Dead of Night

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

“This is Magic Marti at the mike and we’ve been informed that Pennsylvania Governor Harbison is going to make an announcement. Okay, we’re going live to the state capitol in Harrisburg.”

“My fellow citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” said the governor in a deep, somber voice, “as of seven p.m. tonight, I am declaring a state of emergency for Stebbins County and a state of high alert for the following counties: Beaver, Allegheny, Washington, Greene, Armstrong, Indiana, Westmoreland, Fayette, Somerset, and Cambria. We have been offered — and I have accepted — assistance from the federal government and FEMA. I have mobilized the National Guard to shore up flood-affected areas and to assist with evacuations and other rescue operations.”

A pause.

“However, the storm is not our only concern. With police, rescue, and fire departments taxed to their limits, we have been receiving a number of accounts of looting and violence. So far most of this has been concentrated in Stebbins County, which is also being hit hardest by the storm. For that reason I have authorized the National Guard to place Stebbins under temporary martial law. A curfew has been imposed and Guardsmen will work with local law enforcement to restore order.

“It is a sad thing when a corrupt few take advantage of the many, especially during a time of crisis. We saw similar acts of cowardly opportunism during Hurricane Katrina and in the wake of the earthquakes in Haiti.

“However I am convinced — and will remain convinced — that the overwhelming majority of the people of this glorious commonwealth are working shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors to save lives, protect property, and do what is necessary for everyone to survive. The many will not be tainted by the heinous acts of the few, and I can promise that order will be restored in a timely and efficient manner.

“If you are in one of the affected areas, please follow the instructions provided by the police, emergency agencies, and the news services. Stay at home, stay safe, and pray for those in peril. Together we will weather this crisis and see our way to the other end of this storm. Thank you and God bless the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

She was a huddled ball down in the footwell of the backseat, her entire body clutched as tightly as a fist. The state police cruiser was still and cold. Outside, the wind was a tireless howling monster.

Dez had no idea how long she lay there. Thirty minutes? More? Probably more. She knew that, despite everything, despite all need and logic, she had fallen asleep. There had been no other direction in which she could flee.

In her sleep she thought she heard the chatter of automatic gunfire, the screams of men and women, and the roar of truck engines. But now that she was awake she heard none of those sounds.

Every muscle ached from the tension of remaining perfectly still. Her head hurt horribly where she had struck it when they’d hit her with the Taser. Her chest hurt from the strain of keeping silent even while the sobs tore their way out of her.

And she was cold. God … so cold. The November wind blowing in through the open door cut her like knives. Frigid rainwater dripped from the wire cage and pooled under her. There was no escape from the cold. Rain soaked into the tight knot of her French braid and burned like drops of boiling water on her scalp, especially over the bruise she’d gotten when falling. It crept down the collar of her shirt and the waistband of her pants, soaking her underwear, pooling inside her clothes as she lay shivering.

He left me.

Those three words hung in her mind like an echo frozen in time. She knew that the thought was illogical, but what did logic have to do with her world anymore? Logic had been consumed back at Doc Hartnup’s. Logic was torn flesh and gnawed bones. Logic was dead.

He left me.

She’d warned him. Goddamn it if she hadn’t warned him. She told him not to get out of the car. He hadn’t listened. They never do. That was a lessen Dez had learned when she had begged her daddy — begged him on her knees as she clung to his legs — not to go when they wanted to send him to Kuwait. She’d soaked the knees of his pants with her tears, and Daddy had been forced to peel her off of him. He’d been so frustrated that he’d yelled at her. Told her to grow up.

Dez had known that it was wrong for him to go. There were monsters out there in the darkness. There always were, hiding in the shadows, right beyond the corner of your eye, waiting to take you.

Daddy had gone anyway.

On the last day — on that terrible morning at the airport — he’d tried to make it all right with her. He’d knelt down and stroked her blond hair and kissed her nose. He’d said, “Don’t worry, Pumpkin, you know I’ll come back for you.”

That’s what he’d said.

Not come back to you.

Come back for you.

Then he left. Six weeks later he was gone forever, his helicopter blown out of the Arabian skies by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by someone in his own platoon. Friendly fire, they called it.

Mommy was dying already when they got the news. She was leaving Dez one ragged breath at a time as cancer gnawed at her with relentless hunger. When the man from the army read the letter, Mommy had simply closed her eyes and looked away. A single, silver tear rolled down to the pillow. She never spoke a word after that. Not to the army man, not to anyone. In three weeks Mommy was gone. She went away from Dez, too. First into her own grief and then into the darkness and finally into the ground.

Dez was in the second grade. Too young to understand the mysteries of death, but too old not to grasp the concept that anyone could leave at any time. For any reason. Daddy had proved that. So had Mommy.

So had everyone.

Even this trooper. This young guy named Saunders.

Left her.

Alone.

In the cold rain.

With the monsters.

So, why not sleep?

Why not fall into the deepest, darkest hole that opened up in her mind? It was so much safer down there, because you’re all alone. No one can leave you when you’re all alone.

She lay there in the footwell and listened to the rattle of the rain on the roof. Fighting the shivers. Trying to ignore the cold. Trying to block out the pain in her cramped muscles.

Wondering, though, why she was alive. Why hadn’t the monsters taken her? She couldn’t run. She was cuffed, battered, helpless. Meat in a fridge for those fuckers.

Dez listened for the sound of moans threaded into the wind and the rain. Listened. Listened. She heard absolutely nothing except the storm.

Why?

She lay there, waiting — aching, needing — for JT to come. Not as a rescue. She did not see it that way, not even now. Dez did not need anyone to come and rescue her ass. Not even JT, who was the only man who had never let her down, the only man who didn’t have his head shoved all the way up his ass. Backup, though … that would be great. Cop to cop … and now would be a good time.

“Come on, Hoss,” she whispered. “L’il help here.”

But JT did not come. No matter how many times she asked.

Dez even thought about Billy Trout. God, what a pansy-ass jerk. Even so, she wished that he were here. Dez could make a long, long list of Billy’s faults — too much emotion for one thing, that was top of the list — but if he opened that car door right now, she’d drag his ass to the nearest chapel. If Billy could figure out how to pick the lock on a pair of cuffs, she’d bang him blind, maybe even squeeze out a kid or two, just like he wanted. She promised it to Jesus and the saints as she lay there in the wet and cold.

She closed her eyes and remembered how warm he always was. His skin always felt like sunlight was shining on it, even when they made love in the dead of winter. Dez remembered doing that. Clinging naked to him as snow fell outside, her arms and legs wrapped around Billy’s suntanned limbs, the heat of their breath as they gasped and panted into each other’s mouths. The heat at the core of her as Billy moved his hips and she moved hers, creating a friction as old as the world and as fragile as a snowflake. She remembered the heat as he came inside of her, crying out her name as if it was the single word that would buy his way into heaven. And the heat after, as he held her close, stroking her hair, whispering promises to her deep into the night as all around them the world froze into perfect whiteness.

Then she remembered the heat in his eyes on that last day. When he’d come into her trailer with the flowers and the ring, and Big Ted was there. Billy’s eyes had filled with blue fire, and Dez imagined that she could feel the flare of heat as the furnace of his heart burst apart.

Billy. He was the last heat in the world that she could remember.

“Billy,” Dez called out, her lips tasting the shape of his name. “Billy … I’m so sorry.”

But Billy Trout did not come either.

“Damn you,” Dez said to the storm, pretending that her tears were rainwater.

No one came for her. No one at all. Not JT, not Billy. Not the state police.

But …

Dez’s eyes snapped open.

Why?

Why had no one come?

Why had the dead not come?

She wanted to move, needed to move, but Dez needed to understand that even more. Saunders had left her and they had torn him to pieces. Dez had screamed, and the dead had come shambling toward the car. Toward her.

Only … they hadn’t done that. The front door of the car was wide open.

Dez took the risk. She knew before she moved that it was the most dangerous thing she had ever done. The most foolish, which was saying a lot.

She straightened her left leg.

The muscles began to cry out in a long, slow voice of pain as she flexed her thigh and straightened her knee. Then she froze as a new and awful terror struck her.

Her right leg was dead. She couldn’t even feel it.

Oh God! Her thoughts rang inside her head like a scream. They did get me. I’m dead … like them. I’m dying.

These thoughts collided and cracked apart like billiard balls, all logic gone. She rocked sideways, trying insanely to get away from the dead side of her body.

Then there was a sudden and intense flare of pain all along the dead leg and hip — and that fast she realized that panic was making her stupid. Nerve endings burst awake with scattershot pins and needles as blood flowed into muscles that had been crushed to numbness by a hour laying on her side in the cold.

“You stupid bitch,” she told herself, keeping her voice almost silent but loading it with enough scorn and venom to strip the bluing off a gun barrel. “You stupid pussy-ass fucking idiot.”

Scorn was a good lash for Dez. It made her angry, and for her, anger was the only thing that could outfight fear. Anger was an old friend. An ally since she was in the second grade. It made her want to hurt something. Herself, or the first thing she could find that would scream.

Even so, she moved cautiously. Slowly. Unfolding her cramped limbs, even smiling with the rictus grin athletes often wear during physical therapy. Loving the pain. Hating the weakness. Forcing strength back into the body. At the same time listening for changes in the ambient noise. Listening for the moans.

Nothing.

She sat up. It took five minutes. Her wrists were bruised and raw from the cuffs, but she thanked God that Saunders had been compassionate enough not to have cuffed her behind her back. That would be a death sentence. In front … there was at least a chance.

She could not see out of the window. She was too short and the window was fogged with condensation. That meant that she had to get up onto the bench seat.

“Come on, you lazy cow.”

She reached up and threaded her fingers through the mesh of the wire cage that separated the front seat from the back. Her fingers ached from the cold, but Dez fed that pain to the furnace of anger that she was stoking in the center of her chest. She set her teeth and pulled, pushing with both legs. It felt like hauling a transmission out of a pickup truck, but her body moved.

