside was an anger that was unlike anything she’d felt since Afghanistan. When your friends roll over a land mine and a sudden blast scatters them and their vehicle over a hundred yards of the landscape, the same feeling begins to burn. There’s never a signature; you have no one specific to hate. It’s hard to hate an ideology or concept with any degree of satisfaction. Hate is a personal thing, a reaction to attack. Here … Dez didn’t know if this was a person somehow spreading a toxin, or a bug that escaped from a lab somewhere, or a microscopic bug kicked out by Mother Nature. She wanted a cause, a culprit. Someone to go after. Someone to hurt as a way of reducing her own hurt.

JT kept shaking his head. “Doc Hartnup was dead. I mean … you saw it, right? He was dead. He was way past dead.”

“Yup. So was the Russian broad.”

The silence that followed that remark was filled with all kinds of ugly thoughts. After a few moments, JT looked sideways at her. He licked his lips. “About that … I’m sorry, kid.”

“Fuck it.”

“No … you were right earlier. I doubted you in there. Not for long, but there it is, and that makes me an asshole and a bad partner. I’m really sorry.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds. Dez smiled. “Make me a pot of your ass-burning chili and put a six of Sam Adams on ice and we’re square.”

He grinned. “You asking me out on a date, girl?”

“Gak! Don’t be a disgusting old fuck.”

“Good, ’cause I don’t date white girls.”

Dez snorted. “What I was saying, old man, is that we eat some chili and drink some brew and forget today ever happened.”

He nodded. They pretended to smile. Time passed with infinite slowness.

“So…” she said slowly, “where the hell are we?”

JT shook his head again. “At a guess, I’d say the Twilight Zone. Damn murder victims coming back from the dead. Cops killing cops. Cops eating cops. How does that make sense? I mean … even if this is a toxic spill or something.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m going to either become a serious drunk or I’ll be in therapy the rest of my life.”

“Fuck therapy. I’m going to get drunk and stay there. It’s safer. The pink elephants and polka-dotted lobsters don’t try to eat you.”

A nurse burst out of the trauma room and ran past them.

“Hey!” Dez called as she jumped to her feet, but the nurse never even turned her head. Dez looked at JT for a moment, then without saying a word they both moved to the big vinyl doors and bent close to listen. More medical chatter, but they only caught slices of that between shouts and yells and the constant snarls of Andy Diviny.

The sound of footsteps made them turn and they saw the nurse hurrying back down the hall with an armful of folded hazmat suits. She didn’t want to stop, but JT stepped into her path and blocked the hall.

“Excuse me … nurse? We brought Officer Diviny in. What’s his status?”

The nurse gave him a single haunted look and then a fierce shake of her head. “You’ll have to talk to Dr. Sengupta.”

She shouldered past him and pushed into the trauma room.

Dez and JT stared at the door.

“That can’t be good,” JT muttered.

Dez sniffed and turned away.

“Hey,” said JT gently, “are you okay?”

She shook her head but said nothing.

“Talk to me, kid.”

Dez took in a long breath and sighed it out, blowing out her cheeks. When she turned back to him her eyes were rimmed with red and wet with unshed tears. “I’m really scared here, Hoss.” She pointed at the trauma room. “You saw the paramedics try to take Andy’s vitals. He had no blood pressure, no pulse, and he wasn’t breathing. I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy but I’m pretty sure what that means.”

JT was shaking his head. “Can’t be, Dez. Absolutely cannot be. Boy was moving and fighting the whole time.”

“Yeah? Well that Russian bitch was pretty damn spry, too. And neither of us believe that someone came in and carried off Doc Hartnup.”

JT said nothing.

“Doc and the cleaning lady were both dead,” Dez growled. “So was Andy. And then they … they…” She waved around as if she’d snatch the right words out of the air.

“And then they were not dead,” JT supplied. “Come on, Dez … if you’re going to try and sell me on some bullshit that they’re vampires or ghosts or something, then I really am going home to get drunk.”

She wiped angrily at the tears. “Did I say anything about vampires? Andy wasn’t Vlad the motherfucking Impaler. He was Andy and he was dead and he was trying to bite people.”

“Okay, so what does that make him?”

She chewed her lip. “I don’t know. I guess it makes him fucked up.”

They both nodded.

“We’d better see about that other bite victim,” Dez said. JT nodded and they hurried off. But the nurse in the ER informed them that the man was in surgery under a general anesthesia. JT suggested that the nurse talk with Dr. Sengupta who was dealing with a similar bite wound. The nurse nodded and headed off to do that.

Dez and JT walked back to the row of chairs.

“It’s hard to believe they’re all gone,” said JT as he sat back down. “Doc, Jeff Strauss, Mike Schneider, Natalie Shanahan. Andy, too, I guess. Five people that I’ve known for years.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone just like that.”

Dez nodded.

JT cleared his throat. “Is this what it was like in Afghanistan?”

Dez shook her head. “Yes and no. The shock and the grief … yeah, they were the same. But the fear was different.”

“Different how?”

“Over there,” she said, “it was just bullets and bombs. But this…” She shivered. “I don’t know how to be afraid of this. The right way, I mean. You know what I’m trying to say?”

“Sadly, I do.”

The door to the trauma room opened and the tall Indian doctor came out. It took a moment for them to recognize him because he was covered head to toe in a white hazmat suit. He came toward them but stopped ten feet away and held up a hand to keep them from coming closer to him. His hazmat suit was splattered with betadine and other chemicals.

“Doc,” barked Dez, jumping to her feet, “what can you tell us?”

“We are taking Officer Diviny to quarantine.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“We … still need more information.” He considered them. “Since you were in direct contact with the patient, we should consider admitting you both for observation…”

“Not a fucking chance, doc,” growled Dez. “Storm’s hitting any minute.”

Sengupta nodded. “Then at least I would like to have a nurse draw blood from both of you. Urine samples, too.”

They didn’t ask why. They agreed.

“I’ve been on the phone with Poison Control and with several of my colleagues. We have specialists on their way here and I requested a hazmat team for the crime scene.”

“What specialists?” JT asked.

“Toxicology, epidemiology … others. This is a very … unusual … matter. I … may put a call into the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.”

“The CDC?” JT frowned. “Then you do think it’s a disease.”

“As I said, this is very unusual. We don’t know anything yet.”

The vinyl doors opened and the team, all of them in hazmats, wheeled the gurney out and hurried away down the hall. A metal frame had been erected over the bed and it was draped with heavy protective sheeting.

Dr. Sengupta directed a nurse to get samples from JT and Dez, and then he hurried down the hall after the gurney.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Billy Trout climbed back in the Explorer and drove away from Selma’s place, a frown etched deeply onto his face.

“What’d she say?” asked Goat.

Trout fished in his pocket and removed the digital recorder, thumbed back the rewind, dialed the volume up, and pressed play. The recorder had excellent pickup and the playback was only slightly muddied by the cloth of Trout’s trousers. They listened to it twice.

Goat said, “Interesting stuff.”

“Isn’t it, though?” replied Trout.

“She really got to you, didn’t she?”

“I’m not afraid to admit it.” Trout cut him a sideways look. “What’s your take on her?”

Goat fished a York Peppermint Pattie out of his jacket pocket, opened it, broke it in half, and handed one piece to Trout.

“She’s really something,” Goat said, then nibbled the edge of his candy. “She was maybe twenty, twenty-five years younger, I’d have tapped that shit.”

“Really? You listen to that tape and the only thing you can say is that you’d throw her a pity fuck?”

“I ain’t talking a pity fuck. She looks like she was hot stuff, and not that long ago. I could really see Helen Mirren playing her, ’cause I’d tap Mirren in a heartbeat.”

“You worry me at times, Goat.”

“Why? ’Cause I’m on the prowl instead of pining for a redneck lady cop who’d like to see your nuts on her key chain?”

“Don’t,” warned Trout.

“Don’t what? You telling me you’re not still hung up on Officer Boobs?”

“I’ve interviewed twenty serial killers over the years, Goat. I know everything there is to know about how to hide a body where it’ll never be found.”

“Truth hurt?”

“I’m talking dismemberment and multiple burial sites…”

“Okay, okay. Subject closed.”

“Selma,” Trout prompted. “Give me your professional opinion.”

Goat shrugged. “The theater lost a major player when she decided to fuck for a living.”

“Meaning?”

“She’s incredibly controlled. I could barely tell where she was lying and where she was telling the truth.”

“Whoa … barely? So, you could tell some of the times she was lying?”

“Well, sure.”

Trout glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Like where?”

Goat played part of the tape back. “Here. Listen to this.”

Ask your questions.

Are you Homer Gibbon’s aunt?

Sure. Why not?

How well did you know him?

Seen him once in a while. Mostly when he was like seventeen and older. After he ran away from foster care the last time.

When was the last time you saw him?

A pause.

Could you be a bit more specific?

I don’t know. Maybe back in ninety, ninety-one.

Goat hit the pause button. “See?”

“No,” admitted Trout.

“The pauses. First when you asked her if she was Homer Gibbon’s aunt. She lost about half a second answering.”

“So?”

“So … why the hesitation? She knew that you were going to ask that, and yet she still stumbles over her answer. And then again when you asked when she saw him last.”

“She shrugged.”

“Okay, she shrugged. She should have had that answer on the tip of her tongue.”

“Damn, kid, she’s dying of cancer and her only nephew was just executed yesterday. How smooth can a person be after all that?”

Goat spread his hands. “I’m just saying. In film, pauses mean something, they convey meaning. Same thing happens in conversation. Maybe not always as calculated as theater, but people uses pauses to convey a message or allow a person to stall in order to write a script for a specific message.”

“And people call me cynical.”

“You asked.”

“No, keep going. What else?”

Goat played another fragment.

That was after he had committed several murders.

Alleged murders. He was never convicted for anything back then.

“See? She not only threw ‘alleged’ at you, she got kinda pissed that you didn’t use it.”

“She’s related to him.”

“No doubt,” said Goat. “But I don’t think that’s why she got pissed.”

“Why, then? You think she thinks he’s innocent?”

“No … I don’t think she cares. That’s a family thing. Especially families on the edge like this. Kind of the ‘my country right or wrong’ mentality distilled down to a single family. People can fuck up and do all manner of harm, but at the end of the day if their name and your name are spelled the same, then there’s going to be some kind of … I don’t know … acceptance? Forgiveness? Maybe even allowance?”

“So … what’s your bottom line here?” asked Trout. “Why’s she being so dodgy?”

“How should I know? I read performance; you’re the writer … You build the story.”

Trout grunted. He rounded a turn too fast and his BlackBerry slid out of the little tray below the dash. Goat picked it up.

“You got mail,” said Goat, showing Trout the flashing red light. “You got your ringer turned off?”

“Usually. I have two ex-wives and they have aggressive lawyers. I’ll subject myself to that shit later.”

Goat grunted. “Looks like you have a zillion missed calls and one e-mail.”

“That’ll be from Marcia. Probably the Volker stuff. We’ll be at Volker’s place in ten minutes, so read it for me.”

Goat punched the keys and peered at the lines of text. “This is an hour old. Mmm … looks like a bunch of biographical stuff first. She says that Dr. Herman Volker was born in someplace called Panevėžys. No idea how to pronounce it. In Lithuania.”

“That fits. I thought he sounded more Slavic than German.”

“Father was German, but he was raised in Lithuania. Always into medicine. Worked as a lab tech as a teenager, went to medical school. Did residencies in psychiatry and epidemiology. Went into the Soviet army as a doctor. Then he’s off the radar for a while, but get this … he surfaces again as a field surgeon with the Russian forces in Afghanistan, and while he’s there, he defects to U.S. personnel.”

“What kind of personnel?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“But it’s inside Afghanistan?”

“Seems so.”

“CIA,” said Trout. “Has to be.”

“Yeah. That works. Eleven months later he’s working at a good hospital in Virginia. The notes mention that he has a wife and daughter, but Marcia says that she can’t find any records of them after he went into the army. Divorced, maybe?” Goat scrolled through the notes. “A lot of this is dry background stuff. He moved several times. Worked at several hospitals in Virginia, Maryland, and then Pennsylvania, and ten years ago he took a job as a doctor in the corrections system. Federal first, and then a few transfers. Another interesting thing … he got the job as senior medical officer at Rockview ahead of six other doctors with more seniority in the prison system.”

Trout nodded. “So he still has some federal juice. Someone’s making sure he gets what he wants. Wonder why.”

“That’s about it,” said Goat. “The rest is straight employment info, a few tax records Marcia could scrounge, and references to employee evaluations, all of which gave him top marks for everything.”

“More federal juice. If you’re sucking on the CIA’s tit, they watch out for you. I’d hate to be a traffic cop who tried to give him a speeding ticket.”

“Or a professional rival,” suggested Goat as he handed the phone back. Trout stuffed it in his pocket without turning the ringer back on or checking his voice mail. The Volker information was so compelling that he plain forgot.

They chewed on the information as they drove.

“If he has federal juice, then why is afraid of anything?” asked Goat. “I mean, someone fucks with him and he’s one phone call away from calling down the wrath of God.”

“Yep,” agreed Trout “which means that if he was being harassed about having performed the lethal injection, then he could call in ten kinds of support.”

“And here we are,” mused Goat, “driving right to his door to try and bully him into giving us a story. How smart are we?”

Trout didn’t answer. Overhead the storm was darkening the sky to the color of a fresh bruise.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Officer Ken Gunther stood on the porch and sipped coffee from a mug that had HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE in fancy script on one side and a quote on the other: “Death is Momentary — Life is Eternal.”

“Bullshit,” he said. He sipped the coffee. April, Doc’s sister, was not only smoking hot by Gunther’s finicky standards, she could brew a pot of damn good coffee. No lattes or macchiatos. No hazelnut or Irish-fucking-cream. Good old-fashioned American coffee from Colombia. Black and bitter. Hot, too, which was a blessing because he was freezing his nuts off. He still wore a lightweight summer uniform under a nylon Windbreaker, which was dumb because all he had to do was turn on the TV to see what the temperature was. Even the plastic cover for his hat was in the trunk of his cruiser, and the storm clouds were so thick and black they looked ready to explode.

He sipped and stared out at the trees.

The Hartnup place was called a cottage but it was really a big split-level. Roomy, tidy, and remote. He could see himself living in a place like this. Maybe even with April. She was divorcing that ass pirate Virgil, who, despite having fathered two kids, had finally realized that he was gay. Wow, Gunther thought. What a news flash. Everyone had known that since the fifth grade. He wondered how April didn’t know it. She seemed pretty smart, but then again a lot of people are dumb when it comes to love.

Gunther drank some more coffee and set the cup on the porch rail. He needed to pee but he did not want to go inside. If he did, then he’d get stuck in there while Dana Howard would escape out here. On the upside, he’d get to spend some time with April; but on the downside he’d have to spend time with the kids. Gunther was not a fan of children.

He looked at the front door, which was closed, then cautiously peered in through the window. Dana was standing with her back to him in the doorway between the living room and the playroom. April was changing a diaper.

Now was a good time.

Moving quietly so as not to squeak any of the porch floorboards, he crossed to the steps, went down, and then cut around to the side of the house where there was a row of thick holly bushes. He looked up and down the side yard, saw no one, unzipped, and began pissing on April Hartnup’s autumn sunflowers.

When he heard the crunch of a foot on dried leaves he jumped sideways, trying to stop his stream, cover his penis, and grab his zipper all at the same time.

“Dana, I—” he began.

But it wasn’t Dana Howard.

It was a white-faced thing that came out of the shadows between two massive willow trees. It had eyes as black and empty as bullet holes, fingers the color of old wax, and a mouth that was filled with bloody teeth.

Gunther got one word out before those teeth tore into him.

He said, “Doc—”

And then the world was red and black and, ultimately, empty of all color and sense.

CHAPTER FORTY

Selma sat with Homer on the dining room floor. His head was buried in her lap, his arms around her waist, Mildred Potts’s blood soaking through the fabric of Selma’s bathrobe. She stroked his hair and hummed disjointed fragments of nursery rhymes to him as he wept.

“It’s okay,” she said every once in a while. “It’s okay.”

Except that it wasn’t. She knew it. The truth screamed in her mind. He knew it, too. How could he not?

It took a long time for his body to stop trembling. For a long time his sobs were so deep that they threatened to break apart the shadows of the room. They were terrible sobs, torn from some deep place that Selma was sure Homer had not accessed in years. They were the broken sobs of a tortured child, magnified by the mass and muscle of a grown man.

She used the flap of her robe to wipe the blood off his face. His lips were pale, his skin was like wax except for small bursts of red around his eyes.

“Selma,” he whispered, looking up at her the way a confused toddler might.

“Yes, honey, what is it?”

“Did I … die?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, trying not to wince at the question even though it dug under her skin like a fish hook.

“Please…” he begged.

She stroked his cheek. “What do you remember?”

He closed his eyes, too. “I remember the prison. I remember being there. I was there for a long time, wasn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“I remember them coming for me. They gave me some food and I ate everything on my plate.”

“Like a good boy,” she purred.

“I wasn’t even hungry. I was sick to my stomach … but I wanted to eat it all. To make it last.”

“I know.”

“But they still came for me. Four of them. In the movies there’s a preacher, but he didn’t come to my cell.” He sniffed. His nose sounded dry, almost dusty. “They took me to the place. Like a doctor’s office, but it wasn’t Dr. Volker’s office. It wasn’t the infirmary. It was the other place.”

“Yes.”

“They made me lie down. I … almost didn’t. I thought about it. I wanted to fight. I wanted to make them force me down, y’know … make a stand? Show them that I was tougher than them, that they hadn’t beaten me, not in the end. But … I was afraid they’d think I was a coward — yknow, trying to pussy out at the end. I think they must have put something in my food. I wanted to fight … but I couldn’t. I was so out of it. When they pushed me down on the gurney … I just let them. It was weird … I could feel myself wanting to fight. That Black Eye was opening inside my head like it always does. I could feel my hands ready to go. My whole body was ready to go. I was going to tear into them. Take at least one or two of them with me and ugly up some of the others. That’d be an exit, wouldn’t it? Rip off some faces and pop some eyes. The eye was open but the Red Mouth didn’t whisper to me. It didn’t … give me permission.”

Selma squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to sob. Or scream. She knew all about the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. It was on page after page of the trial testimony. There were photos of a black eye from thirty crime scenes. Photos of red mouths cut into the chests of so many people. Men, women. Children.

In court, Homer had never spoken those words. He had never admitted that they were part of his … Selma fought for the word. Method? His style? And yet here he was telling her about them.

God, she thought, oh God, oh God, oh God …

Not that Selma ever doubted that Homer had done these things. But hearing him say it was somehow more real. She could turn off the TV, refuse to read the newspapers. But these were words spoken to her. She owned them now, and there was no way to turn away from them.

Dead by Christmas.

Maybe sooner, if there was a kind God somewhere up there.

Homer shifted his head so that it rested against her breasts. He pressed his ear to her sternum as if listening to her heart. The way he had done as a baby. The way he had done when Selma had held him while Clarice drove them to the shelter in Pittsburgh. Clarice never held him except to hand him to someone else. To Selma, to the intake nurse. Clarice winced every time she put her hands on the child.

Selma had wanted to lock her arms around him and never let him go.

Why had she? God … why had she done that?

Homer was speaking again, fishing for the thread of his fractured memory.

“They spoke to each other in a weird way. The guards. The doctors and all. Like a church thing. Like a litany. It was strange, everybody saying out loud what they were doing and the others in the room saying that they saw it. Or agreed. So weird.” He sniffed again. “They put two IVs in. I asked why they needed two, but I had to ask three times before Dr. Volker told me. He said that one was a backup in case the other line failed. I thought that was funny. Going to all that trouble just to kill a man. Killing is easy as snuffing a match. The state never understood how to do it right. They should let the other convicts do it. Even some of the new fish can do a man faster than a wink, and do it clean, without fuss. Even without much pain. Those prison fucks … they think it’s rocket science.”

Homer laughed and Selma tensed. The laugh was an older laugh. Less of the lost child. More of the man who had gone to prison.

“They ran one of the IV lines into the next room. But … you know what’s really funny? I mean really fucking funny, Aunt Selma?”

“Tell me,” she said, and her throat was so dry that her voice cracked.