Then she was on the seat.

She immediately lay back down, stretching herself on the seat as she listened for moans. Listened for anything that might be reacting to the noise of her movement.

The wind and the rain did not change in pitch or tone.

Dez slowly sat up again.

She leaned and tried to look out through the open driver’s door, but the angle was bad. All she could see was a bit of blacktop and tiny waves of runoff cascading toward the shoulder.

She shimmied over to the left-hand rear window and used her sleeve to wipe away the condensation. Everything outside was still a blur, the shapes smeared by the constant rainfall. Even so … those shapes were constants. Unmoving.

What had happened to the damn dead?

It didn’t make sense.

Until it did.

The hammering of the rain on the roof was half the answer. Noise. And the smell of the rain — charged with ozone and rich with earthy odors from the flowing mud — was the other half. The dead could not hear or see her. Not in that downpour. Not hidden in the back of the cruiser, not through those same smeared windows.

“Well fuck me blind,” Dez said out loud.

She grinned. A real grin this time.

Then she looked down at the footwell. At where she had been. At what she had been down there. Small. Broken. Weak. Abandoned.

Her head abruptly rose and snapped around like a spaniel, her eyes focused to the east as if she could see through car and storm and buildings all the way to the elementary school.

Where the kids were. Where the old folks had been taken.

Were they trapped there? Abandoned by parents who could not get through the storm to pick them up? Or, by parents who had encountered some other problem? Like Saunders had.

“Christ,” growled Dez. She patted her pockets in the vain hope that Saunders had somehow overlooked her handcuff key. Not a chance.

Damn.

The cage was heavy-gauge wire and she was never going to kick that out of its frame. The doors had no handles inside.

But the windows.

Dez sneered at the glass. She’d knocked in her fair share of car windows in her time. With her baton and the end of her flashlight. With a standing kick more than once. And even with the head of Rufus Sterko after Dez had busted him for beating his wife with an electrical cord. Side windows weren’t that tough. Safety glass was made to shatter under the right kind of impact.

The problem was going to be one of angle and resistance. She couldn’t stand up, and that was the best angle. And lying down meant that there was nothing to really brace against. This was going to have to be all muscle and speed. Snapping speed.

She turned and lay down on the seat and scooched down so that she could place her heels on the window with her knees bent. Then she wrapped her cuffed hands in the nylon seat-belt strap, took a deep breath, and kicked.

Her heels hit the glass and rebounded and Dez knee-punched herself in the mouth, smashing her lower lip against her teeth. She tasted blood as pain flared along the inside of her lip. The glass remained unbroken.

“Motherfucker!” she snarled, her anger stoked all the way up to white-hot rage and she kicked out again. And again.

And again.

There was a sharp crystalline pop, and then her heels shot through the disintegrating window out into the rain; however, the jagged teeth of the window raked her ankles and calves.

Dez jerked her legs back into the car, her chest heaving in anger and pain. Hot blood trickled down the back of each calf, but cold rain slanted through the window, driven by stiff wind.

She froze and listened once more to the sound of the storm.

Still no moans. No scuffling feet on the wet blacktop.

Dez leaned forward and cautiously stuck her head out the window, looked left and right.

The bus was still there, but that was it. None of them. Not even the remains of Saunders. Had they totally consumed him, flesh, bone, and clothes? No, that was stupid.

He was one of them now. Dez knew that for sure. The way you know bad things when the shit is really coming down around you. Saunders was out there somewhere, half torn apart but walking. Hunting for food.

Her stomach did a sickening spin.

Stop mooning around, you cow, screeched Dez. Get out of the car. Get out … get OUT.

Dez reached her hands through the shattered window and fumbled for the door handle, found it, hooked her cold fingers in it, clumsied it up, and felt the lock pop open. She shoved the door with her knee, and then she was out of the car, moving as fast as she could, and then dropping into a low crouch, studying the road.

Nothing moved but the wind-blown rain.

Dez crabbed sideways down the car to the open driver’s door, found the trunk release, jerked it. Then she duckwalked to the back of the car, making maximum use of cover, peered around, and saw that the coast was still clear. She straightened and pushed the trunk hood all the way up.

And smiled.

Her hat was there. As was her gun belt, her Glock, and her ring of keys.

Dez grabbed for the keys, fumbled the small cuff key out and worked it into the lock. When they clicked open she turned and threw them as far away as she could, her face twisted into a mask of disgust.

Then she wrapped the belt around her hips and cinched it tight. She’d used up her pepper spray on Andy. Didn’t matter, the shit didn’t work on those dead sons of bitches anyway. She dropped the magazine in her Glock. Nine bullets left and one in the chamber. That was the bad news. The good news was the shotgun attached by aluminum clips to the underside of the trunk lid. It had beanbag rounds, though. Good for knocking them down; no good at all for killing them.

The keys to the cruiser were — where?

She went back to the driver’s side, but the ignition slot was empty. Saunders had been a dutiful little trooper and had taken the keys with him. Shit.

Dez turned and surveyed the road, hoping to see the keys glinting on the asphalt. No such luck.

She knew in theory how to boost a car, but she needed a screwdriver or some tools, and her fingers were so numb with cold that she wasn’t even sure she could pull a trigger.

Dez looked around, considering her options. Her car was parked at the station, four blocks from here. But her car keys were in her briefcase in her own cruiser, and that was back at Turks’s. Miles away.

And, if the staties thought she was a mad psycho killer — if the actual truth of what was happening hadn’t yet come to bite them on the ass — then going to the station was a quick way to get arrested again. Dez knew that she wouldn’t let that happen, even if it meant kneecapping a couple of troopers.

Would she kill one of them if she had to?

She weighed the shotgun in her hand. Beanbag rounds might be a way to muscle through them.

Or, just avoid that whole can of worms and figure something else out.

She looked up the road. The elementary school was two miles from here. A long, cold run in this rain. Her trailer home was the same distance but off to the southwest.

It was way out of her way, but she could feel the old place pulling at her. There was a locked trunk in her bedroom. In it, Dez had two hunting rifles, a shotgun, a Sig Sauer nine, a Raven Arms.25, and enough boxes of bullets to start a goddamn war.

Her landlord, Rempel, had a big Toyota Tundra, too. That thing could drive through a brick wall. If Rempel wouldn’t lend it to her, then Dez had no problem at all knocking him on his ass and taking it. Or kneecapping him, if it came to that. He really was a prick.

She could change into warm clothes, grab her leather jacket and riot gear, put all the guns and ammo into the Tundra and then smash her way right up to the doors of the elementary school. She chewed her lip. That wasn’t a great plan — it wasted time — but it was the only plan that sounded like it ended with her alive. And the kids alive, too.

The wind howled and the street remained empty.

Where the fuck is everyone?

For that matter, where was JT? Was he in lockup, sweating this out in a cage? Or had his driver stopped, too?

“Damn it, Hoss,” she said to the wind, “don’t you leave me, too.”

There was a catch in her voice as she said it. And it made her mad.

“Fuck it,” she told the storm. “It’s only rock ’n’ roll.”

Dez turned and ran down the road toward her home. Toward her guns.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Homer Gibbon drove the back roads away from Aunt Selma’s house. He had no idea where Selma was. Homer had dropped her off on a neighbor’s porch, rang the bell, and was a quarter mile down the road when the screams began. He dropped the church lady outside the church. Seemed fitting. He was laughing as he drove away.

The church lady’s ugly little car bounced and rattled along the rutted roads and nearly got stuck twice in mud. Homer took it in stride. He had the radio tuned to WNOW, listening to Magic Marti talk about the storm and then hearing her voice change as she began reading news reports about outbreaks of violence in Stebbins County.

That confused him for almost a full minute, and then he got it.

As he drove, he tried to put it all together, to connect the chain of events that stretched from the execution chamber at the prison to this moment in the church lady’s car. He remembered the needle and he remembered going to sleep.

Then he remembered waking up and seeing the man at the mortuary. And the ugly Russian lady. Homer remembered fighting with them. Biting them.

That had been the first real taste.

It wasn’t really his first taste of human flesh — he’d bitten parts off a diner waitress once — but it was the first time he’d tasted it out of need rather than curiosity.

And, oh, how he had needed it.

Waking up in that bag — that fucking body bag! — had been awful. Dark and terrifying, like being inside a womb or a coffin. Worse still had been the hunger. It was so deep, so massive that he almost bit his own skin, and he would have, too, if the mortician hadn’t unzipped the bag and bent close. Deliciously close.

He wondered if the mortician and the Russian lady had come back. Like Aunt Selma and the church lady.

Yes, he decided, they had. They’d come back as slaves of the Black Eye, and now they were probably out there somewhere, spreading the truth of the Red Mouth.

That was … He fished for a word that was grand enough, glorious enough.

That was perfect.

It was delicious. And it was fun.

He hit the button to roll the window down, leaned his head out of the Cube as the rain stung him, and screamed at the storm, “Fuck you, Volker!”

Homer laughed for the next five minutes. The old fuck doctor at the prison hadn’t punished him, or damned him, or any such bullshit. Volker had given Homer the keys to the goddamn kingdom. He had empowered him.

Homer liked the word “empowered.” He’d learned it from a Dr. Phil episode.

“Empowered.” It tasted good to say it.

The only thing that bothered Homer was the fact that Aunt Selma and the church lady seemed a little — again he fished for a word. The only thing that seemed to fit was “dumb as shit.”

He thought about it some more, not liking that. It seemed disrespectful. Not dumb. Empty. Like a hollowed-out gourd. Nothing inside except the hunger. Auntie didn’t even seem to know her name. Granted, without a face she couldn’t speak, but she didn’t even respond to her name. Church lady still had a face, but she couldn’t talk, either. They just “were.”