“Before they put the IVs in … they swabbed my arm with alcohol. How stupid is that? I mean…”

He burst out laughing, his body trembling against hers.

“They’re stupid people,” said Selma, trying to soothe him.

“Yeah. That was rich. That was really something. Afraid I’d get an infection.”

“There’s was a chance you’d get a stay of execution,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It was all about my comfort and protection.” He chuckled again. It was older still. A small, dark laugh. Even so, he still lay on the floor with his arms around her. His voice was still soft.

“What happened then?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.

“They started a heart monitor. That’s part of the show, I guess. Watching to see the blips. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive … ooooooh, he’s dead.” He gave her body a squeeze. “The other convicts told me how it works. They give me a shot of sodium somethingorother to put me out. Some kind of barbiturate. Then some kind of muscle relaxant that paralyzes everything. And then something else to stop the heart. They say it takes about an hour, but the dope is supposed to drop you under right at the start. But they don’t do it right then. No, they open the curtains and start the show. Other side of the glass is a big room filled with all kinds of people. I recognized a lot of them from court. Family members of the people the Red Mouth took. The Black Eye saw and marked each one. They were there to see me go, and they’d probably been working up to it, eating their hate, convincing themselves they had the juice to do this, to see me strapped down and pumped full of death. The Black Eye looked into each one of them, and there was nobody — no-fucking-body who was carrying enough hate to get them through this. The Red Mouth was laughing inside me, ’cause we knew that this was going to fuck them up six ways from Sunday. They were all going to take a little bit of me home inside their heads, and I was going to be standing by their bedsides when they went to sleep, and I’d be pulling on their sheets every night until they died. That’s one of the things the Red Mouth gives me. I’m inside their heads, and I always will be. And when they looked at me through the glass, they saw someone so much more powerful than them that they could see they were just specks of bird shit floating in the universe.”

Selma said nothing. She continued to stroke his hair, though now the effort required deliberate effort. This was not the Homer she had cuddled as a baby, or the teenage boy on the cusp of manhood that she had held when he cried in the night. This was the one who was in the newspapers, and she did not know how to speak with him. So, she stroked his lank hair and listened as the monster told his tale.

“The reporters were different. There were a few of them there. I heard they had to win a lottery to get in, so they probably felt lucky as shit. They’re a lot different. They’re not afraid of the Black Eye or the Red Mouth. They love them. Almost like I do, but in a different way. Like Baptists and Presbyterians. Same religion, different churches. Without the Black Eye, they’d be lost. Just like me. Without the Red Mouth, they’d be reporting on car shows and hog contests. I didn’t mind them there. I could see the Black Eye on their foreheads. I felt like I was Jesus looking down and seeing Peter and John and Simon.”

Homer was quiet for a moment, and Selma tried to predict where his mind had gone. The old house creaked in the cold wind. She hoped that it would cave in and bury them both. Right here, right now. With Homer in her arms.

Dead by Christmas. That was too far away.

“Then things got weird. The other convicts said that doctors didn’t usually give the injections. Something about some oath they took. Or some law. I’m not sure. But Dr. Volker was running the whole show … and Volker … now there is one motherfucker who knows everything about the Black Eye. I saw it on his forehead the first time I went into the infirmary. Fucking Angel of Death got nothing on that prick.”

“What do you mean?” asked Selma.

“A lot of people tried to get me to open up, to admit shit. Like I was that stupid. Not him, though. He knew. From the first time I met him, he knew who I was. He never said so, but I know that he knew about the Black Eye and the Red Mouth.”

“Was he … was he like…?”

“Like me?” Homer thought about that for a long time. “Yeah. Not really, but yeah. It was there in his eyes. The Red Mouth had whispered its secrets to him, and probably a long time ago. He had that lived-in look, like someone who was at peace with the voice. It’s crazy … but I kind of admired him. Prison doctor and all. Getting paid to stick the needle. Everybody watching. Biggest audience you can imagine. Papers and TV. Witnesses there to see him perform.”

Perform.

The word hung in the air, impossibly ugly.

“He only opened up to me once,” said Homer. “Just once. It was the only time I was alone with him. After that spic shanked me in the yard and I had to get stitches. Wish I’d killed that spic. Ah, well … Anyway, I’m cuffed wrists and ankles, face down on his table, and Volker’s stitching me up. Then he bends forward and says, ‘I know.’ Just like that. Two words, but man, they said everything.”

“Was that all he said?”

“No … but that was enough. I got it. He was telling me that he could hear what the Red Mouth said. What else could it mean?” Homer pulled away from her and sat up, resting his bare back against the door frame. The blood on his chest was clotted and dark and he scratched at it with a fingernail. His eyes were hidden by the shadows cast down from his heavy brow, but Selma could feel them on her. Boring into her like slow drills.

Selma licked her lips. “What else did he say?”

“Just one more thing. He said, ‘After you go, you won’t be gone. You’ll be with us forever. You’ll know forever.’” Homer shook his head. “I wanted to thank him. It was the only nice thing anyone’s said to me since they busted me.”

“Are you sure he meant—” She stopped herself.

Homer nodded. “I know what he meant. He hears the Red Mouth. He knows what it means to live forever in the sight of the Black Eye. He was telling me you know, you see. That was decent of him. I thanked him and told him I’d like to shake his hand. But someone else came in the room, so that was that. We were never alone again after that.” He paused. “Except for a split second in the execution chamber. Doc Volker bent down to check the IV, and he shifted so that I could see his face. He mouthed the same words: ‘You’ll know forever.’ Then the warden gave the signal for the circus to start. I … don’t remember much after that.”

Selma looked down at the bloodstains on her robe. She tried not to flick a glance toward the cellar door, but failed. Homer caught it and his face tightened for a split second. Was it humor? Annoyance? Shame? She had no way to judge.

“Is that what happened?” she asked. “Did the doctor … rig things? Did he fake your death so he could get you out?”

Homer chewed his lip. Or so Selma thought until she realized with sick horror that he was sucking up some drops of dried blood.

“Has to be,” he said. “I don’t know how … but somehow he pulled a Gypsy switch and next thing I know I’m waking up in a fucking body bag in a funeral home. Scared the living shit out of the guy who unzipped me. He was chewing gum and listening to some lame-ass Celtic music shit when he pulled down the zipper and there I was. Eyes open, grinning at him. At least I think I was grinning.”

A look of confusion crossed Homer’s face and Selma waited it out. The walls shuddered under a cold blast and the windows rattled like false teeth.

“I remember being hungry. So … insanely hungry. I’ve never been that hungry before. Not until … not until…” He ran his fingers across his bloody abdomen.

“What did you do?”

He leaned forward into a slanting beam of dusty light. Now his face was completely Homer Gibbon. The newspaper Homer. There was no trace of the child or the young man.

“The Black Eye opened,” he said softly. “The Red Mouth told me what to do. And it was clearer … God … it was clearer than ever.” As he spoke these last words his eyes drifted shut. The way a connoisseur’s would when savoring the delicate flavors of a piece of perfectly prepared lamb. The garlic and rosemary, the tarragon vinegar, the mint. The blood.

“Did you kill Doc Hartnup?” Selma asked, and it cost her a lot to ask it. Her hands were shaking so badly that she had to ball them into fists around the flaps of her robe. “Did the, um … Red Mouth … tell you to do that?”

“Yes,” he said, soft as a whisper.

“God.” Her voice was softer still. Tiny. Almost not there.

“And the woman.”

“Woman?”

“I think she was Russian. Came to clean the place. Came just in time.”

“Oh, Homer…”

“I had to.” He opened his eyes. “The Red Mouth was screaming at me. Not whispering. Not talking. It was screaming!”

“And Mildred Potts?”

“Who? Oh … her.” He nodded. “I never … in the past … I never heard the Red Mouth speak so soon after. But I got hungry.”

“‘Hungry’?” She echoed the word, almost fainting at what it now meant.

“I was full … stuffed from.…” He let his voice trail off, and looked away with a half smile. “I was full and I was still hungry. You wouldn’t understand.”

The phone rang.

It was so sudden, so loud, that Selma Conroy screamed. She recoiled from the sound as if it had tried to bite her.

Homer smiled at that. He looked from the phone to Selma and back again. The phone was on the counter in the kitchen. It rang a second time.

“You going to get that?” he asked calmly.

“No.”

“You should. It could be that reporter again. Don’t want to make them suspicious.”

Selma stared at him as the phone rang a third time.

“Go ahead,” Homer prompted.

Selma reached out for the wooden chair that stood in the corner. She pulled herself up slowly, her joints creaking and popping.

“You got old,” Homer said.

She said nothing, grunting with the effort. The phone rang again and again before she tottered into the kitchen and picked it up.

“Hello?”

There was no sound behind her, nothing to let her know that Homer had also gotten up, but suddenly he was there, his body pressing against her. When he was a baby his skin was always furnace hot. Now he was cold. So cold.

“I would like to speak with Selma Conroy,” said a voice. A stranger’s voice. Male, accented. And hesitant.

“This is she,” murmured Selma, her voice still small. “Who’s calling, please?”

Homer bent close to listen. Selma could barely feel his breath, but what little there was stank of corruption. It was like the open mouth of a sewer.

The caller said, “My name is Dr. Herman Volker from the State Correctional Institution at Rockview.”

The breath caught in Selma’s throat.

“I would like to speak with you about Homer Gibbon.”

The breath in Selma’s throat wanted to burst out of her as a scream. God, how she needed to scream.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Trout called Marcia to get an update on the Volker research and put the call on speaker.

“Marcia, we got what you sent but—”

She cut him off. “Where are you idiots?”

“Heading to Dr. Volker’s place. Why, what’s up?”

“I don’t know but all hell seems to be breaking loose around here. I called you a dozen times. Murray’s been on my ass about you. The police are keeping it off the regular channels, but all I hear are sirens, and Nell over at the diner says that about a dozen state police cars and half as many ambulances have gone by in the last fifteen minutes.”

“Heading where?”

“Doc Hartnup’s. Whatever’s going on there is getting worse.”

“I know,” Trout said. “I can try going back there, but Dez will just run me off again.”

“Mm,” grunted Marcia. “I still can’t understand what you see in that piece of trailer trash. I mean, sure, she’s got the body and the face, but she is seriously damaged goods. You’d need to win the lottery just to pay her therapy bills. Providing she ever got her head out of her ass long enough to go to therapy.”

“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Marcia.”

Marcia snorted and hung up.

A line of National Guard troop trucks passed them, heading south. Trout counted thirty of them.

“Lot of men for flood control,” said Goat.

“No shit,” agreed Trout. He said nothing for a few seconds, then he punched in another number. He did not put this call on speaker. It rang three times, and he was rehearsing what he was going to leave on the voice mail when a voice answered.

“Hello?”

“Dez…?”

A pause. “I don’t have time for this, Billy.”

“No, don’t hang up. Listen, Marcia’s been telling me that some weird stuff’s been happening at Doc’s. Or at least in town somewhere.”

“That’s none of your—”

“Stop,” he said. “I’m not calling for a story. I … just wanted to see if you’re all right. She said there were ambulances and all.”

A much longer pause.

“Dez?”

“Why?” she asked.

“Come on, Dez … don’t be like that.”

“I’m working here, Billy.”

“I know … that’s the point. You’re on the job and something bad is happening. I need to know you’re okay.”

This time the pause was so long that Trout had to check the screen display to make sure the call was still connected.

Dez said, “I’m … not injured.”

It was the same thing she’d said earlier and it was a funny way to phrase it. It felt awkward and evasive to Trout.

“You sure?”

“I’m fine, Billy,” she snapped, then she took a breath and said it again. This time it was a softer voice than he’d heard her use in months. “Really, Billy. I’m okay.”

Trout relaxed by half a degree. “JT?”

“We’re both good,” she said, and before Trout could say another word, Dez hung up.

Trout held the phone in his palm, weighing it, wondering if he could throw it all the way through the windshield. Beside him, Goat was studying him and for once he wasn’t wearing a joker’s smile.

“Everything cool?” Goat asked.

Trout shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it is.”

Raindrops began spattering on the windshield as they made a right and drove under a stone arch that read GREEN GATES 55-PLUS COMMUNITY.

Below that, in painted script, it read LEAVE ALL YOUR TROUBLES BEHIND.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Lee Hartnup stood in the shadows of his family house and watched the officer die.

Because he did not need to breathe, he was able to scream continually the whole time, from first bite until the thing that was his body turned away from the lifeless meat.

He did not understand that.

The thing fed on anything it could catch. People, animals, insects crawling on trees. It fed, tearing each living being apart, drinking the blood, eating the flesh, gnawing bones. And then it stopped. Floating in the inner darkness but still connected to every nerve and sensation, he could tell that it was not a feeling of satiation that compelled the monster to stop feeding. The hunger that lived inside this hollow man was insatiable, vast and eternal. And yet it stopped.

Why?

His body let the policeman’s corpse slide down the side of the house and sprawl in an ungainly tangle of limbs.

Why discard it? Why stop eating when there was so much meat left?

And at that thought — at the fact that this thought came from his own mind — the screaming started again.

The body moved. It shambled toward the front porch steps, moving awkwardly as rigor mortis took a greater hold over each joint.

Please, he begged, let it stop me completely. That was his only hope now, that the death stiffness would freeze his body and stop it from doing these terrible things. He had no way of telling time, but he knew that rigor began setting in about three hours after death. Rigor was growing in him quickly. But it would take up to twelve hours for it to reach its peak, and then it would last for three days.

Three days.

Surely if rigor made this lumbering monster fall and lie stiffly in the grass someone would find him within three days. Find him, and do what was necessary to stop this. Bury him. Dissect him. Burn him.

Please … anything!

He would welcome any death, any true death, no matter how painful or protracted, as long as it stopped this.

At the bottom step the thing’s feet hit the wooden riser and rebounded. Hartnup tried to listen inside that darkness for some trace of a mind, of a presence. If something was there, if there was some consciousness or spirit — even that of a ghost or demon or whatever had done this to him — then perhaps he could reason with it. Bargain with it.

The right leg bent at the knee and the foot rose over the riser and thumped down on the bottom step.

Hartnup felt it happen but nowhere in this vast darkness could he detect the slightest trace of a directing intelligence.

What was making the legs move? What allowed this thing to encounter the problem of an obstacle like stairs and come up with the solution of stepping up? Even a newborn baby could not do that. This thing has less consciousness than an infant, so how — how — HOW — was it doing this?

His rational mind tore itself to pieces trying to solve that.

The dead thing took a second step, a third, and then it was on the porch, facing the front door.

With a burst of terror more profound than anything he had so far experienced, Hartnup knew what door this was. Just as he knew what unbearable horror lay behind it.

Through the closed window he heard the sound of voices. Two women. One was a stranger. The other.

April.

His sister.

And the laughter of children.

The thing raised a hand and pounded on the door. It was limp, almost completely slack, but it was loud.

“Hey, Ken — did you lock yourself out?”

The other woman’s voice, coming close, a trace of laughter in her words.

The creature pounded again. And again.

And then the door opened.

Hartnup begged God to let him die for real and for good and to not have to be a witness to this.

His loudest cry was as silent as death, and not even God heard him.

Hartnup tried to scream loud enough to drown out the other screams that now filled the air. He tried.

He tried.

He tried.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Dr. Volker surprised them by answering the door after the first knock. He pulled it open abruptly as if he intended to spring out at them, but then he froze, his eyes narrowed and suspicious.

“Who are you?”

Trout smiled. “We spoke on the phone earlier, doctor. I’m Billy Trout, Regional Satellite News.”

Volker was in his late sixties. Beyond retirement age. His sharp German features were softened by age, his blond hair thinned to a pale rime. He wore a thick velour bathrobe and one hand was buried to the wrist in one deep pocket. The pocket sagged under a heavy weight, and Trout suddenly felt his testicles climb up inside his pelvis.

Gun, he thought. Christ, he has a gun.

“How did you get this address?”

“Does it matter?” asked Trout.

“Yes,” snapped Volker, “it does. How did you—”

“DMV. The address on your license…”

“You shouldn’t have access to that kind of information.”

Trout spread his hands. Behind him, Goat shifted nervously and Volker’s pale eyes shifted toward him.

“Who is this?” Volker demanded.

“My cameraman. Gregory Weinman.”

“Weinman,” Volker repeated, his lip curling slightly into a sneer.

Great, thought Trout, he probably hates Jews. This is going to be so much fun.

“Doctor,” Trout said, “we would like to ask you a few questions. About Selma Conroy and Homer Gibbon.”

Volker gave him a flat reptilian stare, and Trout was already fishing for something to say to try to convince the doctor to let them in, when Volker suddenly stepped back. “Very well,” he said. He turned and walked into his house, leaving the door open.

Trout and Goat looked at each other. Goat raised his eyebrows in a “well, this is what you wanted” look.

They followed the doctor inside and closed the door.

The house was depressing and dry. The pictures on the wall were the kind you bought at Ikea. The living room was almost certainly picked without passion from a catalog and it was set up to match that page. It was technically attractive, but it lacked warmth and humanity. No magazines on the coffee table. No novels or even technical books. Nothing. It was a place, not a home. Volker waved them to chairs. Trout and Goat sat on opposite ends of the couch.

Volker surprised them again. “Do you want coffee?”

“Um … yes,” said Trout. “Thanks.”

“It’s instant.”

“Instant’s fine.”

“I don’t have milk or sugar.”

Of course you don’t, you sour old fuck. “Black works for me,” Trout said aloud.

“Me, too,” said Goat hastily, even though he was an eight packs of sugar and a quarter cup of half-and-half coffee drinker.

Volker set a tray with three steaming mugs on the coffee table. Two of the mugs had the logo of Rockview Correctional Institution on them. Very cheerful for home entertaining, mused Trout. The third had “Happy Birthday!” written in bright red cartoon letters. Trout took that one.

Volker lowered himself onto the La-Z-Boy across from the couch. He perched on the edge, elbows on his knees, holding the coffee cup between his palms. The vapor from the cup steamed his glasses.

“Before you ask your questions,” he said, “I want to explain something to you. When you called this afternoon it got me to thinking that I ought to record this. I was going to write it down, but now that you’re here I can see that this is probably a tale best told to real people. That way you can ask questions. I don’t want any mistakes, and there won’t be a chance later to get the facts.”

“Why not?” asked Trout as he set his small recorder on the coffee table.

“Because,” said Dr. Volker as he peered through the steam, “as soon as we’re done here I’m going to kill myself.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Dez and JT were climbing into her car when the radio buzzed. JT took it.

“Unit Two.”

Flower screamed at them. “JT! Jesus Christ … get back to Doc’s. Oh my god! The state police are there. They said … they said … oh my god!”

“Flower! Calm down and tell me what happened.”

“It’s the chief!” Flower wailed, her voice phlegmy with tears and shrill with panic. “Oh my god … the chief!”

Dez slammed the car in gear and stamped down on the gas so hard the cruiser shot away from the curb like a missile, burying JT and Dez deep into the backrests. She cut across the oncoming traffic, siren wailing, swung into the fast lane, and was doing ninety before they’d gone two blocks.

“Flower,” JT said, speaking as calmly as he could. “Tell me what happened.”

But he already knew. They both knew.

Flower said it anyway.

“He’s dead! They called it in. The chief’s dead! Oh my god, JT, what’s happening?”

What’s happening? Dez thought as she rocketed past cars that veered desperately out of her way. That’s the question everyone’s asking. What the holy fuck is happening?

She knew with perfect clarity that she absolutely did not want an answer to that question. And, with equal clarity she knew that she was racing toward that answer at over a hundred miles an hour.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Volker’s living room was deadly still. Trout and Goat sat staring at the old doctor as motes of dust drifted like tiny planets through the air.

“Okay,” said Trout as reasonably as he could, “why do you want to kill yourself?”

“Want to?” echoed the doctor. “I don’t want to die. I would prefer to live out my remaining years somewhere quiet where I can spend my afternoons fishing and my evenings listening to Wagner. But as the saying goes, ‘that ship has sailed.’” He smiled. He had surprisingly bad teeth for a medical man. “However … I don’t care to spend the rest of my life in jail.”

Trout leaned forward. “Why would you go to jail?”

Instead of answering, Volker said, “And, there needs to be a record of this. For … after.”

“After…?”