Would that be how all of them were? He was pondering that when a figure staggered out of the brush and walked right into the middle of the road. Homer stamped on the brakes and had to steer like a madman to keep the Cube from spinning and crashing into the rainswept trees.

“You stupid fuck!” Homer yelled. But then he stopped and peered through the windshield as the wipers slapped back and forth. He knew this man, and Homer grinned. “Holy shit…”

The man turned toward the car, staring with eyes that were dark and empty of everything except hunger. He wore the remains of a blue smock over street clothes. The smock, the clothes, and the man were covered with so much dried blood that even rain this heavy could not wash it away. The face that peered through the windshield at Homer was the same one that had bent to peer at him when the body bag had been unzipped. The mortician. Homer got out of the car and the man suddenly staggered toward him, taking two quick steps as if preparing to attack.

Homer knew that he wanted to attack. He was hungry, after all — Home knew that on a gut level.

Then the man stopped and stood in the rain, looking lost. Looking … empty.

“Guess I’m not your Happy Meal, sport,” said Homer.

The dead mortician lifted his head at the sound of Homer’s voice and the barest shadow of perplexity flicked across his dead features. Then he turned and began staggering in the same direction he’d been going before Homer stopped. On the other side of the road was a farm field, and beyond that … a farmhouse.

“Nice,” Homer said with approval. There was more movement up the road, and he saw a cop step out of the woods. His shirt and throat were ripped away, his eyes dark and dead. The cop crossed the road and headed in the same direction as the mortician. “Very nice.”

Homer got back into the car. He felt satisfied. He’d wanted an answer to his question, and the universe had given it to him, no muss, no fuss.

The empty ones, like Aunt Selma and the mortician, were no different than the worms under his skin. They did what they did but there was no one at the wheel except the will of the Red Mouth.

“Kind of perfect,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s right on the fucking money.” He pounded the side of his fist on the steering wheel. Then he rolled up the window, put the car in gear, and kept driving. A mile down the road he came to a crossroads. Turn left and the road would take him into the town of Stebbins. Turn right and he could pick up Route 381, heading to the county line.

In the rearview mirror a military-style Humvee materialized ghostlike out of the rain, and a moment later a troop truck appeared. And another.

Homer waited for the Red Mouth to tell him, but there was silence inside his head. Then he remembered that he was the Red Mouth now.

Beneath his skin the larvae wriggled and in his stomach the hunger howled.

The crossroads waited. Left or right?

Smiling, he made his turn. He even used his turn signal, just for the hell of it.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Dez Fox ran along the side of the road. Main Street was empty and on any other day Dez would have blamed the storm. Today, though, she could no longer take anything for granted.

The downpour reduced visibility to a dozen yards. Everything beyond that was a confusion of gray. Threatening shapes seemed to materialize out of nowhere and Dez suddenly tensed, bringing the shotgun up, finger slipping inside the trigger guard, only to take two more steps to reveal them as mailboxes, a stand of corn stalks left over from Halloween, a sheet-metal cutout of a smiling car salesman outside of Dollar Bill’s Used Cars. Nothing. None of them.

A mile and a half from her trailer park, she found three dead bodies lying in the middle of the road. Two men and a woman. Civilians. Each of the bodies had been virtually torn to pieces by automatic gunfire. Multiple head wounds.

The ground was littered with brass. 5.56 x 45mm NATO rounds. M16s.

Dez looked around and saw muddy impressions from truck tires and boot marks from at least a dozen men.

The National Guard. Had to be. Hope flared in her chest. If the Guard was here, then someone was using their head. Someone asked for some serious backup and the Guard had come in here to kick ass and take names.

She kept moving and as she ran questions filled her head. How much did the government know? Did the government know anything? The Guardsmen could have been here to sandbag the riverbanks or evacuate the townsfolk. They might have fired as a response to an attack. If so … did the Guard take any injuries? Were any of them bitten and possibly infected?

That was the ugliest thought of all, because they went everywhere in the state. It would be a real bitch if the good guys riding to the rescue were the ones to spread this.

She realized with a sinking stomach that she had already seen that. That’s what happened to Andy Diviny and the others. And Chief Goss. Probably Trooper Saunders, too.

Somebody had to warn them.

“Oh, shit,” she growled and increased her pace. Running hurt her head, but she didn’t care. She slogged through the mud as fast as her weary legs would carry her.

She got answers to some of her questions a quarter mile down the road. She saw the smoke first and as she rounded a curve in the road she saw the burning car. It was a Toyota RAV4. The vehicle was completely gutted by fire, the tires melted, the windows gone, bullet holes everywhere. Spent brass all over the muddy road.

There were six bodies there. Two of them were still inside the Toyota, both strapped into car seats in the back, burned to charred lumps.

“God, no.”

She turned away in grief and horror. The bodies on the road were all adults. Two women and two men. Dez knew the women. Katie Gunderson and her sister, Jeanne. Both of them were married, both had kids in preschool.

Had.

“God…”

Lying partly under Jeanne was a man Dez vaguely recognized from town events. A farmworker. She had no idea what his name was. The three of them were riddled with bullet holes. The farmworker was clearly one of the infected. His face and throat had ragged bite marks; but Dez couldn’t see any trace of bites or the black goo on the women.

The last body was a real puzzle, and again it made Dez’s heart sink.

It was a National Guardsman in a torn white hazmat suit. Dez squatted down and gingerly lifted his gas mask to reveal a young face, maybe twenty. He had a bite on his left hand, but it wasn’t the disease that had killed him. Someone had put three rounds through his forehead.

But … why hadn’t they taken the injured man into quarantine, given him some kind of treatment? Why leave his body here? Even if he’d died as a result of the bite, or if they’d killed him because they were terrified of the disease, why leave his body? Leaving a soldier behind is against everything soldiers are taught. They didn’t even take his dog tags. They blew his head off and left.

That made no kind of sense.

Unless …

“Oh … shit,” she said and she could hear the panic in her own tone.

It made no sense unless the Guardsmen were that afraid of the plague. Unless the plague was so desperately dangerous that even the respect for a fallen soldier had to be prohibited.

Dez licked rainwater off her lips. How bad was this thing? She looked at the bodies and then down at the dead soldier.

Do I have it?

The dead kept their secrets, but their silence seemed to mock her, to promise awful things.

Then she heard a squawking sound. At first she couldn’t understand what or where it was, and then she heard it again, and she knew. It was squelch from a walkie-talkie.

Dez found it under the man’s hip. Dez tore off a handful of leaves from a roadside bush and wiped the device clean of blood and mud. She began fiddling with it as she jogged down the road toward her trailer park. When she found a channel where there was some chatter she slowed to a walk and pressed the device to her ear, sticking a finger in her other ear to block out the sound of the storm. There were a lot of voices, lots of overlapping chatter, a lot of emotions running high. The result was a jumble from which Dez could only harvest a few scraps.

“… last of state cops are in the holding pen … primary shooting line with a fallback at twenty yards … helos grounded … two cars of farmers tried to run the south barricade … CDC Wildfire team delayed by storm…”

Only bits and pieces, but it was enough for Dez. And more than enough to convince her not to say anything into the walkie-talkie. If they shot their own and shot civilians …

She heard the phrase “Q-zone” at least a dozen times. Quarantine zone. Had to be. That was both good and bad. Good for the rest of the state, or maybe the rest of the country. Bad as shit for her and her fellow citizens in Stebbins County. It wasn’t a surprise, but it confirmed her worst fears.

Almost her worst. There was another phrase that was peppered through the chatter. Three words. Three terrible words.

… shoot on sight …

Dez stuffed the walkie-talkie into her jacket pocket and began running again. Faster.

A few cars and trucks appeared in the gloom, but each time they were ordinary. Parked where they should be parked, no sign of further violence.

Until she found the second state police cruiser.

It was smashed into a telephone pole half a block from the road that led to her trailer park. The front end was wrapped like a cruller around the shattered stump of the pole. Wires lay across the road like broken spider webs. Chunks of safety glass sparkled as raindrops struck them.

Dez raised the shotgun as she approached the vehicle from a quarter angle. The windshield was spiderwebbed out from a black impact hole. The driver, seat belt notwithstanding, had hit the windshield hard. From the degree of damage, and the lack of skid marks, it looked to Dez as if the driver had been driving at high speed and never touched the brakes.

There were multiple lines of bullet holes stitched along the passenger side of the cruiser. The brass in the middle of the road were from M16s. All four doors were open.

She darted forward and aimed her gun inside.

The front seat was torn and slashed, and there was an inch-deep puddle of bloody rainwater sloshing around the puddles. Standing like bleak islands in the puddle were small lumps of meat and a man’s left thumb.

Dez’s mind cruelly supplied a name for what she was seeing.

Leftovers.

She swallowed a throatful of acid and checked the backseat. Blood there, too.

Whose blood? The thumb had been from a white man, not from JT.

“C’mon, Hoss,” Dez murmured. “Give me a happy ending here.”

But there was no more to this story.

She moved around to the back of the vehicle. The trunk hood was bent and had popped out of the lock. The shotgun was gone. She tried on a smile, hoping that JT had been the one to cowboy up and blast his way out of there. The backseat was bloody, though.

“No…,” she breathed, and hearing the word drove a spike of doubt and fear into her heart. “C’mon … no…”

The rain was so loud that she never heard the wet footsteps behind her, but suddenly icy fingers clamped around her arms and dragged her backward.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Billy Trout suddenly swerved the Explorer off the road and pulled behind a billboard for a year-round Christmas store.

“What’d you do that for?” demanded Goat.

“Look!” Trout said, pointing.