Volker shrugged. “If there is an ‘after.’” He said it more to himself than Trout, but the words hung in the air.

“Okay, Doc,” said Trout, “if you’re fishing for the award for Best Cryptic Speech you’re a shoo-in.”

There was no trace of a smile on the old doctor’s mouth, but he nodded. “Very well. But I suppose I need to give you a little of my history so that you’ll understand the context of what I need to tell you.” He sipped his coffee. “I am not a very nice man. I am deserving of no compassion. I have done many questionable things in my life, and I make no excuses for them. All I can do is provide a reason.”

Trout nudged the recorder an inch closer. A passive gesture with just a touch of “hurry the fuck up” in it.

“I never wanted to be a prison doctor,” Volker said. “That is a side effect. I detest criminals and I have a special hatred for a certain kind of criminal. Serial murderers, especially those who prey on families. I have a … personal connection to that kind of person. My sister and her two children were the … targets … of such a person. This was in East Berlin, years ago. During the Cold War. Your news services always concentrated on the politics of that era, but there were other stories, other … horrors. The restrictive and oppressive nature of life under the Soviet heel tended to cultivate the worst qualities in people. Paranoia, of course, but hatred, suspicion, ruthlessness, lack of sentimentality, avarice, and a kind of anger fueled by such deep resentment that it struck to the core of who we were. Many people, even those who appeared to live a normal life since the destruction of the Wall harbor the fruits of those emotions. The incidence of spousal abuse, child abuse, and sexual deviance is shockingly high, even today. Back then … back when crimes were committed wholesale but never — never — admitted to the non-Soviet world … we were breeding monsters. So many monsters.

“Here in the United States you create a media circus around serial murderers. They are celebrities. They get book deals. There are people who collect their possessions. Murderabilia, it’s called. In your cinema, they are presented as charming and charismatic. Hannibal Lecter.” He shook his head in disgust. “In East Germany, when a serial murderer was caught, he disappeared forever. Sometimes it was a family member, perhaps a war veteran who understood how to kill, who hunted the monster down and did what was necessary. More often it was the police who removed the person. Justice was swift but it was unpleasant. And it was inconsistent. However, Justice was not always served. Many times a skillful and practiced murderer was taken to prison and then recruited into the secret police or the Red Army. There was always a need for a skilled killer in both. And don’t cock an eyebrow at me,” Volker said, directing the comment to Goat, “I was there, you were not. How old were you when the Berlin Wall fell? Six? Eight? I was already a medical doctor and a major in the army. By then I had seen death in every imaginable form, and I had become familiar with every possible permutation of human and institutional corruption. The Soviet machine ran on corruption.”

Goat held up his hands. “Didn’t mean any offense, Doc.”

Volker grunted.

“You were talking about your sister,” prompted Trout. “She was killed?”

Volker’s eyes swiveled toward him in a way that reminded Trout of the dead eyes of a crocodile. It was a strange blend of hostile potential and bland disinterest.

“Killed,” Volker said, tasting the word. “Yes. She was killed. And believe me when I tell you that ‘killed’ is so pale a word, so inadequate a description of what was done to her. She was destroyed. Her humanity was stolen from her, torn from her. Dear Kofryna. My only sister. My last blood relative, except for Danukas and Audra, her twins. Three years old. Babies. Too young to grasp politics or even the concepts of good and evil. All three of them … destroyed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Trout.

Volker’s lip curled in a sneer. “This was forty years ago. I was a young man then. A doctor, newly transferred from my hometown of Panevėžys in Lithuania. A medical officer stationed in East Berlin. Idealistic, a dedicated communist. A dedicated doctor.”

“And then your family was taken from you,” Trout said quietly.

“Yes. His name was Wolfgang Henker. You will not have heard of him. He was a sergeant in the Nationale Volksarmee. I did not know it at the time — how could I? — but Henker was one of those monsters who had been arrested for heinous crimes and given over to the military as an asset. A tool. A weapon.” Volker shook his head. “Even after all these years, even after all that I know of the world, it still amazes me.”

“I get that,” said Goat, and when Volker cut him a sharp look, the cameraman explained. “After World War Two, after the Allies dismantled the death camps, they found tens of thousands of pages of research material culled from the experiments performed on Jews and Gypsies and other prisoners. You’d think that we’d just chuck all that shit right into the fire. You’d think that we wouldn’t want anything that came from that, um … process, but that’s not what happened. Our government … and everyone else’s, I guess; Russia, England … they took the research on the basis that, despite its source, it was valuable to the overall body of medical research.”

“Yes,” agreed Volker, his stern demeanor toward Goat softening by a few small degrees. “That decision is frequently defended at medical conferences and in papers, because there is strong statistical proof that it has since saved many lives and advanced medical science as a whole.”

“End justifies the means,” said Goat.

“That is the logic.”

“But you disagree with that?” Trout prompted.

“Of course. Or … I did,” said Volker. “It’s confusing, because I have made some questionable choices of my own in order to accomplish my goal.”

“And what is that goal, doctor?”

Volker smiled thinly. “To punish the monsters.”

“How?” asked Trout.

“It became clear that I could not get to Henker. He was very much a prized soldier, and I was a simple army doctor. He was much more important than I was. His specialty was interrogation. Imagine it, gentlemen. Being strapped to a table so that you are entirely at the mercy of a monster such as this. A person who delights in your pain. A person to whom your screams are more delicious than a lover’s whisper. A creature who knows how to keep you alive while he skillfully and meticulously deconstructs those things that define you as human?”

Trout swallowed. As Volker spoke he found that he could imagine it, and it was horrifying. He was one of the people who collected murderabilia. His desk chair once belonged to a mass murderer. He had followed the Homer Gibbon case more out of fascination with the man than empathy for his victims. Now, another window in his mind opened up and he looked through it into the horror Volker described.

“Christ,” he said softly.

“Indeed.” Volker took a breath. “Naturally I did not know that Henker was the killer. Not at first. No … after the police abruptly stopped investigating the case, I continued to look into it. I was very circumspect about it. I am a meticulous man, you see. I followed clues and compiled data until I built a picture of what had happened. I interviewed people — always under some unrelated pretense — and because I was a doctor and a member of the army, people were always willing to cooperate. I used, you see, the atmosphere of paranoia to investigate those murders. I won’t go into every detail. Over the last few months I have written it all down.” He stopped and waved his hand toward a cupboard. “There are several flash drives in there, in a sugar bowl. They lay it all out, and you may have them. You have me saying so right there on your recorder in case there is any dispute.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Trout without enthusiasm. The story was amazing but it was turning his stomach.

“In order to try and get within reach of Henker,” Volker continued, “I volunteered for special services with the Red Army medical corps. I have both the aptitude and patience for research, and I am not a weak-hearted person. I knew that there were special divisions that would require nerve. Every time I thought that I might falter, I held in my mind the crime-scene photos of my sister. It was … very effective. I was accepted. My obvious willingness and my apparent cold detachment served me well in moving up through the ranks and deeper into the inner circles of classified medical research. Soon I was working in one of the more arcane areas of interrogation.”

“With Henker?”

“Not at first. I was sent on research missions to various places around the globe. I spent time in Cuba and was part of a multinational expedition to Haiti. The cover story was that we were studying medicinal qualities of the flora and fauna.”

“Cover story?”

“The truth is that we were looking for a new generation of psychotropic drugs upon which we could build drug combinations useful in interrogation. You would be surprised what nature provides in such areas. I led three expeditions into the Amazon and various parts of the Brazilian rainforests, which are treasure troves for pharmacologists. I became skilled in ethnobotany and related sciences. It amused my superiors that in the course of searching for drugs of warfare we also stumbled on compounds that have contributed significant treatments for a variety of diseases. And there is little government interference in such countries. The biologically rich countries in the tropics are poor in money, thus the rainforests are ripe for exploitation.” Volker spread his hands. “On the books I was a field surgeon, but in truth I was part of the medical team that offered support and protocols for the interrogators. And … from there it was a short step to biological warfare.”

Trout nodded. “You’re here in the states and you have a high security job at a supermax prison. Somewhere up the line the feds have to know your history. Our background checks show that you defected. Why?”

If Volker was impressed by Trout’s knowledge, he did not show it. “I did not defect per se. I was recruited. The CIA had spies peppered all through the Red Army, just as we had spies in the American military. Nature of the game. There is an expression in covert work that a ‘prospect is cultivated.’ It means that there is a process of contacts used to establish trust and look for chinks in one’s political loyalty. I am not political at all. My focus is entirely built around punishment. When my CIA handler finally recognized that, he made me an offer than I quite simply could not turn down. I defected at a pre-arranged time and shortly became an American citizen.”

“I’ll bet the CIA was happy to tap you for information.”

“Very. And it is a scorched place on my soul that the information I shared has almost certainly been put to terrible use. I am well past the point of idealistic trust where I believe that governments only target bad people. That view is absurdly naïve. They drained me of everything I knew. I was offered various positions within the covert scientific community here in the States, but I chose to work in the prison systems. They arranged that for me, with some encouragement to continue my research.”

Trout and Goat shared a look.

Here it comes, Trout thought.

“I was accorded far more freedom than is typical with a prison doctor. My staff was handpicked by my real employers. That was necessary because otherwise there would be too many obvious irregularities … and in truth very little of what I did in the corrections system was regular.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “And that’s what brings me to this moment.”

“Homer Gibbon,” urged Trout.

“Yes. Another monster like Henker. But a monster I could get close to.”

“What happened to Henker?” asked Goat.

Volker gave a short, cold laugh. “He died of prostate cancer. I never laid a hand on him. I never, in fact, met him.”

“Damn…”

“Yes.”

“Gibbon,” said Trout.

“One last bit of history,” said Volker. “But it’s crucial and I guarantee you that it will be worth your time to hear me out.”

Trout nodded.

“Among the projects in which I participated was one intended to create a mind-control drug. I know, it sounds melodramatic, but it’s a common research theme in biological warfare. The goal is to create a compound or pathogen-borne virus that can be introduced into an enemy population and affect brain chemistry. Much of what we know of the therapeutic uses for ethanol, scopolamine, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, temazepam, and barbiturates like sodium thiopental and sodium amytal have come from bioweapons and interrogation chemistry research.”

“Okay.”

“Our trips to Cuba and Haiti were intended to deepen that research by using combinations of those drugs along with various neurotoxins, particularly tetrodotoxin, which is found in certain species of puffer fish common to that area. At near-lethal doses tetrodotoxin can leave a person in a state of ‘apparent’ death for several days, while the person continues to be conscious. It was our task to create a bioweapon that would render an enemy population inert but alive.”

“I heard about that stuff,” said Goat. “There was a movie about a guy who went down to Haiti to study it.”

“Yes,” said Volker. “Dr. Wade Davis, another ethonobotanist, though not one of ours. He was the first person to determine that it was tetrodotoxin, along with a few other substances, that was used to put a person into a deathlike trance. So deathlike, in fact, that victims were often declared dead by trained physicians and buried, only to be later ‘raised’ from the grave. It’s cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science. Science that we developed to a very high degree of effectiveness. Science I brought with me to the United States and shared with your government. Our government, I suppose. And … science I continued to explore as a doctor in the prison system.” He rubbed his eyes again. “Science that I now fear has slipped the leash … science that may endanger us all.”

Trout stared at him. “Wait a goddamn minute … Wade Davis? Tetrodotoxin? Jesus Christ, Doc, you’re talking about fucking zombies.”

A cold tear broke from the corner of Dr. Volker’s eye. “Yes,” he said in a hollow voice. “God help me, but yes … I am talking about zombies.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich turned to his aides. “Give me a minute.”

The two junior officers saluted and stepped outside to stand in the rain. When the door was closed, Dietrich tapped his headset.

“I’m clear, sir,” he said.

Major General Simeon Zetter sounded tired. “I was just on the horn to the president, Mack. This is bad and they’re looking to us to keep it from turning into a complete clusterfuck.”

“Seems to me this was a clusterfuck from the jump.”

Zetter and Dietrich were old friends who had served together through three wars and had transferred from regular army to the Guard as career moves, taking the promotions and taking to heart their orders to bring the Pennsylvania Guard up to a level of combat readiness second to none. They’d done that, despite having equipment that was mostly post-Iraq hand-me-down crap. The whole line of two-and-a-half-ton troop trucks was ancient, and there was not one of their gunships that would pass a civilian flight safety inspection. The troops were top notch though, and they would need these men to be sharp as knives for what they were about to face. Not just physically tough but emotionally and psychologically tough.

“My teams are in position,” said Dietrich.

“You’re going to need to keep a tight hand on them, Mack.”

Dietrich looked through the streaked windshield as sergeants handed white hazmat suits out of the back of a pair of trucks. Other NCOs walked among the soldiers, overseeing the process of transforming a thousand men in camouflaged BDUs into the cast of a big-budget science fiction movie. Hazmat suits looked scary enough at the best of times; but when the wearer is slinging an M16 and has fragmentation grenades jiggling on his belts, it became dangerously surreal.

“They’re professional soldiers,” said Dietrich, “they’ll do their part.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. This isn’t their ‘part.’ None of them signed on for something like this.”

“Well, hell, Simeon … neither did we.”

Zetter snorted. “And, you’ll love this … the governor wants our assurance that we can guarantee a secure perimeter around Stebbins County.”

“With a thousand troops?” laughed Dietrich. “During a hurricane?”

“I told him that. He authorized me to pull as many men as I needed away from flood control.”

Dietrich was silent for a moment. “That’ll mean married men, too.”

“I know.”

“The press is watching this storm, Simeon. They’ll want to know why.”

“I told the governor that. His people are preparing a story and a statement. Viral outbreak of a type and source unknown. It’s a stalling tactic until they build a prettier pile of bullshit.”

Dietrich grunted sourly.

Zetter said, “And, Mack … the governor’s going to pull the state police out and turn the county completely over to us. That order is being cut right now.”

“We could use the extra boots on the ground—”

“Not for this,” said Zetter tiredly. “A lot of these troopers are local boys. They know the people here.”

“Ah,” said Dietrich. He kept watching the process of transformation that was making spacemen of all of his troops. “So, how do they want us to play this? Containment is problematic under these circumstances and—”

“Mack,” said Zetter, and there was a note of deep sadness in his tone, “we’ve been authorized to go weapons hot. The Q-zone is a no-cross line. No exceptions.”

Mack Dietrich closed his eyes. He knew that this had been a possibility, but it was still absurd on American soil. Obscene.

“God almighty,” he said.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Desdemona Fox stood at the edge of the lawn and watched hell itself unfold before her. She knew that the impossibility of the day had now become its defining characteristic, and that all hopes of normalcy had been consumed in a red banquet of unnatural hunger.

“God…” she breathed. A soft whisper, not a prayer.

The state police cars were scattered around, parked on the lawn and in the roundabout, interspersed with county cruisers, emergency apparatus, and unmarked cars. Thirty, forty vehicles. Three news vans. Two of the vehicles were burning, the smashed windows coughing black oil smoke into the still air. Most of the vehicles were pocked with bullet holes or peppered by shotgun pellets.

There was blood everywhere.

On the lawn, splashed high on the front wall of the mortuary, glistening on the driveway gravel. Everywhere.

“They’re dead,” murmured JT in a voice every bit as wooden and lifeless as hers. “They’re all … dead.”

Dez could only nod.

They were all dead.

She knew, though, that JT did not mean the bodies that lay scattered around, their eyes wide, skulls punched in by small arms fire, or skulls smashed by shotgun stocks. He was not speaking about those lifeless corpses molded into the crimson landscape.

No, JT spoke of the others — the black-mouthed, empty-eyed, shambling hulks who had all stopped what they were doing and turned toward them as JT and Dez had gotten out of their car. Their mouths opened and closed like gasping fish, or as if they were practicing chewing a meal that was not yet theirs.

They were on all sides of them, the closest about twenty yards away. Dez recognized that one. Not a statie. Paul Scott, the forensics officer. He only had one eye and patches of his scalp had been torn away. Over to his right, standing half-obscured by the smoke of a burning cruiser was Natalie Shanahan, her Kevlar vest hanging open, her blouse torn, and gaping holes where her breasts should have been. There were others. Sheldon Higdon stood by the open mortuary door, his chest marked with a line of bullet holes. There were four people — a civilian, two cops, and a trooper — with their hands cuffed behind their backs, but their faces were just as empty and pale as the others.

A sound made Dez turn and, closer than all of them, moving slowly out from behind an ambulance, was Chief Goss. One half of his face was gone, exposing the sharp angles of bare white bone and stringy muscle laced with yellow fat. The chief reached for her and she could see that most of the fingers were missing from his right hand. Bitten off, leaving a palm and one fat pinkie.

“Dead,” echoed JT.

Dez felt her arm move and she looked down to see her right hand rise. She was not aware of any conscious choice or deliberate intent. The hand rose, and the arm with it. The gun was a thousand-pound weight in her fist.

I could end it now, she thought. Under the chin, against the temple, or maybe just suck on the barrel and go meet Jesus. Ask that fucker for an explanation. Say good-bye to this shit. This isn’t right. This isn’t how the world’s supposed to be. I can’t live in a world like this.

The chief was ten feet away. Three shuffling steps and he would have her.

I can’t.

The gun rose.

Goss stepped closer. She could smell him. Open bowels and an outhouse stench.

Just do it! screamed her inner voice. Just one trigger pull and a wake up in the big hereafter. If they weren’t lying in Sunday school then it was a ticket to heaven. Mom and Dad would be there. If it was all a lie, then there was nothing at all. Even that option was better than this shit.

The chief’s half of a face wrinkled in a snarl of predatory lust. Hunger flickered like matchstick flames in his eyes as he stepped so close that he could touch her. The fingerless hand pawed at her, leaving smears of red on her vest. The other hand scrabbled to grab her shoulder, to pull her close as his mouth opened wide.

Chin, temple, or mouth. Do it!

She chose the temple.

The barrel pressed in against the skin until it stopped against the hardness of bone.

“Daddy,” she whispered. “Help me…”

And pulled the trigger.

The blast was huge. The bullet punched a big red hole through two walls of bone and blew brain matter twenty feet across the lawn.

Chief Goss fell.

And Dez Fox became alive again.

“JT!” she screamed as she spun and aimed, firing at Gunther, hitting him square in the center of the chest. A certain kill shot. He went back and down to one knee. Then he climbed to his feet and kept coming forward. She fired again, a double tap, one to the sternum — which only slowed him — and one to the bridge of the nose. Gunther’s whole body rocked back, paused for a moment as if he was going to recover and keep coming, and then fell.

The other things around them moaned and hissed and snarled as they came. They all came.

Dez turned and fired at Natalie and blew away most of her throat.

Natalie kept coming, red drool dripping from her lips.

“Fuck!” Dez yelled and fired again, and again, the bullets hammering into Natalie’s body. “Fucking die, you ugly cow!”

Natalie kept coming.

Dez took the gun in two hands and aimed. Her next shot blew out the light of Natalie’s left eye and blew off the back of her head. Natalie’s next step was meaningless and she collapsed down, making no attempt to catch her fall.

Dez whirled toward JT, who was still frozen and immobile. Dez shifted her gun to her left and with her right slapped him as hard as she could across the face. Again and again, forehand and back.

JT staggered back, his lips exploding with blood.

She saw the precise moment when the vacant space behind his eyes suddenly filled again. Just as the gunshot had brought Dez back from her brink, her slaps had dragged JT back from his.

“Watch!” he barked and shoved her aside as he brought the shotgun up and fired a blast at Paul Scott. The beanbag round hit Scott in the chest and spun him in a full circle, but Scott bared his teeth and lunged again.

The second beanbag caught him on the bridge of the nose and his head snapped back so fast and so far that Dez knew that his neck was broken. Scott fell backward and sprawled like a rag doll. He did not move again.

The others were coming now.

They were not fast, but they kept coming. Lumbering, some of them limping on damaged legs, a few — those with head injuries — staggering more awkwardly. Dez fired into them, hitting everything she aimed at. Punching hollow-points through hearts and stomachs and thigh bones and groins.

“Why won’t they go down?” she bellowed.

As they came closer she raised her gun, tried for the more difficult head shots. She caught a state trooper on the cheek, tearing a huge chunk of his face away, but he kept coming. She shot him again, right over the right eyebrow and he abruptly crumpled.

She fired two more shots and the slide of her pistol locked back. She began backpedaling as she swapped out the magazines, letting the spent one fall — against all training and instinct — and slapping the fresh one in. The new mag was heavy with bullets. Reassuring.

She fired.

JT was back to back with her, firing at the things she could not see. Dez had seen the beanbag round drop Scott, but that had been a neck-breaker. JT tended to go for body shots with the shotgun. Dumb, she thought. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

She heard JT mumbling something over and over again.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

He fired and fired.

And fired the gun dry.

“I’m out,” he said, as if surprised that a gun could commit such a heinous act of betrayal in so obvious a time of need.

“Get to the car! I’ve got a box of buckshot under the seat,” Dez said, turning, shoving him, and then they were running.

Dez did not even remember walking this far from the cruiser, but it was a dozen yards away. Some of them were in the way. All of them were closing in, some moving much faster than the others. Distantly Dez wondered if they were the more recently dead.

Another part of her mind wanted to laugh at that thought.

And still another part was whispering her three choices. Chin, temple, mouth.

JT used the shotgun like a club. An EMT grabbed at his sleeve and JT hit him in the eyes. The blow was savage and the sheer force of it pitched the EMT onto his back, but the young man immediately started struggling to get up. Another state trooper lunged at JT and clamped his teeth down on his shoulder. Even through the Kevlar the pain was immediate and excruciating, but JT channeled it into his rage as he swung the shotgun stock up under the trooper’s chin so hard that it snapped his neck. The thing fell backward, colliding with two others who had been reaching to grab.

That gave JT a tiny window and he leaped for the car door, opened it, threw the shotgun in, and pulled his Glock. “Dez, get in! I’ll cover you.”

He began firing spaced shots at the creatures that had been closing in on Dez. He dropped a few — a bullet through the forehead or sideways through an ear. Most of them merely staggered but still came on. It created a window for Dez and she jerked open the driver’s door, dove in, and slammed it shut. They rolled up the windows.

“Get us the fuck out of here!” JT bellowed as he fished under the seat for the box of shotgun shells.

Dez jammed the key into the ignition and turned it so hard that it fired the car and began stripping the starter. She released it, threw it into drive, and stamped on the gas. The road was filled with shambling bodies and the car went four feet before it slammed into two of them. Even with the windows closed they could hear leg bones break. The car rocked to a stop, lacking the momentum to roll over the two bodies that now tried to crawl out from under.

She threw it into reverse and slammed backward, crushing others. Sheldon Higdon tried to claw open the door, but he could not master the mechanics of the door handle. He pulled the gun out of his holster and used it like a club. There was enough intelligence left in him for that, and the heavy pistol smashed through the rear driver’s side window. JT pivoted around in his seat and fired at Sheldon, but the bullet merely punched through his chest. Dez cried out at the blast — it felt like someone was smashing her head with hammers.

A dozen of the creatures began pounding on the car, some with empty hands, some with stones or sticks. The rear window dissolved into a lace pattern of cracks.

Dez threw the car into drive again and kicked the pedal to the floor. There was a ten-foot lead in front of them, and she gave the car all it could take. It surged forward, the big engine howling. As the front wheels hit the crippled dead, the car bucked and lifted and crashed down — but it did so on the backs of the creatures. The wheels spun and the car thumped down over them. As the back wheels dropped onto the gravel, Dez kicked the gas again and the cruiser shot forward toward a line of the dead. At the last second she cut hard to the right, clipping a dead reporter on the hip and sending him flying into the air.

The mass of dead behind her were still coming. Some were trying awkwardly to run. Some could only crawl. But all of them kept coming.

“Go … go!” yelled JT as he fed shells into his shotgun.

She swerved around parked cars and smashed through hedges. She hit two more of the things and then angled down for the service road. There was a thump and when she looked in the rearview mirror she saw that she had just run over the bumper and part of the grille. The whole front of the car was torn apart and the steering alignment was shot. She had to fight the wheel to keep it under control.

She rounded the buildings and angled down toward the exit road.

And slammed on the brakes.

The cruiser skidded thirty feet, kicking up plumes of dust and sending gravel flying into the nearby trees. The road ahead was completely blocked. Two cruisers had been parked nose to nose to keep the press and civilians out, and beyond that were dozens of cars and trucks. There had to be three hundred people there. Most of them were still alive. Most were trying to flee. But at least sixty or seventy of those things were seeded through the crowd. It was a madhouse of struggle and red carnage. Screams filled the air, but there were few gunshots. Unlike the police, who had been the first to be overwhelmed, these people had no way of fighting back except with hands and feet and whatever they could pick up.

“Dez,” said JT.

“I know,” she said.

“We can’t help them.”

“I know.”

“They’re coming!”

She turned and saw the mass of troopers and county cops coming around the side of the building. There was no clear exit.

“Dez…”

“I know,” she said again.

And floored it.

The cruiser was up to eighty miles an hour when it hit the two parked cars, and the impact flung the cars apart. It also rocked Dez and JT back and forth in their seat belts so hard that pain exploded in their necks and backs and the air was driven from their lungs. Both front-side windows shattered.

Dez kept pressing the gas.

The car rolled forward now, barely moving at twenty miles an hour. Smoke curled up from the engine. All the dashboard service lights were lit. People tried to jump on the car, desperate for a way out; but the creatures reached for them, biting and clawing at them, dragging them down. Dez steered with her right hand and fired her Glock with her left through the ragged window. JT filled the interior of the car with thunder and smoke as he worked the shotgun.

The cruiser crept forward and finally caught the edge of Doll Factory Road. The road curved into a long slope down to the crossroads, and Dez steered into the arms of gravity. The dying car picked up speed. One man, his leg bleeding from a bad bite, held on to the roof of the car, his fingers grasping tightly and his mouth open in a continuous scream. When the car crossed the train tracks at Mason Street, the man fell off and went crashing down on the rails.

Behind them, dwindling in size, at least thirty of the dead things continued to follow. The man who had fallen off was trying to get to his feet, but his bitten leg buckled under him. Before he could crawl away, the creatures swarmed over him.

The car rolled down and down and around a curve. Big pines blocked the road behind them, but Dez knew that they were still coming.

Then the engine coughed and died, but Dez kept steering until it rolled all the way down to the crossroads by Turk’s Getty. She turned the wheel and the car drifted to a stop in the exit lane.

Dez and JT piled out of the car and stared up the hill. The curve and screen of pines was four hundred yards away. So far they could not see any of the dead.

Were they all clustered around a red thing that no longer screamed? Or were they still coming?

God, Dez cried, her voice a shriek inside her own head, are they still coming?

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

“This is Magic Marti at the mike with new tidbits for travelers. Okay, kids, the storm is here. Batten down the hatches and make your peace with Jesus, ’cause this one’s a doozy. National Guard units are being deployed to those areas where high floodwaters are anticipated, and we’re already getting reports of small stream flooding in Fayette and low-lying towns to the north and west of Stebbins. If you live near a stream or river and still haven’t gotten to high ground, you better do it now or wave at Aunt Marti as you go swimming by.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“Zombies?” Trout whispered. The word was so strange. It didn’t fit into his mouth. Zombies were movie stuff. Bela Lugosi and Hal Leighton. Old black-and-white late night stuff. The Ghost Breakers with Bob Hope. I Walked with a Zombie.

Zombies did not belong in the real world. Maybe in a National Geographic article. Not here in Pennsylvania. This was a serial killer story. This was Silence of the goddamn Lambs, not King of the goddamn Zombies.

“Wait, wait … you’re saying you guys were dabbling in black magic?”

“No, no, of course not,” said Volker, wiping the tear from his cheek. “There is nothing supernatural about this. Though, by your standards, it is perhaps unnatural. Neither the devil or Mother Nature had a hand in what we were doing.” He paused. “In what I did.”

“What did you do?” Trout and Goat asked at the same time.

Volker said, “Homer Gibbon.”

“Oh, man…” breathed Goat.

Trout licked his lips. “Okay … tell us.”

“As I said earlier, I have committed my fair share of sins. Not sins in the same way as Gibbon, but sins nonetheless. Ethical sins, not religious. I have no faith. It died with my family. And that is how I came to make the decision I made.” He drank the rest of his coffee but still held onto the empty cup. “My handlers did not place me at Rockview by chance. It was one of several prisons in states where capital punishment was technically still on the books. I would have preferred a less liberal state … say, Texas, but they use the electric chair. That did not fit my needs.”

“Needs?” echoed Trout.

“Death by lethal injection. I thought you were following me in this.” Volker sniffed. “I wanted to be in a position where I could oversee the execution of a monster like Henker. Homer Gibbon was a perfect substitute. His crimes are every bit as heinous as those perpetrated by Henker. Gibbon has destroyed so many lives … and not just those of his victims. Their families are destroyed, ruined by what he did. If there was a God then divine justice would dictate that Gibbon burn in eternal torment. The thought that he would sit in a prison cell with television and a library and more comforts than millions of innocent people have…”

“Death row’s hardly the good life,” said Goat, but Volker turned an acid stare on him.

“Oh really? And when was the last time you visited the ghettos of West Baltimore or North Philadelphia? Have you seen the squalor and rampant destitution in Louisiana and rural Mississippi? Have you seen three or four families crowded into a rat-infested single room in Gary, Indiana or Birmingham, Alabama? No? Then please keep your privileged opinion to yourself.”

Goat flushed a deep red and sank into his seat.

“I’ve made a point to visit these places,” said Volker. “Just as I’ve made it a point to visit women’s shelters, and child protection services offices, and support group meetings for families of victims of violent crime. My whole life … or, perhaps it would be fair and truthful to say ‘my obsession,’ has been to find a way to provide punishment for men such as Gibbon and Henker. Death row is inconvenient. It is not a punishment that fits the crime.” His voice was as sharp as broken glass. “But I found a more appropriate punishment.”

“Which is…?” asked Trout, and his heart was split between the reporter’s desire to get this story and the man’s dread of what Volker could say. Everything so far had been bizarre. Red Army, covert bioweapons research. Zombies.

Volker said, “Even ordinary execution is an escape for these killers. We tranquilize them first. They feel nothing, or at worst they feel a little discomfort and some fear in the days leading up to the execution. But, I ask you gentlemen — measure that against what their victims felt and what the victims’ families feel every single day for the rest of their lives.” He shook his head fiercely. “No. That is a sin. That is immoral. That is fundamentally wrong and a crime against justice.”

“What did you do?” asked Trout.

“I devised a way for these monsters to suffer. Not just during the execution … but afterward. Long, long afterward.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” murmured Goat.

“It does if you’ve been paying attention. I have spent years seeking and developing compounds that control consciousness. Tetrodotoxin and the other elements from Bufo marinus, a species of cane toad; and an irritant produced by Osteopilus dominicensis, the hyla tree frog. Half a dozen others, all combined into what the witch doctors of Haiti, the bokor, call coupe poudre. You see, the religion of vodou makes a critical distinction between the physical body, the corps cadavre, the animating principle, or gwo bon anj, and the consciousness and memory, the ti bon anj. Correctly mixed and administered, the coupe poudre brings the physical body to the very edge of death — so close that only the most sophisticated electrical monitoring equipment will be able to detect respiration and heartbeat. The consciousness becomes separated, much as it does with certain hallucinogenic drugs, or during the spiritual exercise of astral projection. There is a disconnect between higher mind and physical body. The consciousness has no control at all over the body, and yet the subconscious mind can be manipulated by suggestion.”

Trout was breathless. “Are you actually saying that you turned Homer Gibbon into a zombie?”

“Yes,” agreed Volker with a sober nod. “That is precisely what I did. Or … a species of zombie. A variation, however you want to put it. Instead of the standard chemicals used for lethal injection, I injected him with my own version of the coupe poudre. It was an extension of something my team began many years ago, a project code-named ‘Lucifer.’ This compound is Lucifer 113.”

“How is that punishment?” demanded Trout.

Volker sighed. “Gibbon had no known family, correct? As a result, his remains are the responsibility of the state, so he was scheduled for burial shortly after the execution. Had his aunt not showed up at the last minute, Gibbon’s body would have been sealed in a cheap coffin and he would have been buried in a numbered grave in the potter’s field behind the prison. No one except the warden and the judge would know where he was buried, and there he would remain forever.”

“Again … how is that punishment?”

“No, no, wait…” said Goat. “Oh man … no, I get this. This Lucifer 113 stuff put him in … what? A kind of trance? A fake death state?”

“In so many words,” said Volker.

“But not really dead?”

“No.”

“And his consciousness … that was still there, just detached, am I right?”

“Yes. The many bokor I interviewed in Haiti and Cuba confirmed this. And our own bioweapons research bore it out. The consciousness remains. Fully aware, still connected in a passive way to every nerve ending, but totally unable to exert the slightest control over the physical body Not a twitch of a finger or a blink of an eye.”

Trout felt the blood drain from his face. “In the grave?”

Volker nodded, his eyes filled with dark light. “In the grave. Can you think of a more fitting punishment for a serial murderer than to be awake and aware in a coffin while his body slowly rots?”

Trout slumped back in his chair. “Jesus Christ … that’s horrible.”

“Is it?” asked Volker coldly.

Goat shook his head. “No, no … there’s something wrong here. Even if Gibbon were in a trance state, he would still need oxygen, right? I mean, how long would he last in a sealed coffin before his brain got oxygen starved and he just shut down?”

Dr. Volker made a face that Trout could not identify as a smile or a wince. “That would normally be correct.”

“‘Normally’?” Trout said. “Oh fuck. What’s the rest?”

“Well … as you say, the body needs oxygen, even in a reduced metabolic state. However the precise needs of that oxygen can be modified.” Volker sat down with a grunt. He looked very old and tired. “One of the principal areas of bioweapons research conducted by the Soviet Union was what people loosely call germ warfare. Project Lucifer was built around an exploration of select combinations of disease pathogens and parasites. I took it several steps further by applying transgenics to those parasites, tailoring them to my needs.”

“Parasites?” Trout asked.

“Nature is so clever, so subtle. People have no idea how many parasites are all around them. Everywhere. They have been found in the hypersanitized interiors of NASA spacecraft. They are everywhere. It’s a conservative estimate that half the world’s population is contaminated with toxoplasmic parasites, either in the body or the brain. Toxoplasma gondii is a very common parasite found in the guts of cats. Its eggs are shed in cat urine and picked up by other animals and by many home owners who are cleaning cat boxes. The eggs become cysts in the stomachs of rats, and the parasites exert control over the rat’s brain function. Normal rats will avoid areas that have been doused with cat urine; however, rats infected with toxoplasma actually seek out the cat-urine-marked areas again and again. This is the deliberate work of the parasite. In humans, scientists have noticed a definite link between toxoplasma and humans with schizophrenia. This potential for schizophrenia will cross the placental barriers and present in newborns.”

“Why include that in what you gave to Gibbon?” asked Trout.

“Schizophrenia heightens fear and increased psychological distress.”

“Jesus God.”

“The toxoplasma is only one of several parasites introduced into the mix. We have re-engineered the DNA of flukes Dicrocoelium dendriticum and Euhaplorchis californiensis to work in harmony with toxoplasma. Each of these flukes affords a measure of predictable control over the behavior of the host body. The key player, however, is the green jewel wasp, which normally targets cockroaches. It injects a venom that blocks the neurotransmitter octopamine, which is associated with alertness and movement. This subjugates the actions of the host body. We greatly accelerated the life cycle of the wasp. Where it normally takes weeks for its larvae to mature, now it happens in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately the total lifespan is accordingly diminished. In order for the parasite to stay active and in control, it needs a constant source of protein. It therefore feeds on the host body … and that, too, is a desired goal. Lucifer 113 has transformed Homer Gibbon from a man to a parasitic factory whose sole output is suffering. Gibbon was supposed to be not only awake and aware in his coffin, it was my intention that he feel himself being consumed!”

Trout and Goat stared in absolute horror at the doctor.

Trout abruptly stood up and walked back and forth across the living room. He felt like he wanted a bath so hot that it would boil even the memory of this conversation off his skin. His skin itched and he stared at the backs of his wrists as if expecting to see parasites moving beneath the skin. Finally he wheeled on Volker, forcing control and a faux calm into his voice.

“Doc, I can appreciate you wanting revenge on bastards like Gibbon and the man who killed your sister and her kids. That’s normal. If you told me you took a gun and shot him, I’d be ‘hey, no harm, no foul.’ If you told me you went all Dexter on him and carved him up into deli meat, I’m good with that, too. But this … this is fucking crazy. This is actual mad scientist stuff here. This is…”

He fished for the word, but Volker supplied it, “Sinful?”

Trout nodded as he ran his fingers through his thick blond hair. “Homer Gibbon wasn’t fucking buried in a numbered grave. He’s in a mortuary in Stebbins County. Now you have to tell me how bad this is. Can those parasites get out? Do we need to call someone?”

Volker’s face was unreadable. “It’s already too late for that, Mr. Trout. I called the Centers for Disease Control before you arrived. They did not believe me. I called the warden, and I called my CIA handler. He did believe me, and it is up to him to get the government machinery working to contain this situation.”

“Wait … so the authorities already know about this?”

“Yes. But, there is one more … wrinkle.”

Volker’s eyes were jumpy. Trout thought the man was half wacko when they arrived, but now he was sure Volker was a short twitch away from going totally batshit.

“Then tell me,” demanded Trout.

“Minutes before you arrived I placed another call,” Volker said, his voice slow and dry. “To Selma Conroy.”

“Why? To warn her?”

“To have her warn everyone. Gibbon was supposed to take the parasites with him into the ground. Into a sealed coffin. With their reduced life cycle they would consume all of the host matter in a few weeks and then die. End of Gibbon and the end of them. Clean and tidy. These parasites were never intended to be allowed to enter the general biosphere. Even when we were working on them in East Berlin we knew that Project Lucifer was likely to produce a bioweapon that was too unstable to use, even when deployed in remote spots.”

“Did Selma call anyone? Is she out there raising the alarm?”

A drop of drool dripped from the corner of Volker’s mouth and ran down his chin. He did nothing to wipe it away.

“No,” he said, and in a voice that was almost too soft for Trout to hear, he added, “No … after I told her some of what I told you, Mrs. Conroy cursed me and damned me … and then she put Homer Gibbon on the phone.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

Lee Hartnup stood in the middle of the living room, his body swaying with mindless indecision as the immediate need leeched away to be replaced by a deeper and inexplicable need. The front door was open and the wet fingers of the storm reached in to touch everything. The walls, the furniture, the curtains, the bodies.

The smell of blood was even stronger than the wet-earth smell of the rain. Even floating formless within his stolen body, Hartnup could smell it. And it drove him to madness that the smell made him feel hungry. Or, rather … it made him completely aware of the hungers that drove this thing, this shell.

Worse than the hunger, though, was the grief. It was so vast a thing that it should have split this infected husk apart and sent his soul screaming into the wind.

April.

Tommy.

Gail.

Oh God … please let me die.

His stolen eyes were not looking in that direction, so for the moment Hartnup was spared the horrors of seeing what had become of his sister and her children. Even so, the last image of them hung burning in front of him, there in the vast inner darkness. April in a sprawl, dying as she tried to run with a savaged throat. Her blood painted in broad arterial splashes onto wall and ceiling. And the two smaller bodies who lay under her, still wrapped in her limp arms as if she could protect them in death more effectively than she did in life.

Tommy and Gail. Small bodies. So little of them left. So much of them in him, in his own stomach.

Please let me die and not see this … let me not know this …

There was a wet sound behind him and his body turned, a clumsy, lumbering act, triggered by an awareness of movement. He saw the policeman. Was this the second policeman he had killed, or the third? Gunther, Hartnup thought, his name is Ken Gunther.

The policeman rose slowly from the cooling body that was bent backward over the arm of the couch. Hartnup stared at the sprawled corpse, wishing he could weep for her. For all of them. But he did not own even as small a thing as his own tear ducts, and so no tears fell for officer Dana Howard. Her eyes and mouth were open. So was her stomach. Steam rose from the red drama of that gaping hole.

As Gunther moved sluggishly toward the door, his shoulder collided with Hartnup’s and the impact staggered them both. There was no reaction other than for each to right himself. No growls, no exchange of words. Like insects, Hartnup thought.