Goat peered through the storm. A hundred yards ahead, almost invisible in the relentless rain, a line of military vehicles was barreling along Hank Davis Pike, the road that cut across the county line and went directly into Stebbins. There were at least a dozen troop trucks and two Humvees with top-mounted machine guns. They were bucketing along, and when they hit the crossroads they didn’t even slow down, burning straight through the red light. Only the last vehicle slowed to a stop, slopping through mud onto the shoulder. Immediately soldiers piled out and began removing sawhorse barriers from the back of the truck. They erected them across the road that led into town. The guards were dressed in rain ponchos, but their M16s were visible on slings.

The soldiers were dressed in white hazmat suits.

“Oh man,” said Goat. “This shit must be totally out of the box.”

“Yeah,” murmured Trout dryly. “God, this story has to get out. Damn … I wish the phones worked. Fucking storm…”

“Screw the storm, Billy. Our calls were going nowhere before the rain even started. Those goons cut the lines and jammed the cell towers and you know it. We’d need a satellite phone or the broadcast uplink to get the word out.”

“Don’t suppose you brought that stuff?” Trout asked hopefully.

“Pretty sure I’d be fucking using it right about now if I had.” Goat stared at the Guardsmen down the road. “We’re screwed, Billy. We’ll never get in.”

“Maybe, maybe. Let me think.” Trout turned and looked the way they’d come, and then looked farther up the road, chewing his lip in thought. “Okay, they’ve got this road blocked, and there are four other significant roads that lead to town. Hank Davis becomes Doll Factory once you pass the reservoir. Then there’s Sawmill Road at the west end, Brayer Bridge Road at the southeast corner, and Sandoval Road that crosses into Maryland. They’re going to block those, no doubt about it. How many other roads does that leave?”

“Including farm roads?” asked Goat. “About a million.”

“Right. So, if they’re just now blocking the big roads, we can still get in on a farm road. What’s close? Forest Lane … or that crappy little utility road by the Miller place.”

Goat looked uncertain. “Wait, man, let’s think this through. Why exactly are we trying to get into town.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack. Think about it, man. Doc Volker infected a psycho serial killer with a bunch of parasites that are probably going to make him even more of a murderous whack job than he already was, and which are likely to spread like wildfire. He said that the infected would be — what’s the word he used? — suborned by the parasite’s need to replicate and feed. We’re talking full-on zombies running around, maybe biting people, maybe doing who knows what to spread the parasite.”

“Exactly,” agreed Trout.

“Then why in the wide blue fuck are we even thinking about going in there?”

“We’re reporters—”

“Yeah? Save that shit for the rubes, Billy.”

Trout turned in his seat. “Okay, then all bullshit aside. Everyone knew that this storm was coming, so by now they would have evacuated the middle school and bussed all those kids over to the elementary school. That’s the town shelter point. They’ll probably be bringing in the old folks from Sunrise Home, and anyone who lives in areas likely to flood. That’s — what? Two thousand people? More than half of them kids.”

“Most of the kids’ parents will have picked them up already?”

“Maybe from east and north, but anyone coming from west and south will have been flooded out. Or, maybe stopped by the military. No matter how you spin it, Goat, there are going to be hundreds of kids and maybe as many old folks and townies who have nowhere else to go. They’re going to be inside that shelter.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, if they don’t know what they’re facing, then they’re going to take in anyone who comes to the shelter doors. That includes wounded people. People who might have been bitten. You heard what Volker said, this thing is completely infectious. If even one wounded person shows up and they let him in, then Lucifer 113 is going to sweep like wildfire through the shelter. Everyone is going to get sick and die, Goat. And I have a pretty bad feeling that the military is going to let them.”

Goat turned away. “They can’t just let everyone die.”

“Yes they can,” Trout said. “We can’t let them. We can’t let Stebbins be erased.”

Goat shook his head. “Jeez, what are you? Captain Avenger? You don’t even have family in Stebbins anymore.”

“It’s still my town, Goat. My friends are there.”

“Dez Fox is there, too, right?” When Trout didn’t answer, Goat nodded to himself. “You’re going to get yourself eaten by zombies or gunned down by the National Guard over some chick who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

Trout said nothing.

“Billy, if you go in there, then whatever happens to everyone else is going to happen to you.”

“Maybe,” Trout snapped. “Or, maybe I get to Dez or JT or someone and they get everyone over to the school and lock it up and we ride this out.”

“What about the infected?”

“We check for anyone with a bite. Anyone who looks sick.”

“And do what? Shoot them?”

“Christ, kid, who do you think I am? No, we lock them up. There’s plenty of rooms in the school.… We take all the infected, anyone who even might be infected, and lock them up until this settles down. Then the feds can figure out a way to help them and rescue us.”

Goat stared at him for a long time. “Damn, I wish I had your optimism. I’d blow my entire paycheck on scratch-off tickets.” He shook his head. “Look, you can play Captain Avenger, but count me out. I—”

“Don’t worry, Goat, I’m not saying you should come with me. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. I want you to get out of here. Hitch a ride to Bordentown or someplace. Get someplace where you’re safe.”

Goat narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“Because you’re going to take this stuff with you.” He fished Volker’s flash drives and his own small recorder out of his pockets. “If things go bad then make sure the truth comes out.”

Goat made no move to get out. “Billy … this is nuts.”

“Yeah, well we left ‘sane and normal’ behind the first time Volker said ‘zombie.’”

“Look,” said Goat, taking the evidence from Trout, “do this for me, okay? Before you do anything else, go to the station and get that little portable satellite uplink we use for field reports. It’s in my office. There’s an old sat phone, too. The army can cut off the phones and the Net, but they’re not going to knock down a satellite.”

“I can contact you with that?” Trout asked.

“Sure.” Goat explained how the device worked. “You can reach me on Skype. The sat phone will give you audio but no video, so we can at least talk. Use it to let me know when you’re going to upload a video file. Get one of my small digital cameras. Shoot everything. The zombies, the soldiers. Dead people in the streets, kids hiding in the school. Anything that will make news. Hell … it’s all news.”

“Good,” said Trout. “That’s exactly what we need. We have to get the news out.”

Goat looked out the window, nodding toward the rainswept fields. “Bordentown’s about four miles that way.” He glanced at his heavy satchel with the cameras and laptop. It was going to be a bastard of a slog through the mud, but he merely sighed. Then he turned back to Trout. “Tell me something, Billy. If you were in charge of the military for this shit … what would you do? Would you like, I dunno—nuke the whole place?”

Trout gave him a cynical laugh. “No. But I guess I’d build a big freaking wall around Stebbins. But, no … I wouldn’t nuke the whole frigging place, and I don’t think they will, either.”

“That’s good—”

“They’ll probably drop a couple fuel-air bombs,” Trout continued. “Incinerate the whole place. Less risk, more efficient.”

Goat stared at him. “Jesus Christ, Billy … you’re building a case for the military to kill every man, woman, and child in town. In the town you are about to return to. That’s insane.”

“What Volker did was insane,” said Trout. “What the CIA did in allowing Lucifer 113 into the country was insane. Burning this place down to save the entire country, maybe the whole world? It’s harsh, but it’s practical. No, don’t look at me like that, I’m not saying they should, I think they will.”

“Oh, man…” Goat held out his hand. “Take care of yourself, Billy.”

“You, too, kid. See you on the other side.”

Goat shook his head as he got out. He stood in the wind, rainwater running in lines down his face as the Explorer pulled back onto the road. Then he set his shoulders against the cold and began walking as fast as the storm and mud would permit.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Dez shrieked as the cold hands pulled her backward, then she stepped back harder than the pull, jammed one foot flat on the ground and used the leverage to spin her body as hard as she could. As she turned, she whipped the shotgun stock at head level, smashing the hardwood into the cheekbone of a tall man in mechanic’s coveralls, shattering the bones in his face and sending shock waves up Dez’s arms.

The man staggered back and for a horrible second Dez thought that she had just hit an infected survivor, but then he caught his balance and turned back to face her. One eye was half-closed, the other stared at her from a red pit from which all of the flesh had been torn away. The rest of his face hung in tatters.

A crooked little laugh of relief escaped her throat. It was only one of the dead.

Or a ghoul.

More laughter bubbled out of her throat as she raised the gun and fired. She thought it was loaded with beanbag rounds but a load of double-ought buckshot blew off the top of the creature’s head. It crumpled awkwardly to the wet ground.

“Yeah, fucking A,” she cried aloud. “Booyah! Kill ’em all, motherfucker!”

Dez stood over the fallen ghoul, feet wide and knees braced, chest heaving, the shotgun clutched so hard that her knuckles were white as bones; she could feel the fastenings that held her sanity in place popping one by one. Part of her even wanted to go crazy. Running batshit nuts through the street, shooting everything that moved until she fired all her guns dry, then running straight into a crowd of them. Kicking, punching, biting, going down dirty and mean and in style. A warrior’s death. Like a lion pulled down by jackals. It was every drill instructor’s dream — to die in combat, wading through a sea of your enemies’ blood as they choked on yours.

She recognized the man. Fred Wortz. Corn farmer whose spread ran alongside the trailer park. As she watched, a piece of Fred’s skull fell away with a plop. It was a grotesque sight but Dez suddenly laughed out loud, and the laugh rose and rose until it was a piercing shriek like a gull’s cry and then the laugh disintegrated into a sob that almost brought her to her knees.

Stop it! Screamed her inner voice. Stopstopstopstopstop …

The sobs fractured and fell apart into a choking cough. No more laughter boiled out of her.

“Fuck you!” she yelled at the rain and the storm and all the cold things that moved within it. “Fuck you!”

The words were so loud they burned her throat, but the storm swallowed them whole, eating each echo before it could roll back to her.

It hurt her that this was Fred. She’d had beers with him, sitting in lawn chairs outside of her trailer. Talking football and Monday-morning quarterbacking the war in Afghanistan. It was so wrong that she had simply killed him. Even though she knew that he was already dead. How could that matter on a day like this? What mattered was that this was a guy she knew. A drinking buddy. A friend. And now he was gone. Just as Trooper Saunders was gone. And Chief Goss, and Sheldon Higdon, and Doc Hartnup … and all the others. Everyone she knew was dying. Everyone she knew was leaving her. Everyone.