On the couch, Dana Howard suddenly sat up, and the motion forced air out through the torn tissue of her throat. A hollow sound for a hollow person. She slowly clambered to her feet, indifferent to the intestines that sloshed out of the ragged hole in her stomach and slapped onto the carpet. Dana tottered two crooked steps forward, her head slowly turning left and right but her expression remaining vacant. Absent.

Hartnup wondered if the real Dana was still in there. As he was in here, a hijacked soul in a hollow body. He wanted to step close, to look into her eyes, to see if there was still some sign, however small, that the soul or personality of Dana Howard still remained.

And if it did, what then? What would it change? Would it make him feel less alone, knowing that he was part of some larger, shared catastrophe? Or would it build another layer of impotent sadness and grief atop what he already felt? Which was better? Which hell burned less intensely?

There was another moan. More truly a moan than the sound Dana had made. Hartnup’s body turned and he cursed God as it did so, because he knew what horrors lay behind him.

No. Not lay. Stood.

April.

Somehow her face was untouched, though every other part of her was crumpled and torn and slashed by teeth and nails.

April. With her dead eyes. Holding small, squirming, hissing, moaning things in each arm.

The Hollow Man turned away and shambled toward the door, moving away from this place because there was nothing left here to hunt. The ache, the deep hunger, was waking once more in his stolen body. Within shuffling steps, he followed his sister and the police officers out into the howling wind.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

When Dez and JT got to the gas station it was deserted, the doors locked and the staff gone.

“Turk’s gone,” JT said as he peered in through the grimy office window.

Dez rubbed a clean spot on the window of the roll-down garage door. “Yeah, both of his wreckers are gone. Must be out cruising the roads between the schools.”

Turk and his son made money every time there was a heavy rain, pulling cars out of the mud. Dez slammed her fist on the door and turned back to their car. It was a smoking wreck and getting to the gas station took all that it had left.

JT ran over and crouched behind a corner mailbox, squinting through the gloom up Doll Factory Road. Dez opened the cruiser door and grabbed the mike, but all she got was static. Her cell phone was lost and she had no idea where. Maybe at Hartnup’s, maybe at the hospital.

“Talk to me, Hoss,” she called over her shoulder. “Are they coming?”

JT reloaded his shotgun and shoved the remaining shells into his pants pocket. “I can’t see them,” he called in a loud whisper. “They must be over the rise. Did you get Flower on the line?”

“Trying…”

Dez tried again, but there was only white noise. She threw down the mike and hurried over to kneel down next to JT.

“What are we into here?” she asked. “I mean … Jesus, JT, this thing is spreading out of control.”

He licked his lips. “Those people … they’re dead?”

It was maybe the tenth time he’d said it since they got out of the car.

“Yes, they’re fucking dead,” she said through gritted teeth.

He glanced at her. “No … no … I mean…” He shook his head, tried again. “We shot the shit out of them, Dez, and they kept coming.”

“Except some of them,” she corrected.

“Right, that’s my point. Some of them went down. Some of them are dead dead, you know? Not running around dead. God — could this make less frigging sense?”

Dez touched his shoulder. “I know, Hoss … I know. The chief … a few of the others. I shot them and they didn’t go down, and then I shot them and they did. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“When you … killed the chief,” he asked slowly, “where’d you hit him?”

Dez thought about it. “In the forehead.”

JT let out a breath, almost a sigh of relief. “Same thing happened when you shot the EMT. And I hit Paul Scott in the head and that broke his neck.”

“And the cleaning lady back at Doc’s?”

“I shot her in the cheek and she—”

“No,” he said, “where’d you put your last shot?”

Dez paused. “Right above the eye.”

“Head shot,” said JT. “That’s it, then. It’s the head. The brain, probably. Definitely the spine. That’s how to put them down for good.”

“Are you sure?”

JT said, “Think … did any of them get up after you shot them in the skull?”

Dez thought about it. “No,” she said. “Not one.”

“Head shots,” he said again. “We need to get them in the head.”

She shook her head. “I’m a good shot, but I can’t guarantee a head shot unless those fuckers are right on top of us. Maybe if I had a hunting rifle with a scope. No … we need SWAT. We need snipers firing from elevated positions.”

“Try the radio again, Dez. Maybe we can stop this if we get those snipers in here.”

She nodded. “Or enough people with guns to create a shooting line. Most rounds slow them. Double tap the fuckers back to wherever they came from.”

JT gave her a troubled look. “Dez … they came from here. That was Chief Goss and Sheldon and Paul…”

“You know what I mean,” Dez snapped, though in truth she didn’t know what she meant. She turned and hurried back to the cruiser and tried to call the station again. Nothing. Dez threw down the mike in disgust and just as the handset bounced off the seat she heard a voice.

“… report your…”

Not Flower.

Dez lunged for the handset and clicked the button.

“Unit Two to dispatch, do you copy?”

The response was immediate. “Unit Two, identify.”

She recognized the voice. The state police lieutenant, William Henry Hardy.

“Lieutenant Hardy, this is Officer Fox.”

There was considerable static, but Dez got every word. “Officer Fox, please state your location and status.”

“My unit is wrecked at the corner of Doll Factory Road and Mason Street. Turk’s Getty. Requesting immediate backup. We have officers down. I repeat, we have multiple officers down. Estimate thirty plus. County and troopers. We have civilian casualties. Estimate fifty plus.”

“Say again.”

Dez repeated it. The enormity of it was like a fist against her head.

“Backup is already rolling,” said Hardy. “What is the nature of the emergency?”

“I … don’t know.”

There was a moment of crackle.

“Officer, please repeat. What is the nature of the—”

“People are going crazy down here, Lieutenant. Everyone’s attacking everyone. People are fucking eating people. Cops, too.”

“Officer Fox, did you make contact with Chief Goss?”

She took a breath. “Chief Goss is dead.” Tears boiled out of her eyes and fell down her cheeks. “Christ … they’re all dead.” A sob hitched inside her chest and suddenly she was crying. She leaned against the side of the cruiser and slid down to the ground, the sobs wracking her, the pain in her soul doubling her over. She buried her face against her knees and banged the microphone against her head. Over and over again.

“They’re coming!” JT yelled and she jerked her head up to see him rising to lay the shotgun atop the mailbox.

“Christ,” Dez said, and realized that she was still holding the radio send button. “Lieutenant … with the storm the emergency evacuation center is the elementary school. There’s going to be hundreds of kids in there. Old folks, too. It’s only a couple of miles from here. Please … get some people over there. You can’t let any of the infected in there … those kids…”

With sudden horror Dez realized that she was yelling into a dead mike. She clicked the button, jiggled the handset, and this time she could not even raise a whisper of static.

“Shit!”

Her mind was filled with a terrible image of all those kids crouched in the cavernous old school as the storm pounded on the walls and the hungry dead clawed at the doors to get in.

She threw the microphone down and pulled her piece. She had eight bullets left and one extra magazine. JT had the loaded shotgun, nine extra shells, and two full magazines — one in his Glock, the other on his belt. Dez used her bloody sleeve to wipe away the tears.

She was not going to let the infection reach the school. No way. If she had to kill every one of those monsters … if she had to break their necks with her bare hands, she was not going to abandon those kids. Not the little ones. Dez knew what it was like to feel abandoned. To feel like the people who were supposed to be there just left you in the dark. With the boogeyman. With the monsters.

Despite what Billy had said on the phone, Dez knew the shape of her own damage. It wasn’t particularly obscure, and she even understood how it warped her. Big deal. She could see it right there every time she looked in the mirror. That was a couple of grand saved on therapy, and it didn’t provide a magic pill any more than it gave her a road map to a brighter future. To hell with that Dr. Phil shit.

The simple truth was that parents let down their kids. It was a fact of life. It happened all the damn time. But there was no way that she would become another statistic in that drama. She was going to get to those kids. End of story.

Dez Fox was not a religious woman. She lost a chunk of it in second grade when her father was killed by friendly fire in the first Gulf War and the rest when her mother died of cancer a few weeks later. She believed in God, but hated Him for His cruel indifference. However, as she racked the slide on her Glock, she murmured a small and almost silent prayer.

“God help us,” she whispered.

She kept listening, hoping to hear sirens, but all she heard on the breeze was the faint moans of the dead and the splats as the first fat raindrops fell from the leaden sky.

“God help us all.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Everything should have looked familiar. The Grove, the wide green lawn, and tall trees were the same. The main funeral house and the mortuary work building, all the same. But nothing was familiar. Cars and emergency vehicles were parked haphazardly on the roads and the lawn. The grass around the mortuary was splashed with wild swatches of red and puddles of black in which larvae squirmed and writhed.

And everywhere were the Hollow Men.

Dozens of them. In uniforms, in ordinary clothes, in farm clothes, and work clothes. Several of them had cameras hung around their necks and plastic press credentials clipped to their jackets. Two of them were twins, girls of about seventeen, unique now because of the individuality of their wounds. This wasn’t like the crowds who gathered for funerals. There were no tears, no suppressed laughter, no broken sobs, no whispered conversation. Their shoes whispered across the soft, wet grass.

The hollow ones milled, bumping into one another or against the fenders of cars. One of them tripped over something and Hartnup saw that it was the fat body of Marty Goss. The chief lay sprawled and silent, a big black hole punched through his forehead. His white fingers did not twitch, he did not try to get up. He looked … dead.

Dead.

Hartnup felt suddenly and irrationally jealous of the dead man. How could a fat putz like Marty Goss deserve an actual death when Hartnup had to go on and on, floating like a dust mote inside a stolen body? It was wretchedly unfair.

How did Goss die? A lot of the creatures here had gunshot wounds. What was different about Marty?

Hartnup’s body kept shuffling forward. Hartnup screamed for it to stop. He wanted to examine the body, determine the answer to this mystery. From the blood smears on Goss’s face it was clear that he had reanimated and become what Hartnup still was. So … how had that curse been broken for the chief?

His body moved on and on, shambling toward the road, just as some of the others were turning that way. There was a sound coming from around the bend. A car was coming.

More flesh for this feast.

God, no!

As his body moved toward the noise, it passed another body that lay unmoving in the mud. The whole top of its head was missing. Blown away by a shotgun blast.

And then Lee Hartnup understood. It was the brain.

Yes … yes … yes … yes … yes … whispered his own inner voice.

It did not answer the questions of why and what, but it gave Hartnup a shred of insight. The brain. The motor cortex and the nerve conduction of the spinal cord. Even a stolen body needed that much. Maybe only that much. Rudimentary control and nerve signals. To stand, to walk. To grab and bite. To chew.

Destroy the brain and you stop the monster.

That would be perfect. Not merely hollow … but empty.

God, he pleaded, let someone shoot me! Please, God, let someone blow my head off and kill me!

It was the strangest thought that had ever flown through his brain, but also the sanest. And it was his truest prayer.

Unless.

Unless …

What if destroying the body did not turn off all of his own lights? What if he remained, lost in the darkness of a dead and decaying body?

Would that be worse?

No, he told himself. If my body is dead I can’t hurt anyone else.

The car rounded the bend. State troopers.

The crowd of things moaned almost as one, their cries rising in intensity now, louder than the downpour. The cruiser slewed sideways as the driver kicked down on the brakes; gravel and mud showered the dead things that staggered toward it. None of them fell, none of them stopped.

The doors opened and two troopers stepped out, guns in their hands, their faces almost as blank as the things that approached them.

Hartnup heard one of them yell. “What the Christ—”

And then the creatures were upon them.

The troopers yelled warnings. Over and over again. They leveled their weapons. Hartnup waited for the shots, needing to see the bullets punch through skull and brain, needing to see one of the monsters fall. His own body moved forward on stiff legs, hands reaching for the distant flesh; hunger swelling like a scream inside his body.

Then the troopers were gone beneath a mountain of white limbs and red mouths.

Please … no! Hartnup pleaded. Please, for the love of God, no!

You haven’t killed me yet.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

“Wait,” said Trout as he leapt to his feet. “What? Homer Gibbon is alive?”

Tears rolled down Dr. Volker’s face as he nodded. He pulled a handkerchief and pressed it against his eyes. His body trembled with quiet sobs.

Goat sat in open-mouthed shock.

“No, no, no, goddamn it,” Trout shouted as he strode over to the doctor, looming above him with balled fists. “You fucking tell me what you mean? How the hell did Homer Gibbon speak to you on the goddamn phone? He’s dead! I saw him die. I saw you pump that shit into his veins and I saw the machines flatline. I watched you execute him, for Christ’s sake.”

When Volker only shook his head, Trout snarled, “You gave him that stuff, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Volker’s voice was tiny.

Goat whispered, “Oh … holy mother of shit…”

“Are you saying that Gibbon is free?” Trout demanded.

“Free?” echoed Volker. “No…”

Trout started to relax, but then the doctor added, “It’s much, much worse than his being free.”

With a snarl, Trout grabbed Volker, hauled him halfway out of the chair and did a fast pat-down to find the pistol he knew Volker carried. It was a heavy nine millimeter, and he tore the pocket open to retrieve it and flung the doctor back down. Volker made a swipe for the pistol, but Trout slapped his hand away and retreated a step. He stared down at Volker with contempt.

“So the plan was to dump this shit in our laps and then eat your gun? You fucking coward.”

“No,” Volker protested, “I told you … I called my handler. The authorities already know about this. They are taking care of it.”

“Taking care of it? Really? A serial killer infected with — Christ, what do I even call this thing? A zombie parasite? — is free in my home town and you think a call to your bosses and a confession to a couple of reporters is enough to balance the scales here?”

“No, I…”

Goat leaned forward. “Doc … if this gets out, if Gibbon is out there among people … what’s the risk of infection?”

“I thought I made that clear.”

Trout racked the slide and put the barrel against Volker’s kneecap. “Make it clearer.”

Volker’s eyes flared with terror. “Please … the parasites were reengineered for survival and proliferation. Outside of a containment unit such as a coffin, they will drive the host to find and infect other hosts.”

“Why?” demanded Goat. “Why would you engineer it to do that?”

“Understand,” said the doctor, mopping tears from his cheeks, “when the Lucifer research was active, it was intended as a bioweapon. Something that could be introduced into an enemy population — a military base or some isolated encampment — and then we would sit back and let the parasites do their work. It would spread through host aggression, and the vastly accelerated life cycle would make each newly infected person a disease vector within minutes. Then military in protective suits could clean up the infected with flame units and acquire the physical assets.”

Trout narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘host aggression’?”

Volker’s hands gripped the arms of the chair so fiercely that the doctor’s fingernails tore scratches in the fabric. “This is a serum transfer pathogen,” he said in a ghostly voice. “It lives in any body fluid. Blood and sputum would be rife with newly hatched larvae. The logic inherent in parasites would cause the host to transfer the larvae through the most efficient possible means. Spitting into the eyes, nose, or mouth of a target host would work well. The parasites would be absorbed through the mucus membranes. But the most efficient and direct way to guarantee infection would be to forcibly introduce the parasites directly into the bloodstream.”

“‘Forcibly,’” echoed Goat.

Volker nodded. “Through a bite.”

Trout backed away like he’d been slapped. “Goat … oh, shit!”

“What?” asked Goat.

“This morning … at the mortuary. The cops were there…” He pointed the gun at Volker. “What time did you talk to Gibbon?”

Volker flinched. “Half an hour ago.”

“Fuck. So the cops were there putting that sick son of a bitch in cuffs.”

“No,” admitted Volker. “Gibbon had already … left … the mortuary.”

“Whoa,” cut in Goat. “What’s that supposed to mean? That pause. What happened at the mortuary? What did Gibbon tell you?”

Volker sniffed and clutched his handkerchief in one bony fist. “He told me that he … woke up … at the mortuary in Stebbins.”

Woke up. The two words hung in the air, throbbing with ugly meaning.

“What about the mortician? Lee Hartnup?” asked Trout, lowering the gun.

Volker shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What do you know? What did Gibbon say?”

“He … thanked me.” Saying it seemed to cause physical pain for the doctor. He winced and touched his chest. “God help me…”

“Thanked you?” Trout felt the moment slipping away from him. “Thanked you for what? I thought this was supposed to be a punishment. Are you telling me that this was something else? Are you saying you helped this asshole escape?”

“No! God in heaven … no. I injected Gibbon with Lucifer 113 because I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him in his coffin screaming in torment as the parasites kept him alive just so they could feed on him. He deserved it. They all deserve it.”

“Then why did he thank you?”

“Because he thinks I helped him escape,” cried Volker. “That maniac thinks that we had some sort of agreement, that all of this is part of some plan I had to free him. He said that he knew it back when he first came to me in the infirmary.”

“Why would he think that?” asked Goat suspiciously.

Volker shook his head, but he said, “Once, months ago, when I was briefly alone with the prisoner, I made some kind of veiled threat to him. I said something like … ‘After you go, you won’t be gone. You’ll be with us forever. You’ll know forever.’ Something like that. It was a threat. I wanted him to fear what would happen to him when the execution day finally arrived. I didn’t want him to have a single night’s peaceful sleep.”

“But he didn’t take it that way?” said Trout as he sat back down. He nodded to himself. “Yeah, I can see it. Twisted mind like his.”

Volker gave another shake of his head. “On the phone … I told him the truth. I told him everything that I had planned to do to him. I told him that it was still going to consume him. I told him that he was still going to be punished for what he did.”

“How did he react,” asked Trout.

“Gibbon laughed at me. Then he said that he would be coming for me. A hollow threat … he has no idea where I live. And, I suspect, he doesn’t have your resources for finding out.”

Trout sneered. “But you were going to shoot yourself anyway. Just in case?”

The doctor said nothing.

Goat was shaking his head “Homer Gibbon never died? He’s alive…?”

Volker cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking. Homer Gibbon did die. He was clinically and legally dead.”

“But it was a dodge,” suggested Goat.

“No. He was dead. His body was dead. His mind was…” Volker shrugged. “Even in Project Lucifer we had no word for it. ‘Elsewhere’ is as good as anything.”

“But what about oxygen starvation?” demanded Goat. “That destroys brain cells, right?”

“It does in every case except this. The parasites use their own larvae — a network of them linked through mucus — very much like a charged plasma. It’s fascinating and—”

“Seriously, Doc?” asked Trout, jiggling the pistol. “You want to brag? Now?”

Volker colored. “Sorry.”

“So,” Goat said, “these parasites, these wasp thingies, kept Gibbon’s brain alive?”

“No.” Volker looked frustrated. “Gentlemen, in order to discuss this, and to have you understand it, we have to step outside of our normal scientific lexicon. We are not discussing life or death as we have always known it. Those have always been the only two states of existence. However the activity of these parasites, and the unique way in which they protect and maintain their host, has no parallel in nature. This is a third state of existence. Something entirely new, though hinted at in the religion of vodou. This is, to give it a name, a ‘living death.’ Homer Gibbon did die. That is a fact. But the parasites maintained a key few functions within his body so that, instead of dying, Gibbon transitioned into the state of living death. His body is certifiably dead. Right now his skin is putrefying, and he is almost certainly far along in the process of rigor mortis. He is dead. However, the parasites require that certain motor functions remain intact. When I spoke to him on the phone, he was a … reduced … personality. Less keenly intelligent, and yet still capable of accessing his memories, still able to speak and reason.”

“That’s horrible…” murmured Trout. “And you wanted him to be like that in his grave?”

“It was a punishment, damn it!” bellowed Volker. “You were at his execution, Mr. Trout. You know the scope and nature of his crimes. Do I need to remind you of what he did to children? To babies?”

Trout said nothing.

The doctor pounded his fist on the arm of the chair. “I have no regrets for what I had planned for Gibbon. Even with the amount of suffering he would endure … weeks, perhaps months before he truly died … I think he is getting off more lightly than his crimes deserve. Tell me I am wrong.”

Trout looked inside his mind and saw no counterarguments there. Instead he played one tired old card. “You’re not God, Doc.”

Volker snorted. “Neither is any member of the jury that convicted him or the judge who ordered his execution.”

“Guys,” interrupted Goat, “a little focus here. I don’t give a rat’s ass about how appropriate the punishment is or isn’t. What has my balls in a vise is the fact that this son of a bitch is still alive. Or … whatever. Living dead.” He shook his head in frustration. “He’s out there.”