Her stomach bubbled and Dez turned away and vomited into the mud.

Then she heard something in the storm, behind the waving sheets of rain.

Moans.

Not just one voice.

Many.

So many.

She stared into the rain with mad eyes.

“Come on, you pussies!” Dez jammed the shotgun stock against her shoulder and fired into the wind. Again, and again. She turned and fired, turned and fired. The buckshot was wasted on the storm, but she didn’t care. “Come on you … you…”

Her words disintegrated into sobs and Dez sagged to her knees. She shook her head as the moans floated toward her through the rain.

“I can’t,” she blubbered as tears and snot mixed with rainwater on her face. “I can’t do this…” Not with JT gone. Probably Billy, too, the bastard. And the chief, and Flower … and everyone. All gone. How the fuck was she supposed to go on without any of them still left?

She let the shotgun fall to the asphalt as she collapsed forward onto her palms, head hanging down between her heaving shoulders. Voices — a thousand variations on her own voice — spoke inside her head. Telling her to get up. Telling her to give up. Telling her to just let go. Telling her that it was okay, that she didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Telling her that this was all just a dream. A dream and Daddy will come and tuck her in and kiss her good night and make everything better. Nothing but a dream. Only that.

The moans changed into a hummed lullaby. A dozen voices humming in her daddy’s voice.

No matter what happens, pumpkin, I’ll always come back for you.

Come back for you.

She looked up, her eyes wide and desperate as if she expected to see her father come lurching out of the rain, his body twisted and torn by the explosion that had killed him. Daddy, coming for her. To take her. To consume her, the way these monsters wanted to consume her.

“PLEASE!” she screamed.

The moans were louder now. Dez closed her eyes. If it hurts, so what? It won’t hurt for long.

It won’t hurt for long. And then …

And then what?

The voices muttered and yelled and whispered, but none of them had an answer.

And then what?

Death? Sure … that was certain.

And then what?

Dez heard a sound. A soft scuff, and she raised her head an inch, opening her eyes to a squint as if afraid of a bright light. Raindrops swung pendulously from her eyelashes.

She saw a foot. Small, with a bright red sneaker. White tights.

Dez looked up. White tights and a plaid skirt and above that…? Blood.

The face that came out of the rain could have been her own, years and years ago. Big blue eyes, corn yellow hair. Round cheeks. A pretty little girl.

A …

… little …

..…… girl …

The little girl reached out her hands, a soft and plaintive gesture. A child wanting warmth, craving the safety of strong arms to hold her and keep her safe from the boogeyman.

The little girl could have been her.

Only it wasn’t.

“Please…” whispered the little girl.

That’s what Dez’s mind tried to tell her, that’s the lie her inner need created. Please. But it was a lie, and Dez knew it. Some fragment of her still understood that much. The voices in her head yelled the lie, but some deeper part of Dez was whispering back. No.

The little girl had not spoken at all.

She could not.

All she could do was moan. An empty plea to satisfy a hunger that was vast and endless. Dez looked into the little girl’s eyes. She had seen the eyes of the other ghouls. Chief Goss … others. In their eyes all she had seen was nothing. But here, for a fragment of a moment, Dez thought that she caught the flicker of something else; it was as if she looked through the grimy glass of a haunted house and saw the pale, pleading face of a ghost. In the second before the thing lunged at her, Dez saw the shadow of the little girl screaming at her from the endless darkness.

It was the single most terrible moment of her entire life. Worse than the lingering death of her mother as cancer carved her down to a skeletal parody of who she had been. Worse than the imagined ghost of her father come shambling into her bedroom months after he had been buried in a sealed coffin. Worse than all the intervening years of drinking to shut down her mind and fucking to try to feel something. Worse than all of the things that had happened today.

The screaming face of the little girl, trapped inside the mindless thing that had been her, was worse than anything. Worse even than all the voices screaming inside Desdemona Fox’s head.

So, Dez screamed, too.

And with a movement as fluid and fast as if she had been practicing her whole life for this single moment, Dez drew her Glock and pointed and fired straight and true and blew out the lights in the haunted house. The little girl pitched backward and fell onto the asphalt. Dez crawled over to her and looked down into the dark eyes. She bent close, staring, staring. All that she saw, however, was her own pale reflection in the black pupils and fading blue irises. The ghost was gone.

The screams in Dez’s head … stopped. Just like that. Blown to silence by the blast of her gun. Falling empty on the ground like spent brass.

Dez Fox raised her head. There were other moans in the storm, coming closer. Slow shapes with dark bodies and pale faces were emerging from the shadows of the downpour. Dez lingered for one moment longer, looking at the victim of the small murder she had committed. However, Dez offered no apology. This was not her crime.

She had saved this little girl.

She turned toward the side road. Her trailer was less than a mile away now. Go there. Get the guns. Get Rempel’s truck. Then get over to the elementary school. The Stebbins Little School at the end of Schoolhouse Lane. A gym for peewee league basketball. An assembly hall for meetings and Christmas pageants. And a basement designated as a shelter for all civil emergencies and natural disasters.

A safe haven … or a well-stocked larder, depending on who was in charge.

All the children of Stebbins County. All of the little boys and little girls.

Needing help.

Needing her help.

The ghouls were going to slaughter them all. And if not the ghouls, then the National Guard. Teeth or bullets or a fucking fuel-air bomb. Either way, no one was left to protect them. Everyone else had run away or died.

Except Dez.

“No,” she said to the storm and the moans and to her own pain. “No!”

Dez holstered her pistol and ran.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

As soon as he rounded the bend, Billy Trout cut sharply off the road and crashed through a screen of brush onto a deer path that snaked between two farms. The brush closed behind him, and if some of the bracken was crushed and twisted, Trout figured that anyone would blame it on the storm. There were trees falling, who cared about some brush?

Branches and shrubs scratched along the sides of the Explorer, and mud splashed as high as the windows as he bumped and thumped over ruts and roots.

This path wound around the Miller and Rubino farms and then crossed a paved road that would take him right into the back of the Regional Satellite News parking lot. With any luck the whole staff would be there, reporting the storm and manning the journalistic bastions. They’d help him get word out to whatever cops were left in town and definitely to the authorities. Some public appeal might coax the feds into considering other choices.

Of course, getting the word out would put his neck on the federal chopping block. Prison was a real possibility, First Amendment notwithstanding. They could beat him to death with the Patriot Act, disappear him to some hellhole for a few decades, and call it “interests of national security.” It was no joke, and Trout wasn’t laughing.

“What the hell are you doing, Billy Trout?” he asked himself.

Even though the heater was only set for defrost, he was sweating badly and his mouth was as dry as old cloth. It wasn’t simply the threat of government retaliation for what he had planned. Things were much, much worse than that.

Trout was still in his thirties, but he’d seen his share of life’s awful moments as a reporter — first in Pittsburgh after college and then here in Stebbins. Nothing he’d seen, however, ever filled him with anything approaching the fear that was screaming in his head. He had always considered “terror” to be more of an abstract political concept rather than an actual state of human experience. That was before Volker and Lucifer 113. Now he was truly and completely terrified. He wanted to pull off the road, curl up in the back, and pull his coat over his head. Or drive to Pittsburgh and buy a ticket for the first flight out of the state. Maybe out of the country. For once that wasn’t a joke.

What if he ran into Homer Gibbon?

That thought made Trout want to scream.

It was one thing seeing that maniac in leg and waist chains in a courtroom or strapped to the execution table behind reinforced glass. It was something totally different thinking about meeting him out here. Meeting a Homer Gibbon who was free, insane, and infected. A Homer Gibbon who was a zombie.

Zombie.

The word was still so unreal.

Suddenly something broke from the foliage on his left and ran across the road. Trout stamped on the brakes and skidded through mud, fishtailing as he rocked to a stop.

He flicked on his brights and stared.

The lane was empty. Whatever it was had cut into the woods on the right.

And then the same shape moved back into the road, standing there in the glow of the lights, head swiveling in fear and panic.

A deer. Only a damn deer. On a deer path. Who’d have thought? Trout began to smile, but then he bent close to the windshield and took a closer look at the animal, and his smile bled away.

The deer was covered with open wounds that bled sluggishly in the rain.

Not bullet wounds.

Bites.

Clearly … bites.

The deer kept looking from one side of the road to the other, ignoring the car completely. It was a doe, maybe two or three years old. Lean and strong, but dying on its feet, its sides heaving with exertion or panic.

Trout put it all together. It wasn’t hard. Everything Volker had said was burning in his mind like words written in fire.

“No,” Trout said. “Come on … no.”

Then a figure stepped out of the woods and stopped in the middle of the road, ten feet from the hood of the Explorer, thirty feet from the doe. A woman. Raven black hair, pale skin. Ample curves in a velvet and lace dress and spiderweb pattern stockings. The heart-shaped face stared at him, ruby red lips parted in a soft “oh.” A Goth look. Heavyset but sexy.

And heartbreakingly familiar.

“Oh … no,” whispered Trout, and the ache in his chest became ten times worse.

The woman’s face was totally unmarked. The rest of her was not. Her arms and legs, her generous breasts and stomach … every other part of her was torn.

Bitten.

“No.”

Trout knew every line and curve of the woman’s face, from her liquid green eyes to her full-lipped mouth. Eyes that always twinkled with wicked fun; a mouth on which a thousand variations of a saucy smile flickered. Now those eyes were as empty as green glass; that mouth slack. Her expression was a total blank. No pain. No fear. Not even the wry, self-aware humor that perpetually defined her. There was nothing.

“God,” said Trout as tears broke from his eyes. “Marcia.…”

Another figure stepped out into the lane. A young man in mechanic’s coveralls and a baseball cap twisted sideways on his head. A stranger. His lower face and throat had been savaged, and even with the rain the whole front of his coveralls was dark with blood. He shambled into the path, turned awkwardly toward the headlights for a moment, and then wheeled around toward the deer. Without hesitation he lunged at the animal, but the deer pelted away down the road, uttering the strangest cry Trout had ever heard a deer make. The mechanic lurched after her.

Marcia, however, stood her ground, her head tilting first to one side and then the other as if she were trying to see past the high beams; but as she did that her expression maintained its bland vacuity. It was as unnerving as it was grotesque. This was the secondary infection that Volker described. Bodies totally enslaved to the parasites. Hosts without conscious control.

But where was the consciousness? Volker had intended for Gibbon to retain consciousness while in the grave. Unable to move, but able to feel and experience. Was that what he was seeing here? Was Marcia trapped in there?

It was the most horrible thing Trout could imagine. Her body hijacked by mindless insects that functioned on a purely instinctive level, and her mind — Marcia’s beautiful, clever, cheeky, delicious mind — trapped and unable to control what the parasite made her body do. Like a ghost haunting a house that once belonged to it in life.

He wished he’d killed Volker. God, he wished he’d taken that gun and beat that fucking maniac to death with it.

Or, better yet, he wished he’d made Volker come with him. So he could see firsthand what horrors he’d wrought. Then he’d kick the son of a bitch out into the rain and let Marcia have her way with him.

He gagged and almost vomited on the dashboard.

Marcia was a monster. An actual monster.

Trout knew that if he stepped out of the car she would attack him. Or … rather, her body would. Marcia would have no control over it. She would have no choice. She would have to watch her body commit murder and cannibalism.

“Jesus Christ,” Trout said.

How widespread was this? How many people had been infected?

Where was Dez?

That thought ignited like a flare in his mind. Where the hell was Desdemona Fox? Was she alive or dead? And, if she was dead … what kind of dead was she?

Tears brimmed in his eyes again. He had the pistol, but Trout had no idea how to use it. He’d never fired a gun in his life. Even if he knew how, he was sure he couldn’t bring himself to use it on Marcia. Or Dez.

Maybe on himself, though. That thought was whispered constantly in the back of his mind. If Dez was infected, if she was truly lost to him forever, then he would use Volker’s gun and give her peace … and then he would join her. If he could not have her in life, then he would follow her into death.

Tears ran down his face and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

Screw this. Dez was probably already as dead as Marcia. Maybe everyone in town was. Say good-night, folks, and thanks for coming. So long.

Marcia took a small step toward the Explorer.

“Marcia,” Trout said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

She took another step. Trout tried flicking the lights at her. Her lips curled in a brief snarl, but then settled back to rubbery slackness.

Trout took his foot gingerly off the brake, allowing the engine idle to move the SUV forward a few feet.

Marcia did not move. He stepped down on the brake pedal.

“Come on, Marcia … please,” Trout said, sniffing at the tears. “Cut me a break here.” The pistol was on the seat beside him. Even a bonehead like him could suck on the barrel and pull the trigger.

He thought about Goat and what they had planned to do about this.

There were hundreds of kids at the shelter. Maybe more. If they’d gotten there when the storm started, then there was a good chance they were still alive, still safe within the blocky walls of the elementary school.

And Dez was out there somewhere.

“Fuck!” He yelled it.

Outside, Marcia heard him and took a more definite step toward the car.

Inside, a clock was ticking in Billy Trout’s head.

He eased his foot off the brakes again and the car moved forward once more, slowly closing the distance between the Explorer’s grille and Marcia. She didn’t move out of the way. She reached for the hood, and Trout watched her red nails scratch long lines in the paint. One of her nails bent slowly backward and then broke, tearing away a flap of skin. Trout yelped in imagined pain; Marcia did not.

The Explorer moved against her, bumping into her with a soft, heavy sound that made Trout clench his teeth. Marcia leaned into the car, pushing and clawing at it as if she could tear through it to get to …

A fresh wave of sickness washed over Trout as he realized with perfect clarity what Marcia intended to do. It was something he had known all along but not quite accepted. Until now.

“Please,” he begged. He hit the horn.

She clawed at the hood.

He tapped the brakes to try and jolt her away. The lane was far too narrow to go around, and there was no side road.

But she would not, could not, be deterred. She knew that he was in there. And she wanted him. Even though her eyes were dead, her mouth worked constantly, snapping at the air.

“Please,” he said again, but even as he said so, he touched the gas. Just a tap, but it made the Explorer surge five feet forward. Marcia was flattened against the grille and hood for a moment, her feet sliding in the mud. Then she slipped. Just a few inches, her weight pulling her down as her feet lost their support.

Trout touched the gas again, just a whisper of extra power. The Explorer lurched forward again, and Marcia slipped farther down.

“I’m sorry,” Trout said and then a sob broke in his chest as he pressed down on the gas, driving the car forward and watching Marcia slide slowly backward off the hood and sink down, inch by inch, in front of the car. In front, and under. Her arms were stretched forward, nails scratching and scrabbling at the wet metal. Rain pounded her, dancing along the white skin of her hands and arms.

Another few feet forward, another few inches down.

She was disappearing in horrible slow motion, sinking into the mud as the weight and mass of the Explorer pushed her down. Trout stared into her empty green eyes as they peered at him over the very edge of the hood … and then they were gone as she slid down. Her hands slid away from him, and they, too, were gone.

There was a moment when the car seemed to stall, but then Trout realized with even greater horror that it was because the wheels were trying to climb over an obstacle.

A second, deeper sob tore itself from Trout’s chest as he fed the car more gas and the four-wheel drive found purchase. The Explorer rocked sideways as it climbed awkwardly over the obstruction. Wheel by wheel it thumped back into the mud, and the vehicle rolled forward without further hindrance.

Trout kicked the brake pedal to the floor and bent forward as if in physical pain. His forehead rested on the knobbed arc of the steering wheel. He let go of the wheel and punched it, and punched the dash and punched his own head. Trout screamed as loud as all the pain in the world.

When he finally began driving, he dared not look in the rearview mirror. It would kill him to see Marcia lying broken in the mud. It would kill him to see her getting to her feet.

“Oh, Christ,” he said through his tears. “Dez…”

He gunned the motor and kept driving.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

“Where is everyone?” asked Jimmy Hobbs as he and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Donald, stepped into the foyer of the offices of Regional Satellite News. He was five years younger than Elizabeth and was the company gofer, doing everything from chauffeuring camera crews to replacing broken toilet seats. With his shocking red hair and freckles he looked like Archie from the comics. Elizabeth had curly black hair and dark eyes and a Goth style she modeled after Marcia’s, minus all the piercings.

“Where’s Marcia?” asked Elizabeth as she shrugged out of her wet coat. She was not smiling. A faint frown tugged at the corners of her mouth.

The receptionist’s chair was pushed back against the wall and her Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup was on its side, still dripping into the pool that was spread under the desk.

“Maybe she went to get the mop,” suggested Jimmy. “I’ll go see.”

Without another word he pushed through the batwing saloon doors that led into the newsroom. Elizabeth bent over to shake droplets from her hair. From that angle she could look under the edges of the flapping saloon doors and for a moment she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

Jimmy seemed to be dancing with Murray Klein’s secretary, Connie.

Dancing?

Even as she saw this, Elizabeth knew that it was wrong, that her perception was skewed, and not merely because she was bent over. The picture she saw would not fit into her mind.

She straightened slowly and peered over the top of the doors.

Jimmy was not dancing. Of course he wasn’t dancing. That was crazy.

What he was doing, however, was crazier by far.

Connie and Jimmy were locked in a fierce embrace and it seemed to Elizabeth that Connie was forcibly trying to kiss Jimmy.

No. Not kiss.

Bite?

Jimmy was twice the secretary’s size, but shock and the ferocity of the attack was crippling him. In a moment it would kill him, unless …

Elizabeth burst through the doors and into the newsroom.

She stopped, momentarily forgetting even the weird and absurd gavotte being performed in front of her. The newsroom was in shambles. Desks were overturned, papers thrown onto the floor. Computer monitors had been smashed and some still leaked smoke; and someone had splashed bright red paint everywhere.

Once more Elizabeth’s mind rewound that thought and edited it with new words. Not paint. Blood. Pints of it. Gallons. Walls, floor, and even some on the ceiling.

Bodies lay scattered around. The rest of the afternoon staff. The weatherman, Gino Torelli, was spread-eagled over a desk with his crotch and the inside of both thighs simply … gone. Torn away. Elizabeth could see torn muscles and white bone, but worse than that someone had rammed a letter opener into one of his eye sockets, angling it to drive all the way into his brain.

“Oh…,” murmured Elizabeth.

The other secretary, Wilma, was slumped in her chair as if she was trying to awaken from a terrible dream. There were others, too. Two reporters, an engineer, a copy editor, and a man dressed like a state trooper. The engineer was lying face down on the floor; the others knelt around him like picnickers, pulling red pieces out of him.

Elizabeth uttered a single, sharp, high yelp. A sound with no meaning beyond an expression of horror so profound that adjectives for it did not exist.

Their white faces turned toward the sound; toward her.

Jimmy, still wrestling with Connie, yelled, “They’ve all gone crazy! Get out!”

She almost did. She almost turned and ran right then.

But Elizabeth liked Jimmy. A whole lot. She’d been waiting for a decent guy like him for years. And, irrational as it may have been, she felt her disgust and horror suddenly drain away to be replaced with a towering indignation. She did not know what kind of madness was unfurling around her, but she was goddamn well not going to let anyone take Jimmy away from her.