“By now … others may have been infected,” said Volker, cutting a wary look at the pistol in Trout’s hand. “I explained this to my handler. Anyone infected by Gibbon will be entirely overwhelmed by the parasite. Gibbon, however, seems to be an unusual case. He was narcotized using the Haitian zombie coupe poudre before the parasites were introduced. When I spoke to him on the phone, he was lucid. That’s not in keeping with the profiles we worked up during Project Lucifer. The parasites invade the brain and essentially disconnect the higher functions in favor of their own needs and directives. Consciousness remains but intelligent control is gone. Except … that’s not what happened with Gibbon. For some reason he is still in control of his body. Mind and body are still connected even though he is infected. I would need to…” he paused and licked his lips, “to ‘study’ him to understand this variation on the ideal model.”

Trout’s hand tightened around the pistol. He wanted to whip the barrel across this old maniac’s face. He wanted to brutalize him for this. “How do we stop it?” he asked hollowly. “What’s the cure?”

“Cure?” Volker repeated as if the word was unknown to him.

“How do we treat the infected? How do we save them?”

Volker was already shaking his head. “You can’t save them. There is no cure, no treatment, nothing. The parasites are hermaphroditic, so there’s no queen to find and kill. Each parasite is born pregnant. They begin laying eggs seconds after they hatch. They stay perpetually in the larval state, producing and laying eggs. The only way to stop that cycle is to destroy the host. That was the point.” He paused, perhaps aware of how he sounded. In a calmer voice he said, “However … if no other human goes near the corpse, then within a few weeks the larva inside the host will have consumed it. Without food, no new larvae will be born. The old larvae die off within days. Three, four weeks and the corpse is inert. But if you want to stop the ambulatory hosts, then you can do that by destroying the motor cortex or the brain stem. And then incinerate the body.”

Trout stared at him, needing all of this to be untrue, to be a lie told by a sick and delusional old man.

“I’m losing my cool here, Doc,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “I need you to tell me what you’re going to do about this.”

Volker’s face wore an expression of profound confusion. “Do? Haven’t you been listening to me? There is nothing I can do. There’s nothing you can do, either. I doubt at this point that there’s anything that the government can do. We are not sitting here discussing a response protocol. You and your friend are here as witnesses to these events. You are the historians who will tell the truth of this story. But you are witnesses only from a distance. Go back to Stebbins and you become part of the infestation. Stay here, or at least away from town and you will be able to report what I’ve told you.” He nodded toward the door as if that was a clear line to the town. “Don’t worry about Homer Gibbon. The parasites are consuming him even as we speak—”

“He could spread it across the whole goddamn country,” interrupted Goat.

“No. As I said, I told my handlers. There are people in the government who know the full potential of the Lucifer program. I’m sure all appropriate steps are being taken.”

“What do you mean by ‘appropriate’?”

The old doctor’s eyes glittered with new tears. “Exactly what you would expect that word to mean.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Dr. Raja Sengupta stared through the reinforced plastic window of the hazmat suit. Inside the suit the figure of Officer Andy Diviny still writhed and thrashed against the four-point restraints and canvas strapping. There was no way he could break free, but even so Sengupta was not willing to go back inside that room.

Not now. Not after the test results had come back. There was a pulse, but it beat less than once per minute. There was respiration, but so shallow that it was impossible to detect without machines. So shallow that it had to be destroying brain cells. Sengupta had seen hypoxia at a hundred different degrees of intensity, but nothing like this. There was so little blood and oxygen going to the brain that it bordered on anoxia; cellular respiration was nonfunctioning at any detectable level. Without cellular energy, tissue all over the man’s body was becoming apoptotic, turning necrotic. He was rotting like a corpse even while he growled and fought to get up.

None of which was possible. Not even with the worst coma patients.

Even that wasn’t the worst thing. That wasn’t what frightened Dr. Sengupta on the deepest levels. The blood and saliva tests were nightmarish.

His fingers trembled so badly it took him four tries to punch in the number for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Lt. Colonel Macklin Dietrich bent over a plastic-coated map of Stebbins County. Three other officers and several aides were clustered around the table. A portable communications table had been set up against the far wall of the plastic shelter that had been erected to serve as field HQ for this operation.

He tapped the map with a forefinger. “This is the funeral home where Gibbon was taken. We’ve lost communication with the local and state police at the scene, so we can assume that it’s been compromised. However, a second wave of state troopers arrived a few minutes before we secured the perimeter. They’re on cleanup for this.”

“Sir, what do the local police know?” asked a captain.

“Nothing,” said Dietrich, “and we’re going to keep it that way.”

A major asked, “Can’t we use them as local assets?”

“No. This is not a joint operation. We do not want any bonds formed between our people and the infected.”

“May I ask why not, sir?” asked the major.

“Because we are to regard anyone inside the Q-zone as potentially and indeed probably infected.” Dietrich sighed. “I know how you must all feel. I feel the same. These are American citizens and they didn’t ask for this. This is a goddamn tragedy. Our sympathies and the sympathies of the men under our command are going to naturally be with these people.”

The major shook his head. “We’ve been trained to help the civilian population, not stand aside and watch them die.”

“This isn’t something anyone’s been trained for, Major,” said Dietrich. “This is a worst-case scenario that should not have happened. But it has happened and it’s up to us to contain this inside the Stebbins County line. We drop the ball and we’re going to need a mass grave the size of the Grand Canyon to bury the dead.”

The officers glanced at one another in horrified silence.

“What are the safety regs on this?” asked the captain.

Dietrich said, “Containment and sterilization are the only options they gave us to work with. We’re running without safety measures, and they tell me we don’t have a viable treatment. These parasites make ebola look like a weak dose of the clap. We’re talking about something that is one hundred percent infectious and one hundred percent terminal.” He looked around and watched the truth and its implications bury spikes in each of the officers. “So, the hard news is that everyone who is infected is not only terminal, they are a very real and substantial threat to the rest of the country.”

The major made a disgusted face. “So — they want us to go in there, lock it all down, and flush it? Seven thousand people?”

Dietrich leaned on the table and stared hard into the major’s eyes. “Yes. No exceptions. You see your own mother in town and she’s infected, you put a bullet in her goddamn brain.”

“What if she’s not infected, sir?” asked the captain.

Dietrich’s eyes were bleak. “Everyone in Stebbins is infected.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“God,” whispered JT in a sick voice, “they’re coming.”

Dez crept up beside him and peered around the corner of the mailbox. A hundred and fifty yards up the long slope of Doll Factory Road, emerging like ghosts from the gathering mist, came the creatures. Even from here, even without seeing their dead eyes or the wounds that had killed them, it was clear they were not people. Not anymore. They lumbered like animated scarecrows, their limbs stiff and awkward. It hurt Dez’s heart to accept that these things existed at all. They were nightmare creatures; they didn’t belong in the waking world. It hurt her worse that she knew so many of them, and would have to kill as many as she could.

She sniffed back tears. Beside her, JT banged his head on the cold metal of the mailbox. Once, again, and again. He stopped when a sob hitched in his chest.

Dez wrapped her arm around him and hugged him and for a moment they squatted there, foreheads pressed together, refugees in a world that no longer belonged to them.

“What are they?” he begged. “Are they people?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Hoss. God, I really don’t know.”

The wind blew down the hill toward them and Dez watched it whip an empty plastic grocery bag past them. She followed it with her eyes and saw the lights of the diner. There were at least a dozen cars in the lot.

“We got a problem,” she murmured and JT followed the line of her gaze.

“What?”

Dez chewed her lip, looking around. The intersection was on the very edge of town. There were a few decaying factories from the town’s more prosperous era, including the crumbling remains of the factory that gave the road its name. There were other stores and businesses beyond the diner. If the creatures went that way it would be a slaughter. The southern end of the cross street, Mason, led only to a corn farm, and the farmhouse was two miles away. Six hundred yards to the north, right at a bend in the road, was Bell’s Tools and Hardware. Even at this distance they could see half a dozen cars and pickup trucks in the lot, too.

“Talk to me, kid,” said JT. The shambling mass of the dead was halfway down the hill.

“We can’t let those things get to the diner,” said Dez. “We have to stop them here until the staties get here.”

“We can’t,” said JT. “We don’t have the ammunition for that.”

“Then we have to draw them away.” She nudged him and nodded toward Bell’s.

“There are people down there, too.”

“Yeah, but Bell’s is a blockhouse, solid as a rock. Not much past it, either. Just farms and no one’s going to be planting seeds with this storm coming.”

The rain was still only a drizzle and through the noise they could hear moans. Even with the slow gait of the creatures, the distance was closing fast. Not all of the dead were slow … a few loped along at an awkward run.

JT studied her for a moment. He flicked a glance at the shambling dead — still hundreds of yards away — and then at Bell’s. Dez was right about the hardware store — it was a squat cinder block building with roll-down steel shutters. They could hold off the legions of hell in there.

“I don’t want to die out here, Dez,” JT said indecisively. “We have backup coming and we’re not trained for this.”

Dez said, “Give me a better plan.”

He closed his eyes. “Fuck me.”

Dez stood up from behind the mailbox. For a moment she stood there, waiting to be seen, but when the dead did not visibly react to her, she began waving her arms over her head. They kept coming. Maybe they had seen the two officers all along, or maybe it was that they could not show emotion, but there was no appreciable change in their speed.

“Fuck ’em,” JT said again as he rose, laid the shotgun over the curved hump of the mailbox, and fired. At that distance the pellets did no harm, but instantly each of the dead swiveled their heads toward him.

“Yeah … that did it,” said Dez.

The creatures began moving faster. Some could only stagger along on crippled limbs, but others — perhaps the more recently risen among them — began loping down the hill at a sloppy run.

“Oh … shit!”

Dez and JT said it at the same time, and then they were running north on Mason Street.

Dez was younger and could run like a gazelle. JT was fit for his age, but he was a lot older and heavier and had one knee that was a few years shy of needing a replacement. The rain was intensifying and brought with it a cloying, choking cold. JT was breathing hard before they covered the length of a football field. Dez had to slow down to let him keep place.

“The backup will be here soon,” she said. “I want to draw these crazy fuckers into an isolated area so the staties can set up a proper kill zone.”

“Jesus, Dez,” JT puffed, “those are still people.”

“You didn’t seem to think so when you were putting buckshot into them, Hoss.”

“That was different. That was self-defense.”

Dez wiped rainwater out of her eyes. “The hell do you think this is?”

JT said nothing. Sweat and rainwater poured down his cheeks, and under his natural brown skin tone a furious red was blossoming. Dez noticed that he was slowing down, too. She turned and looked back.

The crowd of dead things was falling farther behind them. Some of them had not even rounded the corner from Doll Factory, and as the rain thickened it was harder to see them. They were still coming, though, Dez was sure of that. Whatever drove them was as powerful now as it was when they first attacked them at Doc Hartnup’s.

“Thank God they’re slow,” she said.

JT nodded, unable to speak and run at the same time.

One of the cars pulled out of Bell’s parking lot and turned their way. Dez and JT were running up the middle of the street, so the car slowed. Dez began waving her arms.

“Turn around!” she yelled. “Turn around!”

The driver pulled close and lowered her window, using a flat hand to shield her eyes from the stinging rain. It was Bid McGee, the woman who owned the craft shop in the center of town.

“Bid! Turn around and get the hell out of here. Go! Go!”

“Good lord, Desdemona Fox, what happened to you? Are you all right, dear?”

Dez gave her fender a savage kick. “Are you frigging deaf? I said turn the frigging car around and go the other frigging way, Bid, or I’ll drag you out of there and beat the stupid off of your skinny ass.”

Bid went white with shock and then purple with outrage, but turned her car around and then laid down thirty feet of rubber going the other way.

“Stupid cow,” Dez snarled.

Despite everything, JT smiled. “You have a real way with people, Dez. Charm and poise and—”

“We’re one half sentence away from me kneecapping you and leaving you here for those dead fuckers to eat.”

“Point taken,” he said, and they kept running. They didn’t speak again until they reached Bell’s parking lot. The rain was hammering them now and in the distance they could hear the angry growl of thunder. JT collapsed against the tailgate of a black Ford F-150. “I’ll … I’ll wait here. Keep an eye out…” He flapped a hand toward the door.

Dez lingered for a moment, “When did you go and get old on me, Hoss?”

He tried to grin, but it was a ghastly attempt.

Dez burst through the door and stopped inside. The store was bright with fluorescents and country music was playing on bad speakers mounted high on the wall. Thom Bell was behind the counter ringing up a purchase of black pipe for a construction worker. He and the customer both stared at her in surprise.

“Thom!” Dez snapped. “Listen to me. We have a problem. There’s been some kind of outbreak. Very, very bad stuff. A bunch of infected people are on their way here and whatever they have is making them act all schizo. Help is on the way, but we need to keep everyone in here and lock this place down, and I mean right now.”

Thom Bell asked only one question. “Is this some kind of terrorist thing?”

“Yes,” lied Dez. “Now come on, I need you to—”

Bell was already in motion. He reached beneath the counter and flipped a switch to kill the music, and hit another to turn on the public address system. He told everyone in the store almost word for word what Dez had told him. One woman screamed, but the rest merely ran to the front of the store and started asking questions.

“Okay!” yelled Bell, “Now everyone listen up. We have a situation here. A terrorist situation. Officer Fox just told me that we need to secure this place and that’s what we’re going to do. I want all of the customers to go into the back. There’s a staff locker room there with some chairs. You all just go in and sit down, and we’ll secure the building. Nothing or no one is going to get into here, I can promise you that.”

He spoke with absolute command; Dez knew that he had been a two-tour sergeant during the first Gulf War. He was a big man with a wind-raw face and calm eyes beneath the brim of his Snap-on Tools cap. A man to be taken seriously.

Dez watched the faces of the patrons and staff as Bell spoke. She saw the shock, the first wave of surprise and doubt, saw their eyes flick toward the door, but she also saw how Bell’s commanding voice held them in place and, at least for the moment, emotionally in check.

“Chip,” Bell said to one of the clerks, “you show everyone where to go. Scott, make sure the back door’s locked. Drop the bar, too.” Bell clapped his hands with the sound of a gunshot. Everyone jumped. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

And they went, just like that. Bell told another employee to roll down the shutters.

“Thanks, Thom,” said Dez, closing on him and lowering her voice.

He nodded, but his eyes probed hers. “Is help really on its way?”

“Yeah, and JT’s outside.”

Bell looked her up and down. “You’re covered in blood, girl.”

“I know—” she began, but he cut her off.

“No … I mean, is that infected blood?”

Dez opened and closed her mouth. “I…”

“Maybe you shouldn’t get too close to anyone.” To emphasize this he took a step back. “Now … tell me what’s really happening?”

She shook her head. “I really don’t know.”

“Tell me what you do know.”

She did, moving through it in quick, clipped sentences. As she laid it out, the whole thing sounded impossible to her and she’d lived through it. She watched for, and saw, the doubt grow in Bell’s eyes.

There was a moment of pursed-lipped silence as he considered it. He went to the door and called out in a hushed voice. “JT … what’s happening out there?”

Dez heard JT say, “Still coming. I can’t see them but I can hear them.”

“Better get inside,” suggested Bell, and he held the door as JT hobbled inside, limping on his bad knee, and Bell closed the door behind him. The door was steel with only a small wire-mesh window the size of a piece of loose-leaf paper. The lock was a heavy dead bolt. Bell pounded his fist against the door to show how solid it was.

“Nothing short of a tank will get in here.”

The clerks came up the aisles to assure Bell that the place was locked down. They wore identical expressions that were a mixture of fear and excitement.

“Okay,” Bell said. “You boys go wait down with the customers. Keep everyone calm. Let them have whatever they want from the machines. Go on now.”

Bell turned back to Dez and JT. “I have to say,” he began slowly, “if it was just you telling me a story like this, Dez, I’d think you were on the sauce. No offense, but I’ve seen you at the bar enough to know that you don’t mind knocking a few back.”

Dez said nothing.

“But you, JT,” Bell continued, “we’ve known each other for too many years, and I know that you’re a serious man.”

Being a “serious” person was a mark of distinction with Bell. Everyone knew it, and it was a label he only grudgingly awarded.

JT glanced at Dez. “You told him?”

“All of it,” she agreed.

“Hell of a story,” Bell said. “People turning into … into what? Some kind of ghouls? Eating each other? Marty Goss? Paul Scott?”

“The proof’s on its way here, Thom,” said Dez. “Want to go outside and see what they have to say?”

“Don’t smart off at me, Dez,” said Bell sternly. “This is my store and you brought this here to me. I did what you asked and secured the perimeter, but I have a right to ask questions.”

Dez flushed. When the pressure was on it took effort for her not to be a smart-ass, and Bell wasn’t the kind to accept it.

“Sorry,” she said meekly.

“I know how crazy this sounds,” said JT.

“Crazy about covers it,” agreed Bell.

Dez said, “Why not take a look outside and you tell us what you think. I’m not joking, Thom.”

Bell studied her for a few seconds. Before he did, he reached beneath the counter and removed a big.45 Colt Commander. “I have a permit,” he said, though at the moment Dez wouldn’t have cared if he’d produced a shoulder mounted antitank weapon. Bell quietly opened the small grilled window and peered out. Rain slashed at the door in waves.

He stared for several seconds. “Now that’s disturbing,” he said softly.

“That’s what we’ve been telling you,” said JT tightly.

Bell turned and gave them both a quizzical look, then he unlocked the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Dez, taking a step toward him.

Bell gave her a sad, disapproving shake of his head as he stepped back, raising both arms, holding the.45 with two fingers out and away from his body as a dozen men in black BDUs and helmets with ballistic shields came swarming into the store. They carried M16s and shotguns and nine millimeters and they were all yelling.

They took Thom Bell’s gun away from him and pushed him to the floor.

A SWAT officer pointed a shotgun at Dez’s face. “Officer Fox, you are under arrest. Hold your arms out from your side … do it now!”

“What the fuck are you assholes doing! We’re police officers, goddamn it—”

Two officers closed on her, spinning her, taking her weapons, forcing her to the ground. JT bellowed like a bull, but he hit the deck next to her.

Dez knew every dirty trick in the book. She twisted as they forced her down and pulled one leg free and used it to kick one of her attackers in the shin. He crashed to the ground next to her, and suddenly there were six pairs of rough hands on her, slamming her chest-down onto the linoleum floor. Dez screamed and fought and cursed them to hell and back.

“Officer Fox,” growled the SWAT sergeant, “I need you to shut up and stop resisting or I will tase you.”

“Fuck you, you faggot! I’ll shove that Taser right up your—”

She felt a sudden sting and then a prolonged, searing burn. Her whole body went rigid and then shuddered with convulsions as thirty thousand volts flooded through her.

The world went blood red and then velvet black. Dez tried to scream, she tried to fight, but all she could do was fall.

She heard JT calling her name from a million miles away.

She heard someone yell, “Catch her!”

She heard her own twisted scream.

She felt her head hit something. The counter, the floor — she couldn’t tell — but it opened a big dark hole in the world and Dez Fox fell into it.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Trout shoved the pistol into the waistband of his jeans. He stood in front of Volker, looking down at the doctor with undisguised contempt. “Listen to me you piece of shit. We’re going back to Stebbins. If one person is infected, if one single person dies because of what you did, I’ll make sure every newspaper in the world runs this story with you as the villain.”

Volker leaned back from Trout’s intensity, but there was some defiance in his blue eyes. “You were there to report on a man being killed by pumping poison into his veins, Mr. Trout. You profit from such stories. The public loves to read of such things. Should I believe that you’re naïve enough to think that we are not all monsters? Each in our own way.”

“Save that crap for a jury, asshole.”

“Or is it that you’re so arrogant,” Volker continued, “that you believe that your moral worldview supersedes all others? Can you tell me that you would not have executed Homer Gibbon, or even tortured him a little, knowing what you know of the horrors he inflicted on women and children?”

“Yeah, sure, I might have even enjoyed waterboarding the fucker,” snarled Trout. “That’s not the point. I wouldn’t have risked using radioactive water to do it, though. There’s revenge, and there’s primal satisfaction, and then there’s risking the health and wellbeing of others just to satisfy your own bloodlust. Don’t try to put me on the same playing field as you, Volker. As far as I see it, with the destructive potential of what you shot in Gibbon, you are every bit as bad as Gibbon. You’re every inch the monster he is.”