With a growl that was as inarticulate as her yelp but filled with much greater purpose, Elizabeth strode over to the wrangling couple, grabbed Connie by the back of the hair and yanked her away from Jimmy with such ferocity that Connie’s feet momentarily left the ground. The smaller woman lost her grip on Jimmy and landed with her heels in a puddle of blood. Possibly her own blood. Elizabeth didn’t care. She spun Connie around and belted her across the face with every ounce of strength she possessed.

Connie’s head whipped to one side and she staggered several steps away.

The things that were crouched around the engineer dropped the pieces of meat they held and began to get to their feet.

Which is when Elizabeth’s brief rage slammed into the wall of reality.

“Oh … fuck,” she said.

“W — what the hell’s going on?” demanded Jimmy. His eyes were glazed and, sweetheart though he might be, he was clearly not capable of handling this.

“Get out, Jimmy!” Elizabeth bellowed. “Run!”

He stared at her, clearly unwilling to leave her, but then the state trooper spat a mouthful of black mucus at Jimmy, who backpedaled to avoid it. His body, once in motion, apparently wanted to keep moving, and he turned and crashed through the saloon doors and then out through the vestibule and into the rain. The monsters — Elizabeth couldn’t think of any better word for them — began to lumber after him, drawn by the sound and movement of his departure.

“No fucking way!” snarled Elizabeth. She hooked a foot around the leg of a wheeled chair and kicked it into their path. The state trooper fell over it, and the others fell over him. Elizabeth laughed by reflex even though the moment possessed not one ounce of comedy. Even to her own ears her short laugh had an hysterical note.

Connie turned toward her. Her lips writhed back from cracked white teeth.

“Shit,” said Elizabeth, and then she was running. Not after Jimmy. She had the presence of mind to go another way, to give him a chance. Instead she shoved Connie out of the way and ran between her and the other monsters, barreled down the corridor past the editing rooms, and hit the crash bar on the back door with both hands.

She ran into the rain and darkness. Behind her she heard the crash bar strike again and again as the monsters followed her outside. Elizabeth was not a fast runner and the monsters seemed awkward and slow, but every time she looked back … they were closer. She realized with even greater horror that a few of them could move fast. Not as fast as Jimmy but faster than her.

I’m going to die! Jesus God, I’m going to die.

As she ran, she knew with completely certainty, that she was right about that.

But it wasn’t the dead who killed her.

She cut across the parking lot and out into the street and never saw the National Guard troop truck that came bucketing down Main Street.

“What the hell was that?” yelped Corporal Nick Wyckoff as he fought to control the troop truck after the impact.

Sergeant Teddy Polk was in the passenger seat. He cranked down the window and craned his head to look down the road. “Nice one, Nick. You got one of those fuckers.”

His voice was cocky, but his eyes were filled with terror.

Wyckoff licked his lips. “Are you sure? You sure it was one of the infected?”

“Has to be,” said Polk. Despite the cold, he was sweating inside the hazmat hood. “You heard what the captain told us. Everyone in this damn town is already dead.”

“Dead,” echoed Wyckoff. He crossed himself and touched the medal of Mary beneath his clothes.

The truck raced along a side road, kicking up plumes of mud behind it.

A figure suddenly appeared in the headlights, running along the shoulder of the road.

“Christ, there’s another one,” said Wyckoff. In the pale glow of the dashboard the sergeant looked ten years old.

“Get her,” urged Polk.

“Are you nuts?”

“Hey — the captain said that we can’t let any of them out of here—”

“I know, Teddy, but she’s just a—”

“Run her the fuck down, Nick!”

However, when the driver swerved to clip the figure, it was gone, vanished into the woods beside the road.

Wyckoff did not stop. He kicked down on the gas and headed toward the center of town.

As the truck’s taillights dwindled into the distance, the figure stepped out of the woods. She was panting, drenched, bedraggled, and furious. She held her Glock in a two-handed grip and her lips were curled back from gritted teeth.

“Fuckers,” growled Dez Fox. Then she lowered her gun, asking herself if she would have fired on them if they’d stopped and gotten out of the truck. Could she have drawn down on soldiers who were out here doing their jobs? Even if that job was the systematic extermination of everyone in town?

Could Dez even be sure that she didn’t have the plague? She wasn’t sick, but she knew that people could carry diseases that didn’t make them sick. Typhoid Mary.

She touched the walkie-talkie in her jacket pocket. If she called them and tried to explain things to them … would they even listen?

At some point she was going to have to find out.

She checked the road for more vehicles, but there was nothing.

Dez holstered her pistol and kept running. She was almost there.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Billy Trout sat in his Explorer and watched most of the people he knew and worked with at RSN close in around the office gopher, Jimmy, and drag him kicking and screaming into the shelter of a parked news van. Trout almost got out of the car to try to help, but as he reached for the door handle he could see that Jimmy was already pretty far gone. The actual killing was over quickly. So quickly that it left Trout breathless.

They grabbed Jimmy from all sides. The weatherman, Gino, had his teeth buried in Jimmy’s cheek. Wilma had both arms wrapped around Jimmy’s waist and was tearing at his thigh with bloody teeth. The young man’s screams were as high and shrill as a girl’s.

There wasn’t a goddamn thing Trout could do about it, and, as he watched, the scene collapsed down into a feeding frenzy more savage than a pack of hyenas around a downed zebra. Trout reeled back from the sight, squeezing his eyes shut and wincing as if he could feel the pain of those bites. How had it spread so far so fast? His mind kept replaying the image of Marcia falling slowly under the wheels of his Explorer.

Come on, you idiot, growled his inner voice, you’re wasting time.

He opened his eyes and studied the building. From where he was parked he could see in through the open front door, through the glass vestibule, and into the reception area. There was no movement inside.

Trout licked his lips. Volker’s pistol was a cold weight on his thigh, and Trout touched it with trembling fingers. He expected the solidity of it to comfort him, but it did not. To kill these things — to really kill them — Volker said that you had to destroy the motor cortex or the brain stem. Trout didn’t like his chances with a head shot. He’d be lucky to hit the body let alone a target as small as the motor cortex. Not unless he was almost face-to-face with them, and that thought was unbearable.

He got out of the car very carefully. The zombies did not look up from their meal. None of them appeared to notice the dome light come on in the Explorer. The rain was still an effective screen. Even so, every sloshing footfall, every ragged breath seemed insanely loud to him as he crept from the side of his car to the side of the building. It felt so strange to carry a gun and, despite everything, Trout felt vaguely foolish, like a kid playing cops and robbers.

He paused at the entrance, looked inside and looked back, and cursed himself. That quick look into the lighted building spoiled his night vision. Taking the pistol in both hands, Trout sidled in through the vestibule and hip-checked the door so that it swung shut.

The reception area was empty, and he cautiously crept into the newsroom. Trout bit down on a cry of horror. The station engineer, a gray-haired man named Jock Spooner, lay on the floor. The dead had been at him. The man was like a scarecrow with all the stuffing removed. His arms and legs were spread like a starfish and were strangely intact … but the rest of him — chest, stomach, organs, and meat — had been torn away. And eaten. Trout was sure of that.

The devastation to the man was appalling. It was dehumanizing on a level that Trout had never witnessed … but it wasn’t the worst part of the grisly spectacle. Not by a million miles was it the worst.

The man’s eyes were open.

His mouth was moving.

Not trying to speak. Trying to bite. Destroyed as he was, the engineer was trying to raise his head and bite.

Trout stared down at Jock. “Oh … God, no.”

Jock’s teeth clacked together. His arms and legs were attached by a few strings of meat. Compelled by a twisted fascination, Trout leaned as close as he dared and stared into the engineer’s eyes.

Jock snapped the air causing Trout to flinch.

“Shit … um … Jock? Hey, buddy … are you still in there? Can you hear me?”

The dead eyes stared at him without expression. Trout bent closer still to examine the wounds, trying to make sense of animation and apparent life in the presence of so much physical destruction. He caught movement along the lines of torn flesh, and when he realized what it was he recoiled in terror. Jock’s blood had coagulated to a dark jellylike substance, and it was teeming with tiny worms. They looked like maggots, though much smaller and thinner.

He looked at the blood splashed on the floor. Some of it was bright red, some was as dark as Jock’s blood. All of the dark blood was pulsing with larvae. But where the black blood and the red blood intermingled he could see waves of even smaller larvae and tiny spots of white. Eggs and hatchlings. Had to be. But it was so fast. Insanely fast.

“Volker, you sick bastard.”

Trout backed away, looking frantically round the office, but, aside from Jock, the place was empty. He turned and ran down the hall to Goat’s editing room. Trout was moderately tech savvy from being around the equipment for so long, and he gathered up what he needed and shoved it into one of Goat’s big canvas rucksacks. Then he tiptoed to the door and ran through the rain to his car. The zombies raised their heads as the engine roared to life, but by the time they lumbered to their feet, Trout was back on Doll Factory Road, rolling hot and fast toward the school.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Byron Rempel sat on the floor next to the woman who killed him.

Fifteen minutes ago, Rempel was alive and so was the woman. She was Mrs. O’Grady, who had a modest trailer three pads down from the double-wide that served as Rempel’s office and home. Mrs. O’Grady was a quiet old lady who paid her rent on time and more often than not preferred to live with something broken rather than bother Rempel for a repair job. That made Rempel like her. Or at least tolerate her. Rempel didn’t like any of the residents of Sweet Paradise. They were all white trash losers as far as he was concerned. Half of them were on welfare or unemployment, and Rempel considered both of those institutions to be socially parasitic. He worked his ass off and he hated the idea that some of his tax dollars went into the pockets of lazy fucks who couldn’t hold a job, or who were too lazy to try.