Trout’s blood roared in his ears.

Volker shook his head and turned away.

“I hope you rot in hell,” Trout whispered.

Then he turned and ran for the door. Goat lingered a moment longer, staring at Volker but unable to express the horrors that screamed in his head. He spat on the floor in front of the doctor, then followed Trout.

The Explorer roared down the lane, burning through the rainwater to leave skid marks on the asphalt. Trout and Goat both had their cell phones out, punching numbers as fast as they could.

In the wreck of a Stebbins County police cruiser, lost under a seat amid a jumble of spent shell casings, Dez Fox’s cell phone began ringing. The ringtone was from a Dwight Yoakum tune. The phone rang four times and then went to voice mail.

Dez’s message was: “You got the machine. Leave a message and a number. If I don’t call back, your message wasn’t interesting.”

When Trout heard the call go to voice mail, his heart juddered in his chest. “Come on, Dez … come on.”

At the beep, he said, “Dez, I need you to call me back right away.” He paused, trying to word a message that she wouldn’t immediately delete. “I got a reliable tip that someone infected with a dangerous disease is in town. Call me now!”

He clicked off and tried JT. Straight to voice mail. He left a similar message, hung up, and called Marcia.

The phone rang three times. Four … and then she answered.

“Marcia!”

“Oh … Christ … Billy…” she said. Her voice was weak and she was breathing too fast and too hard. It sounded like she was having sex. “Billy … God…”

“Marcia, what’s wrong? What’s going on there?”

“Billy … I tried calling 9-1-1. They … they didn’t answer…”

“Marcia!”

“It hurts, Billy … oh my god … it hurts so bad. I can’t stop the bleeding…”

The line abruptly went dead.

Trout screamed into the phone. Nothing. He redialed, and got nothing. No voice mail. Not even a ring.

“What was that?” demanded Goat, his eyes filled with fear.

“Marcia. She was hurt. She said she was bleeding and then the line went dead.” He looked at the phone display. “Says the number is unavailable.”

“Oh shit. I called my roommate,” said Goat. “He started to say something about hearing sirens and some gunshots, then nothing. You think the storm knocked the lines down? Or…?”

Trout cut him a brief, savage look. “Try the police.”

Goat hit 9-1-1 and got the regional dispatcher. He put it on speaker and asked to be patched through to Stebbins County. He expected to hear Flower’s voice. Instead a stern male voice said, “Sir, what is the nature of your emergency?”

Instead of asking about the nature of the emergency, the operator asked for his location. Trout hung up.

“What’d you do that for?” asked Goat.

“That was the military,” said Trout. “I’d bet my ass on it. They’re intercepting all the calls to Stebbins police.”

“Oh, shit,” said Goat softly. “Oh shit.”

Trout cut in and out of traffic. Cars blared horns at him but he didn’t even slow down long enough to give the finger. His heart was racing faster than the engine.

Goat licked his lips. “The military … that’s good, right? I mean…?” His voice trailed off. A moment later he said, “We’re in deep shit.”

“I know,” said Trout, and he stepped down harder on the gas.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

“Where is he?”

Irene Compton, the desk nurse, looked up at the intern, who looked about a year younger than her daughter. “Pardon?” asked the nurse with a half smile.

The intern, a petite redhead who could not possibly be out of high school let alone a medical student, was not smiling. “Patient in Sixteen. Chart says he presented with a bite?”

“Oh, that’s Mr. Wieland. One of the farmers picked him up at a gas station and brought him in. We took vitals and put him in … um.…” She punched a few keys on the computer. “Yup … in sixteen.”

The intern, whose name tag read Slattery, narrowed her eyes. “No, he’s not in sixteen. I just came from sixteen. There’s no one there.”

Nurse Compton kept her smile in place. She was well aware that she looked matronly and these interns usually started thinking of her as a mom figure. “Maybe he went to the bathroom.”

Dr. Slattery turned and stalked away. No thanks, no nothing. Nurse Compton watched her slim figure retreat down the hall. “Bitch,” she said quietly.

Dr. Gail Slattery pushed through the double doors leading to the emergency unit. There were two central nurses stations surrounded by rows of curtained bays. Each bay was marked with a number that was painted on the floor and stamped onto a bright plastic disk mounted on the ceiling just outside the curtain tracks. She stomped past bays eleven through fifteen. Most of them were unoccupied. Fourteen had a broken hip, fifteen had a seventeen-year-old skateboarder. Sixteen was supposed to be the bite victim, but wasn’t. The room was a mess, too. Bloodstains on the sheets, pillow on the floor. Open suture kit sitting on a chair.

She snorted and kept going, peering into bay seventeen, also empty, and eighteen, probable torn ACL. The last bay, nineteen, was next to the bathroom. The patient in nineteen was one that Slattery had already seen. Mona Greene. A geriatric with chest pains. Woman was ninety-three, a smoker, and had a history of angina, emphysema, and congestive heart failure dating back to the Clinton presidency. It was a wonder she was alive, let alone able to drive herself here about once every three months for “chest pressure.”

The curtains were drawn, and Dr. Slattery parted them for a quick peek.

She was about to say something, but she froze, her lips parted.

Mrs. Greene was there, sure enough … but so was Mr. Wieland. He was bent over the old woman, and for an odd moment Gail Slattery thought that the man was kissing her. Or whispering something in her ear.

He wasn’t.

Dr. Slattery gasped.

Mr. Wieland heard the small sound and his head jerked up, eyes darting toward the part in the curtains. His roved over the curtains, not lingering for even a moment on the narrow part. Those eyes were completely empty.

His mouth, however, was full.

Red bubbled on his lips and ran in lines down his cheeks and over his chin and splashed on the ivy pattern of the Wolverton Hospital patient gowns. Mr. Wieland’s mouth worked and worked, and even across the twelve feet that separated them, Dr. Slattery could hear the sucking, smacking sounds as his teeth chewed on what he had taken from old Mona Greene.

Dr. Slattery should have backed quietly away. She should have cleared the area and called security. She should have called the police. She did none of those things. Instead, Gail Slattery did the one thing that she should not have done.

She screamed.

Mr. Wieland’s eyes snapped back toward her and now he did see the narrow part. And the eye that looked through it. His lips curled back from his teeth and he dropped the remains of the sticklike arm he’d held.

With a howl of insatiable hunger, a hunger not at all satisfied by all that he had consumed, Mr. Wieland rushed around the bed straight toward Dr. Slattery. She screamed and screamed. She screamed as long as she could. As long as she was able.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

“This is Magic Marti at the mike with new tidbits for travelers. Well, it’s official, campers … the cow manure has hit the fan. We got a major storm clamped down over the region. Airports and bus terminals are shut down. Schools are closed and all nonessential activities have been canceled all across our listening area. And there’s still some police activity on Doll Factory Road in Stebbins. And we have unconfirmed reports of an incident at Wolverton Hospital on the Stebbins-Bordentown border. No details yet except that state police are on the scene. And … one more thing, kids. I know that big storms are kind of fun in a haunted house, roller-coaster ride sort of way, but this is serious business. Folks are out there dealing with this. Police, fire, and rescue units are going to be pushed to the limit, so please … no more of the crank calls about monsters eating people. Aunt Marti likes a good prank as much as the next gal, but c’mon guys … now’s not the time.”

CHAPTER SIXTY

Hartnup moved through the woods a dozen yards from the road, paralleling Doll Factory, heading toward Mason Street. He had no control over where his body went, just as he had no idea where it was going. There were more like him in the woods. Some close enough to see, others merely gray shapes in the rain. Some headed in the same direction, drawn by some force beyond Hartnup’s perception; others walked across his path, going north or south or east, drawn by other needs, other calls.

The body around him moved stiffly, and he could still feel it. The hoped-for rigor mortis was upon him now, slowing him, making his limbs move like stilts … but they kept moving. It hurt, too. No human before could ever appreciate the terrible, ceaseless pain of rigor. He knew the science and that was no comfort. The pain was going to get worse and worse. It was a process that starts as soon as respiration ceases. Muscles begin an inevitable and irreversible contraction. It was worse than a charley horse, worse than stomach cramps. It was everywhere at once and each jarring step sent nerve flashes through the dying muscles.

Hartnup’s world was pain. He tried screaming to endure it, but there was no way to escape this hell. All he could do was experience it.

This is hell, he thought, I’ve died and now I’m in hell.

His body moved like a badly managed puppet, and there, beneath the pain, was something far worse. Something that burst through the cracks of agony in each contracting muscle.

Hunger.

That hunger was so big that Hartnup could not grasp its dimensions. It was the god of this thing.

The hunger was all.

And all was hunger.

The dead body in which he floated staggered on, heading down a slope, away from the road, heading into the farmland. To where the food was.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Dez woke up in the backseat of the state police cruiser. She was alone, JT was nowhere to be seen. Her hands were cuffed and her head hurt like she’d been kicked by a horse. She had been slumped over as far as the seat belt would allow, now she straightened, and just that little bit of movement sent a wave of nausea sloshing through her head and guts.

“What the hell happened?” she growled.

The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. The trooper in the front ignored her.

Dez kicked the back of the seat. “Yo! Fuckface! I asked you a question.”

Without turning, the trooper said, “I can pull over to the side of the road and tase you again, Officer Fox. Or you can behave yourself and wait until we get to your station.”

“Is that where you’re taking me?”

“Yes.”

“Why the hell didn’t you just say so? Whatever happened to professional courtesy?”

He made a sound. She thought it was a snort of laughter. She kicked the seat again.

“Hey!” he barked.

“Why did you ass-monkeys tase me in the first place? And who hit me in the head?”

“You struck your head on the counter when you fell. An accident … and I’m sorry about that. Doesn’t look serious though.”

“Feels pretty goddamn serious,” she snarled. Dez considered throwing up on the screen. That would make her stomach feel better and would really piss this guy off. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “What the shit is going on here?”

“You’ve been arrested, Officer Fox. I’d have thought that was clear. Even to you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He didn’t answer. Dez looked at her cuffed wrists. For most prisoners the chain of the cuffs would be threaded through a D ring on the floor, but they had given her the smallest slice of courtesy by cuffing her hands in front of her without attaching her to the ring. Even so, the rear doors were reinforced and could not be opened from inside. The wire mesh cage separating front from rear seat was heavy grade, and she wasn’t going to kick her way through it.

Dez looked out the rain-slick window. They were halfway across the county from the hardware store, just a couple of miles from the center of town. Stebbins was a tiny community on a massive piece of land. The “town” proper was one traffic light long. Three blocks in one direction, two in the other, and all of it clustered around a Baptist church and the public safety office — which served as the police station, post office, fire station, municipal offices, mayor’s office, and various other one-person offices. The next biggest building in town was a Bean-O’s coffee shop, a greasy spoon with aspirations of Starbuckshood.

Even on its best days Stebbins was a ghost town. The only thing that kept Stebbins from drying up and blowing away was some state and federal money for a regional elementary school that occupied the northwest corner of the township and a slightly smaller regional middle school a few miles away from the town proper — and the county hospital whose campus shared real estate with Bordentown.

They stopped at a crossroads to allow four yellow school buses to pass, heading from the middle school toward the shelter of Stebbins Little School. Dez craned her neck to look at the buses, at the pale, frightened faces pressed to each window. One of the kids, a little girl with yellow curls, waved to her. Dez waved back, needing to lift both hands to do it. Then the buses turned onto Schoolhouse Lane and were gone into the swirling gray wind.

“Where’s my partner?” Dez asked.

“You’ll see him at the station,” said the trooper.

“What’s going on? We’re the frigging police, or were you too busy looking at my tits to read the wording on my badge?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Fuck you and answer the question. Why arrest us?”

“You’ll have to discuss that with Lieutenant Hardy.”

“How about you stop being a total prick and tell me. What happened back there? Did you stop them?”

Nothing.

“Did you fucking stop them?”

“Stop whom?”

“What the Christ do you mean, ‘stop whom’? There were fifty of those things in the middle of the street. You had to have driven right through them.”

“I think we should get to the station and you should listen to your Miranda rights before you say anything, Officer Fox. And that is professional courtesy.”

“What?”

“I don’t like seeing another cop in cuffs, and I don’t know what happened out there or why you did what you did,” he said, “but you need to have a lawyer in the room and your rights on record. That’s me talking here, cop to cop.”

Dez stared at the back of his head. The impossibility of the day had slid sideways into the surreal and she sputtered, trying to find a route of logic that would take her back onto firmer ground. She suddenly stiffened.

“You didn’t even see them … did you?”

“See who?” he demanded again.

“Christ.” Dez tried to think it through. JT said that they were coming up the road, but he’d been hunkered down behind the pickup truck, and everyone else was in the store. The rain was getting heavy and it was dark as the devil’s asshole out there. Maybe that was it, she thought. Maybe those things lacked the brain power or imagination to seek out prey unless they saw it or heard it. Or smelled it. Walking uphill toward an empty road in a downpour, they might not have had anything to go on.

So … where did they go?

There was forest on both sides of Mason. Forest with farmland beyond it. She tried to remember if you could smell the farm animals from Mason. Probably. You could always smell cow shit.

“Did anyone go to the crime scene at Hartnup’s?”

The trooper shook his head. “You really don’t want to do this now.”

“Yes, I fucking well do, because you have me cuffed in the back of your cruiser when I should be out there. Somebody’s made a big goddamn mistake and we’d better do something before it bites us all in the ass … and that is not a frigging joke. Now pull over, undo these cuffs, and put me on the radio with someone who doesn’t have his own dick in his ear.”

The trooper sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For whatever happened to you. For whatever’s wrong with you. I heard you were a fuckup off the job, but I always heard that you were pretty good on the clock. What happened? No … wait. Save that for when we’re doing this right. I don’t think I want to hear it.”

Dez leaned as far forward as the cuffs would allow. “What’s your name?” she asked.

There was no need for him to stonewall her on that, so he answered, “Trooper Brian Saunders.”

“Trooper Saunders. Good. Brian. I’ve seen you around. People call me Dez.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know how or why they think that I’m responsible for anything that’s happened today, but I want you to hear me on this. I was protecting the public at all times. I was defending myself at all times. I am not irrational, and I have committed no crimes.”

“Okay.” His tone was neither encouraging nor dismissive. Merely an acknowledgement that he heard her.

“There are people out there who are acting irrationally. They’re sick, possibly as a result of a chemical agent or some kind of toxin. It might be a disease. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it hits hard and it hits fast. I saw it hit one of the locals. Kid named Diviny from Bordentown PD. Diviny went apeshit and attacked fellow officers. We restrained him and my partner, Sergeant JT Hammond, and I transported him to the hospital. This is a matter of record. Check with the hospital. Immediately after that we received a call from dispatch to return to the Hartnup crime scene. Dispatch said that people were killing each other. Understand that? Killing each other. Whatever this thing is, it must have spread. That dispatch call is also a matter of record. Call the station. Talk to Flower, she’s the dispatcher. Let her play the tape.”

Saunders said nothing. The sound of the windshield wipers seemed unnaturally loud.

“When my partner and I arrived at the scene we were attacked by the infected. Some of those infected were police officers, including state troopers. We tried everything — verbal control, beanbag rounds — and then the situation forced us up a rung on the force continuum, so we defended ourselves to the best of our abilities and training. As any cops would. As you would, Brian.”

Saunders was shaking his head, but he didn’t say anything.

“Brian…” Dez pleaded. “Please. Just check.”

“They are checking,” said Saunders with exasperation. “They did check, and that’s not how we’re reading the scene. We didn’t find any ‘infected.’ All we found was evidence that two officers went batshit and began killing people. Killing cops. We found Chief Goss with half his head blown off. Burn marks around the wound look like the barrel was right against his flesh. His own gun was still in its holster. How would a cop let someone get that close unless he knew the person?”

“He was infected!”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about the hospital? Have your people talked to them? Dr. Sengupta?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“At least let me talk to—”

“Hey! Watch out!” Saunders suddenly yelled and turned the wheel violently to the right as a pregnant woman stepped out from behind a farmworker bus that was parked on the shoulder of the road. The fender of the cruiser missed her by an inch and Dez screamed in the back seat, sure that the woman was going to be smashed.

“Goddamn!” Saunders stamped down on the brakes and the cruiser slewed sideways on the wet asphalt, kicking up a wave of dirty rainwater. Dez was thrown forward as the car rocked to a jarring stop. Saunders jerked open the door handle. “Stupid bitch.”

“Don’t!” cried Dez, but Saunders ignored her as he got out. Rain chopped in through the open door. Dez twisted around in the seat to see what was happening. The pregnant woman was looking the wrong way, but she had stopped in the middle of the road; her hair hung in wet rattails and her clothing was disheveled.

Saunders crammed his Smokey the Bear hat on his head, hunched his shoulders against the cold rain, and stomped toward her, his back rigid with anger and stress, one stiffened finger jabbing the air as he yelled at her.

Dez knew this was all wrong even before the woman turned.

It was wrong because the day was wrong. Because the world was wrong. Because everything was wrong.

“Don’t…” she said, her voice much smaller. She knew that the moment was already rolling downhill.

The woman turned just as Saunders reached her. Her body was heavy with a late-term pregnancy. Her dress was a pretty farm country frock with a cornflower pattern. She was young, maybe twenty-five, with long blond hair. She had dark eyes and nearly every scrap of meat had been torn from her face and mouth.

Saunders juddered to a stop. Frozen by what he was seeing. By the impossibility of someone so badly injured still standing.

Through the open front driver’s door Dez could hear the patter of raindrops on the wide brim of his hat. She heard him begin to say, “Jesus Christ. Lady, are you—”

“Don’t!” Dez’s shriek bounced off the closed windows of the cruiser.

And then the woman was on him. She lunged at him with small, pale hands. Her lipless mouth opened wide and white teeth streaked with black blood snapped forward.

Dez screamed.

A geyser of blood shot ten feet above Brian Saunders’s head.

Dez screamed and screamed. She kicked the screen; she threw her shoulder against the door.

Saunders’s legs buckled and he dropped to his knees as the woman bent over him, her teeth locked on the side of his throat.

There was movement on the bus. Beside the bus. Behind the bus.

More of them.

A busload of them.

They converged on the trooper and dragged him to the asphalt.

Dez screamed one more time. And then she tried to stop it, realizing far too late what that scream would do.

Several of the things looked up from their unspeakable feast. Looked in the direction of the scream. Looked at her.

“Don’t…” Dez whispered softly as one by one a dozen of the monsters rose from the thrashing body and shambled toward the cruiser. The front driver door was open. Dez was in cuffs. She twisted around and popped the catch on her seat belt, but there was no way out of that car. She was trapped.

No … she was preserved. Meat in a locker.

“Don’t…” Dez begged, even though Saunders was long past hearing her. “Don’t leave me…”

They shuffled toward her.

There was no need for silence now.

Dez screamed again, and again.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

“What scares you?”

The waitress working the counter at Murphy’s Diner looked up from the coffee she was pouring. This wasn’t the first odd question this customer had asked. He was a thriller writer and he had been round annoying other customers with questions for the last couple of days. Today he was the only one crazy enough to brave the storm.

“Slow days and bad tippers,” she said.

The writer smiled. He was a blocky man with white hair and a gray mustache that was at odds with a youthful face. He wore an expensive leather jacket over a sweatshirt that had the emblem for the Northern Illinois Huskies college football team.

“Serious question,” persisted the writer. He fished in his pocket and laid a business card on the counter and pushed it toward the waitress. The card read SHANE GERICKE. The waitress, who wore a white plastic name tag with SHIRL on it, picked up the card and flipped it over. On the back was a full-color picture of his latest novel.

“Torn Apart,” she read, then set the card down. “I don’t read horror novels.”

“It’s not a horror novel,” said Gericke as he poured cream into his coffee. “I write thrillers.”

“What’s the difference?”

“No monsters.”

“Then who’s tearing who apart?”

“Serial killers, mass murderers. No vampires, no werewolves, nothing like that.”

The waitress made one of those faces that suggested that she wasn’t likely to be interested in anything this guy wrote about. At least, not until she saw how well he tipped. If he dropped twenty percent or better, then she’d be a lot more interested next time. She knew a couple of writers. They were always broke. Only people who tipped worse were college students.

“You ready to order?” she asked, setting the pot down and pulling her order pad from her apron.

“If I do, will you answer the question?”

“You taking a poll?”

“I’m researching a book. The lead character in my novels is out here from Illinois to participate in a multistate manhunt for a killer. I’m trying to get a sense of what people are like here. Moods, politics, relationships, personalities.”

“Why not just make it up?”

He shrugged, blew across his coffee cup, sipped, and set it down. “Better to draw on real life.”

“Small-town color,” she said, “is that it? Make sure the hicks are properly redneck and uneducated?”

Gericke laughed. “I grew up in the burbs outside of Chicago. Not exactly ‘big town.’ And, no, I’m not profiling everyone as a redneck. It takes all kinds of people to make a town. There’s no one ‘type.’” He ticked his head toward the street outside. “I’ve met some interesting people so far. Chief Goss, a reporter named Trout, and—”

“Billy Trout? You met him?” Shirl managed a smile for that. Without the smile she looked north of fifty and off the radar for personality vitality, but the smile dropped fifteen years from her and chipped away a lot of the gray clay that seemed to have been built around her.

“You know him?”

Shirl gave him the kind of laugh that said that she not only “knew” Billy Trout, but could tell you stories.

“He comes in here every now and then,” she said with a wonderfully coquettish slant of her eyes that made Gericke smile. He’d already planned to base a character on Trout, but he was starting to sniff a juicy subplot about the seedy newsman with a soul and the lonely but still sexy diner waitress. Maybe she pines for the guy, or maybe she’s the one that got away. Something like that. Gericke knew he could take that and run with it. Put some desperate sweat-in-the-dark sex into the book.

“I’m planning on writing him into the novel,” said Gericke. “Not under his name, of course, but a character based on him.”

Shirl laughed. “Well, that wouldn’t be a stretch, mister, ’cause Billy is a character.”

At the other end of the diner the door opened and a man in a rain-soaked hoodie stepped inside.

“Damn, Sonny, close the door!” yelled Shirl, then she dropped her voice and in a confidential tone said to Gericke, “Speaking of characters. This one never did have enough brain cells to know when to come in out of the rain.”

Gericke hid a smile behind his coffee cup as he turned to look at the man. He couldn’t see Sonny’s face, but he was still standing in the doorway, his foot propping the door open. Rain was already pooling on the red tile floor.

“Come on, Sonny,” barked Shirl in a voice used to yelling out orders during packed lunch crowds of truckers. “In or out. Jeez … were you born in a damn barn?”

Sonny took a step forward, and Gericke frowned. The man moved heavily, awkwardly. Drunk, this early in the day? He figured he could get some mileage out of a character like that, too.

The door swung shut as Sonny took another couple of steps into the diner. He turned right and left as if uncertain of where he was.

“Come on and sit down,” said Shirl, affection tempering her annoyance. “Get some hot coffee into you before you catch your … death?” Her last word came out crooked and weak because at that moment Sonny lifted his head and the fluorescents washed away the shadows inside his hood. Gericke froze. The face inside the hood was two-toned: wax white and dark red. The skin was bloodless, but blood poured down from a ruin of a mouth and between broken teeth.

“Holy Christ!” yelled Shirl. She grabbed a clean towel and hurried down the counter as she yelled over her shoulder for Gericke to call the police. “Sonny … good lord, what happened to you? Were you in an accident?”

She came around the end of the counter, raising the hand with the towel, her face showing both a clear revulsion and a take-charge strength. Sonny staggered toward her, reaching out as if to accept the towel. Or a hug. Or …

“No…” said Gericke. The word escaped his mouth before he knew why he said it. A visceral, instinctive reaction. Then he said it louder as he came off his stool. “No!”

Shirl flicked a confused look at him.

Sonny leaped at her, slamming her back against the counter, his fingers tangling in her hair, pulling her head back, stretching her throat wide and pale. There was a scream, a deep moan, and then a flash of bright red that shot all the way to the overhead lights.

By then Gericke was moving, running down the length of the empty diner. He had no weapon, he was not a fighter, but none of that mattered. He dove at Sonny like a defensive tackle, knocking the man sideways, breaking the ugly contact between him and Shirl. Hot blood sprayed the side of his face and as he bore Sonny to the ground, Gericke heard the wet, choking, burbling sound as Shirl tried to speak. In a weirdly disjointed and detached part of his brain, Gericke wondered what the dying waitress needed to say so badly that she would try and force the words out through a torn windpipe. He would like to have put that in his next book.

He and Sonny crashed to the floor and suddenly all thoughts of writing and dialogue and curious characters were swept away. The only thing on Gericke’s mind then was keeping those red-smeared teeth away from his own throat.

He never heard the door open. Did not hear the wind and rain whip in, or the slap of slow, shuffling feet on the soaked red tiles of the diner.

Nick Pulsipher hated the place. The motel had been seedy when it was built back in the seventies and it had lost ground since. On the best nights he got a couple of decent family types looking to break up a long drive in a cheap room. Once in a while there were some bikers worth talking to. Sometimes even somebody from his home state of Nevada — people who had actually heard of Henderson, where he grew up. Though never anyone from Caliente, where he’d lived before moving east to this place. Nick thought that it might be an upward move, going from desk clerk to manager in the same chain of roach motels; but after three years here it was his opinion that if Caliente was the absolute asshole of America, then Stebbins was the “taint.” As career moves go, this one wasn’t going into the history books.

At least the motel office had cable, if the storm didn’t knock that out. The lights had already flickered and he wouldn’t have bet a torn dollar bill on making it through the night with lights, power, and cable all intact.

The rain was like a constant animal roar. The customers in the six rented rooms might as well have been on the moon. He hoped none of them needed anything from him. Nick did not want to go out in this shit. Winds like that, you don’t hold on to something, next thing you know you’re wearing ruby slippers and skipping down a yellow brick road.

He went around the counter and peered out through the window. The awning kept the rain from hitting the glass, but even with that it was hard to see all the way across the parking lot. The Crescent Motel was actually built like a blocky letter C, and Nick could see lights glowing in a few windows. And one doorway. Nick bent closer. Yep, the door to Unit 18 at the far end was wide open, and the damn wind was blowing that way.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. The carpet would be soaked, and when it dried it would smell like old underwear. He saw three people run in through the open door, but with the failing light and the rain it was hard to make out who they were. 18 was rented by a woman traveling with her grown daughter, heading to Washington, D.C., for some political thing. At least that’s what they told Nick during check-in. One-nighters. All well and good, but not if that one night left him with a soaked carpet and a mother of a cleanup job.

He saw two more people come out of the rain and enter the unit. Then another. And another.

“What the hell are they doing over there?”

What was it? Some kind of party to celebrate the storm? Ditzy broads.

The carpet was going to be ruined. That came out of his maintenance budget. His bonuses were based on a percentage of the budget leftover at the end of the month. Replacing carpets for a whole unit was going to cut that down to chicken shit.

Nick debated what to do. Call them or go the hell over there?

He called.

The phone rang and rang. He slammed down the phone, looked up their cell number on the register card, and called that. It rang three times and went right to voice mail.

“Shit.” He grabbed his raincoat off the peg behind the counter and pulled it on, then crammed a Pirates baseball cap down hard on his head. Even with that he knew he was going to get soaked, but he was so mad that he didn’t care.

He pushed the door open and had to force it closed against the claws of the wind; then he hunched his shoulders and bent into the blow, trudging through the rain like a man walking through mud. The gale winds were intense and the rain was numbingly cold. By the time he was halfway across the parking lot he was drenched, with lines of water running down inside his clothes. Rain pelted his face with the stinging force of hail, and runoff dripped from the tips of his long chin beard. Through squinted eyes he could see the crowd of people gathered at the open door, some of them inside Unit 18, some outside. None of them had umbrellas or rain hats. They stood in the rain like they didn’t give a shit and Nick was twenty yards away from then when that fact started to bother him.

He was ten yards away when he realized that everyone was chewing. They stood with their hands cupped and held to their mouths, each one totally absorbed in whatever they were eating.

“The hell—”

What was this? Some kind of crazy storm tailgate party? Beer and ribs and…?

He was five yards away when he realized that he was wrong. About the nature of the gathering. About the menu. About everything. The people closest to him raised their faces from their meals and stared at him with eyes that were far too dark and mouths that were far too red.

Nick was three yards away when he stopped walking and turned to run.

That was two yards too late.

Jillian Weiner felt the darkness closing in. The calm-down drugs were taking her below the level of pain and stress, and soon the big, dark, soft wave of anesthesia would roll over her and she would go down into a sweet nothingness. She wouldn’t feel the scalpel as the doctors went in and removed her appendix. Who needs an appendix anyway? She knew that there would be pain when she woke up, and more pain during the recovery, but for now … it felt like rolling down a hill that was lined with silk and covered with pillows.

Sounds were becoming muted, distorted, softened so that they made little sense other than as background noise. She could hear the doctor and the nurses speaking, and even understand snatches of what they said, but if it made any sense to Jillian, she was too deep to care.

“… the hell’s going on out there…?”

“… someone’s hurt out in the hall…”

“… oh my God … my God!”

“… please … oh, sweet Jesus … please, don’t let it in here…”

The screams became the cries of seagulls over a lazy beach. Even when blood splashed her, it was nothing more than salt spray from the summer waves.

It’s nice down here, she thought. So sweet, so soft …

Jillian felt hands on her. Nurses? Doctors? Who cared?

She couldn’t exactly remember what a doctor was.

Or why she was here.

The darkness was flowing around her, filling up the room. The figures that moved around her were painted in tones of mint green and bright red. Then the colors swirled as she went deeper, and deeper.

She felt the others hands, the colder hands, on her. But she didn’t care.

She felt the dull pinch of teeth. That registered as pain, but as far away, on a shelf, over there, somewhere else.

As Jillian’s eyes closed, as the anesthesia took her all the way down, she had one last glimpse of the room. A doctor with an Indian face and eyes filled with blood, bending toward her stomach. Another pinch, another bite.

The anesthesia pulled her under and she was smiling as Dr. Sengupta, the nurses, and several patients gathered around her gurney and devoured her.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

The dead moved toward the cruiser. Trooper Saunders had stopped screaming by now. Dez’s screams died slowly in her throat as she stared through the rain-smeared window at the monsters. Most of them were clustered around the body, but the rest were coming her way.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God …

There was no way out.

The rain was getting heavier by the moment, obscuring the window, making it hard to see what they were doing.

“Shit,” Dez breathed and immediately slid down off the seat, crammed herself into the footwell and tried to disappear. The rain was so loud she could not even hear the moans of the dead.

Please please please …

Then she heard the driver’s door creak against its hinge. She dared not look. Above her, around her, there were soft sounds. Hands touching. Bodies bumping without force against the skin of the cruiser.

Dez held her breath.

They can’t see me down here. Not through the rain on the windows.

The thin hiss of fingernails on wet glass and dripping metal.

They can’t smell me. The rain stinks of earth and manure and ozone.

The vehicle rocked as someone … something entered it.

Please, God … they don’t know I’m here.

The rain was so loud. It drowned everything out. Dez willed it to drown her out. The air began to burn in her lungs.

JT … where are you?

Outside there was a whishing sound as another vehicle drove by, and then a change in sound as it slowed.

“Hey!” called a voice. “Are you … oh, Jesus Christ!”

The scream of tires. Turning, turning, burning as the water on the blacktop evaporated and the rubber smoked. A higher shriek as the tires found purchase, the roar of the engine as the car accelerated away.

Then nothing but the rain. So much. So heavy.

It fell and fell. A steady thunder on the roof and the rear windshield. Cold and wet breeze coming in through the open door.

But beneath the rain … nothing.

Dez had to let the breath out. It was a fireball behind her sternum.

She let it out open mouthed. Slow, forcing her throat open wide. No stricture, no sound. Exhale it all out. Hold. Wait. Inhale. Silent.

God … don’t let them hear me.

She waited for the dead-limp hands to start beating on the glass. She turned her head an inch and peered up, wanting to see and terrified to see the worm-white fingers poke through the grille.

Waited. Watched.

Dez breathed as silent as a ghost while she waited for the dead to come for her, to take her, to devour her.

She didn’t have her gun. Saunders had taken it. If they got to her, if they infected her, there was not going to be a way out. No exit strategy. No fast ride on the night train. She would die, and be consumed, and …

… God, please don’t let me be a monster.

God, please.

Please.

Please.

Mommy, please …

… Daddy …

Please …

The rain hammered down and the wind blew.

And she waited to die.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

“This is Magic Marti at the mike and we are in a world of hurt out there. The storm is parked over Stebbins County and we’re seeing torrential rains and gale-force winds. Small and moderate streams are flooding, and we’re getting reports of road washouts. Telephone and cell lines are taking a beating from the storm, which seems to have knocked out communication with local police and fire. That’s the bad news, and I wish I had some good news to throw at you, campers. If you can hear my voice, then get to high ground, lock your doors, and we’ll ride this out together.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Selma Conroy said nothing as Homer Gibbon paced back and forth across the dining room floor. He was agitated, his eyes jumpy, his fingers twitching. Every step was an awkward lurch as he fought the increasing stiffness in his muscles.

“He lied to me,” Homer snarled. “He lied to me. To me.”

He turned and swept his arm across the table, knocking dishes and stacks of magazines and a week’s worth of mail onto the floor with a crash. Homer slammed his fists down on the tabletop and leaned on them, shaking his head slowly back and forth.

“I thought he understood.”

Selma said nothing. Magazines and unpaid bills littered the floor around her like fallen leaves.

Homer stopped moving and looked down at his hands. They were caked with blood. They were cold hands, pale and …

… dead.

That’s what Volker had told him.

You are a dead, damned thing. The doctor’s words down the phone line. Venomous and filled with betrayal. Not the voice of the Red Mouth at all.

He held his right hand up to his eye, studying it. The flesh did not look right. Even apart from the scratches and blood, it looked wrong. On a deeper, more troubling level.

Wrong.

His skin … moved. Like the way flesh crawls when it contracts in the cold. Or when there is so much fear the skin wants to retreat from it.

Like that. Only … not like that at all.

It rippled. As if something were moving just below the surface.

He could barely feel it, though. His arms and legs were stiff and sore. Everything hurt. It was all he could do not to scream with each step.

You are dead.

Dead.

A damned thing.

The doctor had done something to him. Volker had admitted it. He’d thrown some scientific bullshit at him. Parasites and crap like that. The doctor had actually tried to hit with some shit about vodou.

Dead.

Homer pressed his left forefinger to the back of his right hand. The flesh trembled with a sensation like squirming.

“Oh God fuck me,” whispered Homer. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

I damned you, Mr. Gibbon. I damned you to suffering so that you’ll understand.

“Yeah, well fuck that, Doc.” Homer’s voice was hoarse. “I already know. I’ve known all my life. The Black Eye shows me everything. The Red Mouth tells me everything I need to know. Maybe you fooled it, you cocksucker, but the Red Mouth will whisper to you. Oh, hell yes and no doubt about it. Ain’t that right, Auntie?”

Selma said nothing.

“But what did you do to me, you Frankenstein fuck?”

He pressed thumbnail against his skin. Below the surface it felt like something popped. Something wet and small. Setting his teeth in a grin that was wired in place by pain and hatred, Homer pressed his nail into the skin, rubbing it back and forth until it made a pale groove. Not a red welt, but a pale trench. That only made him madder. He pressed the thumbnail in, finding a cracked section and using that like a plow to cut the flesh, constantly rubbing back and forth, squeezing his fist to force the blood out.

Only it wasn’t blood. It was a black muck, thicker than oil and filled with white threads. No, not threads. Worms. Or maggots. They wriggled and twisted in each black drop that rolled outward from the cut.

Homer Gibbon stared at the goo … and what swarmed and thrived inside of it. Inside of him.

“No,” whispered Homer. The truth of it — what Volker had told him over the phone and the proof crawling from his veins — staggered him. He backpedaled drunkenly until his back crunched into the wall. He slid down to the floor, his mouth opening and closing as a scream kept leaping up from inside his chest to rip loose and break the world.

“Auntie?”

That word, small and plaintive, was the only sound he made. It was faint, nearly a child’s voice. A lost voice.

Aunt Selma did not answer.

She could not.

She had no mouth with which to speak. No lips. No tongue.

She sat amid the debris from the table, her robe soaked scarlet from the blood that flowed from all the red mouths Homer Gibbon had opened on her skin.

Homer stared blankly at her, and it took him almost a minute to understand what he was seeing. There were black spots in his mind, obscuring memories both recent and old. But not Dr. Volker’s words. No, each and every one of them were as clear as if he were crouched behind Homer and whispering in his ear, but Selma…?

Homer knew what had happened to her.

He could feel the weight of meat in his stomach. He understood what that meant. It’s just that he had no memory at all of having done it.

Homer had not wanted to do this. Not to Selma. Not to her.

He sat and stared and tried to weep. He strained to force out a single tear.

“Come on, you fucker,” he yelled, as if Volker was right there in the room. “Give me that much. Let me still be human enough for that.”

He felt a tingle at the corner of his eye, and with great relief he touched his fingers there, needing to see the ordinary glistening wetness of that tear. The world began spinning around him. The drop of liquid on his fingertips was as black as the Black Eye. Tiny worms wriggled in it.

Homer Gibbon screamed. And this time the scream was real, full and charged with all of the power of his hate and rage.

He screamed and screamed. He jumped to his feet and raged through the house, tearing it apart. Be damned to the pain in his muscles; he took that pain and fed it in like fuel to his fury. He shattered windows and threw chairs across the rooms. His hands swept pictures from the walls and his feet kicked side tables to kindling. He overturned the sofa and slashed at the curtains with fingernails and teeth and then with knives from the kitchen.

And then he stopped dead in his tracks.

Aunt Selma stood in the doorway to the dining room. Her face was a death mask of exposed bone and empty eye sockets. Her clothes hung in stained tatters exposing wrinkled, bloodless skin. Some of her fingers were broken and bitten.

“Auntie?”

Selma raised her hands toward him and moaned. A deep, aching moan of blind and unbearable hunger. Homer stared at her, watching as she shuffled toward him. Even from ten feet away he could see the black goo leaking from between the exposed teeth, and inside the goo … the worms.

It was then, in a grand leap of understanding, that everything Volker had told him about Project Lucifer, the coupe poudre, and the parasites coalesced into a shared body of knowledge with the things the Black Eye had witnessed all of Homer’s life, and which the Red Mouth whispered incessantly in his ears. Homer looked at the ripped skin on Aunt Selma and touched his own mouth, making intuitive leaps. Making connections.

Over the years, in the service of the Red Mouth, Homer had used every kind of tool. Knives, saws, drills, pliers, hatchets, clubs, forks, and even dentist tools. Each of them had opened red mouths in the people whom he sacrificed to his inner gods. But now …

He ran his fingers over his teeth, feeling each one. Shape and size and sharpness. Ordinary teeth, but not really. Not anymore. He could feel the worms wriggling beneath the flesh of his gums and within the meat of his tongue and the walls of his mouth.

Yes, whispered the Red Mouth.

There was a soft thump from the cellar and a low moan, and Homer knew that the church lady was trying to climb the stairs. He knew that without having to look. It all made sense now. Everything was clear.

The state had captured him and chained him; Doctor Volker had tried to transform him into the living embodiment of suffering. But a higher, grander purpose was at work in Homer’s life; and now he understood the purpose of that power. Like a grub that turns into a wasp, it was all about transformation.

Just as Aunt Selma had transformed from living meat to a servant of the Red Mouth, Homer Gibbon understood that he was no longer Homer Gibbon.

He was the Red Mouth.

“God!” he said aloud, meaning himself.

He felt the hunger inside. In the same instant he felt all doubt and confusion decay and die.

He opened the door and let Aunt Selma stagger out into the rain.

Then he looked through the debris until he found the keys to the church lady’s car. With them in hand he stepped out onto the porch, smiling. Filled with purpose.

He remembered a snatch of an old poem that one of the older cons in Rockview used to repeat. Standing on the top step, he said it aloud.

“This is how the world ends,” he whispered to the rain.

“This is how the world ends,” he said to the wind.

“This is how the world ends,” he shouted to the storm.

Not with a bang.

But a bite.