There were exceptions, of course. There was that stuck-up waitress in 14-E. That broad never even gave him a free refill of coffee when he stopped in the diner. Bitch. And that Irish layabout writer, Kealan Patrick Burke, who just moved here from Columbus. Guy won some awards for some goofy horror stories and thought his shit didn’t stink. Thought he was Stephen-fucking-King, and as far as Rempel was concerned even Stephen-fucking-King wasn’t Stephen-fucking-King. Not anymore. Not since The Stand. Last good book that New England prick ever wrote.

Rempel had not read any of King’s books after that, and had not read a word of Burke’s, but he was positive the guy was an overrated Mick who was probably a drunk and a wife-beater, too. They all were. Every writer he ever met was a drunk, and every Mick he ever met was a wife-beater. Rempel was positive of this, so he disliked Burke on general principle.

The queen bitch of Sweet Paradise, though, was Dez Fox. Now there was someone who really thought that she crapped little gold bars and peed gin rickeys. And talk about stuck-up? Rempel had asked her over for coffee three times, and each time Dez Fox looked at him like he was a spitty place on the sidewalk.

Granted, she was hot. Bitch had a serious rack of bombs on her, Rempel admired that. Nice ass, too; but she knew that she was stacked and that’s why she treated Rempel like crap. Except when something broke in her apartment, then Dez was all sweet, saying “please” and “thank you” like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

What made him unhappy was someone making a mess. Which is why he was very unhappy fifteen minutes ago, answering a call at Burke’s trailer in the middle of a rainstorm that would have scared the shit out of Noah. The writer called with some kind of hysterical rant about blood or something all over the floor. All over the carpeted floor. Rempel hadn’t been able to get a straight story from Burke. The idiot probably cut himself shaving while drunk. Serve him right to bleed to death, the frigging Irish sot. But he grabbed his tool kit, pulled on his yellow rain slicker, and slogged through ankle-deep mud to the writer’s trailer.

When he got there he started cursing at once. The door to Burke’s trailer was wide open and the rain was pouring in. But as Rempel approached the trailer he slowed, frowning in consternation. The runoff that dripped out of the trailer was tinged a rust red. Christ, what the hell did Burke do? Cut his own head off?

Rempel mounted the three metal steps to the open door and peered inside.

Burke was nowhere to be seen. However, Mrs. O’Grady was lying flat out on the floor just inside the door.

“Shit!” Rempel rushed inside and dropped to his knees beside her, ignoring the blood that pooled around her. The old lady had been terribly brutalized. Some mad bastard had beaten her face in. Literally beaten it in. Mrs. O’Grady’s false teeth lay shattered and scattered around her, and from the bridge of her nose to her chin the skin was torn away and the bones smashed to pieces. Rempel stared in mute horror at the exposed splinters of bone that stuck up through the mangled flesh.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was the work of a madman, a maniac. Could Burke have done this? Rempel tried to imagine the soft-spoken Irish writer going apeshit like this. He didn’t like Burke, but this didn’t fit at all.

It was hard to imagine anyone doing this to a nice old broad like Mrs. O’Grady. Killing her was bad enough, but disfiguring her was …

Well, Rempel thought, it was just plain crazy.

Rempel got up and moved cautiously through the trailer. No sign of Burke. No sign of a mad killer, either. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and punched 9-1-1. The phone went immediately to a “No Service” message. Not even a ring.

“Shit.” He tried 4-1-1 and got the same thing, and he had no better luck with Burke’s home phone. It made a weird electronic beeping sound, but there was no dial tone. Rempel had two thoughts about that. The storm and the killer. In the movies it was the killer who disabled the phones, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of a cell phone signal.

He heard a sound behind him and turned, expecting it to be Burke.

It was Mrs. O’Grady.

She stood a few feet away from him, her eyes wide and dark and empty, and her face a ruin of jagged bone and ripped flesh.

Rempel stared blankly at her.

“What—” he asked.

She answered with a bite. Not with her old false teeth — they were destroyed — but with a new set of teeth formed by the jagged bones of her exposed jaws. It was a disjointed, improbable weapon, and he should have been able to block her, evade her, sweep her aside. Rempel was easily twice her size. Mrs. O’Grady wasn’t even particularly fast.

It was all about shock. All about impossibility.

Rempel stared in shock one second too long.

Which is how so many in Stebbins died that night.

And it was why so many of the dying spoke the same last word. A single syllable, spoken with fear and wonder.

“No.”

Dez slowed to a cautious walk as she approached the trailer park. Even from a hundred feet away she could tell that the wave of the infection had already reached here and swept through it.

Two of the trailers were burning.

Doors were open, cars stood idling and empty.

There was no blood, not in this rain, but she saw the glint of shotgun shells on the ground.

Dez wasn’t sure how to react to this. On one hand, the violence seemed to have rolled around her rather than over her. On the other, she felt like she was losing what little grasp she had on exactly what was happening.

How long had she been asleep in the back of the cruiser?

It was full dark, and she didn’t think it was an early dusk caused by the storm. This was night. The dead of night, she thought, and shivered at her own joke.

She moved into the park. The closest trailers were dark except for Rempel’s, but he wasn’t home. She wasn’t sure if she was happy or disappointed that he wasn’t the main course in a monster feast.

A moment later the implications of that thought hit her. It wasn’t another bad joke. She really had been disappointed that Rempel wasn’t dead, and that was really bad thinking.

I’m losing it.

As she continued deeper into the trailer park she tried to knock down that observation, but it dodged every blow.

God … how far gone am I?

How do I even know if I’m crazy or just in shock?

At the corner of Rempel’s trailer she paused. Her own double-wide was sixty feet across open ground. No cover except for some flower gardens that had withered in the cold and were now beaten flat by the rain. She was about to sprint for it when she saw a figure come walking out from between her trailer and her neighbor’s.

It was a teenager. One of the Murphy twins from the F-section of the park. He was dressed in jeans and a white sweatshirt. No shoes or coat. Even from twenty yards Dez could tell that he was dead. The realization drove a knife into her heart.

The twins were thirteen. Still kids.

She raised her pistol and aimed. The distance was far too great for an accurate shot, but she suddenly found herself running forward, the gun leading the way, her feet making the quick, small steps she was taught in the military. Large steps jolt and jerk the body, spoiling aim; small steps roll the body forward, keeping the gun level. She ran toward the boy and, as he turned toward her and began to reach, Dez fired a single shot from eight feet away. It took the boy in the forehead, blowing an apple-sized chunk out of the back of his head as the impact snapped the child’s neck.

Even with the roar of the rain muffling the blast, the gunshot seemed too loud. It would draw them. She knew that for a fact, which meant that she had just blown a hole in her own future.

Hurry, you bitch.

She ran to her trailer, jammed the key in the lock, opened the door, jumped in, and shut and locked the door behind her.

Byron Rempel sat on the floor, dead but newly awake, inert because there was no prey to follow, when Desdemona Fox ran past the open doorway.

The sight of her. The smell of her. The living reality of her triggered a response in the parasitic hive mind that now ruled his body. It was not a thought, merely a reaction. An impulse to follow, to attack, to feed, and to transfer larvae to a new host. To another host. One of many.

Rempel and Mrs. O’Grady struggled to their feet and shuffled slowly out of the trailer, following the scent of fresh meat. Other figures emerged from trailers all along the path the running woman had taken.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

The trailer was dark. There was no backup generator, no emergency lights.

Dez unclipped her flashlight and used its beam to find the stove. It was gas, so she lit all four burners. The light filled the kitchen and dining room. She fished in the cabinets until she found a box of candles. She didn’t have any of the thick girlie-girl scented candles. All she had were thin colored candles left over from JT’s birthday, so she lit those and carried a fistful of them into her bedroom. Since she couldn’t hold them all and do what she had to do, she grabbed her metal trashcan and dropped the candles on the balled-up tissues, used makeup sponges, torn-up bills, and a card from Billy Trout that she had thrown away unopened. The tissues caught right away and then the rest, throwing bright yellow light into the room.

Dez set the can down on the bedroom carpet, fished in her pocket for her keys, and fumbled the right one into the lock. The Yale clicked open and Dez lifted the lid.

It was all there. Handguns in wooden boxes. Shotguns. Hunting rifles with scopes. Stacked boxes of bullets. Knives. Everything.

For the first time in hours, Dez Fox smiled.

And then the dead began banging their pale fists against the walls and windows of her trailer.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Billy Trout drove across town like a madman. At the corner of Doll Factory and Meetinghouse Road he saw a National Guard Humvee.

“Thank God,” he breathed. Guardsmen were mostly local guys, if not from Stebbins then at least from this part of the state. If anyone would understand, they would; and if anyone had the resources to turn this thing around, they would. The feds might be willing to wipe Stebbins off the face of the earth, but he did not believe that of ordinary guys.

The soldiers turned at the sound of his horn. Trout flashed his brights at them. He was looking for a sign, a wave, a smile. Anything.

The soldiers leveled their weapons at him.

Trout slowed the car, still forty yards from them.

He tooted the horn again.

There was a two second pause as the Guardsmen bent their heads together to consult. Trout began to smile.

Then they opened fire.

Mud popped up in lines all the way to his car and then Trout was down, cringing and curling himself onto the seat, screaming as the bullets tore into the grille and hood and punched holes in the glass.

“Jesus Christ! What the fuck are you crazy bastards doing?” he yelled.

There was a lull in the gunfire.

The entire windshield was a lace curtain of cracks and holes.

Trout raised his head, risking a glance over the dashboard.

The soldiers were advancing on him, their barrels smoking in the rain but still aimed his way.

Trout reached out and threw the car into reverse and then shot upright in the seat and kicked down on the gas pedal. The Explorer lurched and jumped backward, rolling fast away from the soldiers who immediately opened fire.

“I’m not infected!” he screamed.

He knew that they could not hear him over the roar of their own guns, but Trout was furious. He kept yelling that as he hit the brakes, shifted into drive, spun the wheel and went diagonally across Doll Factory Road. More bullets stitched a line of ragged holes in the passenger side. Both side windows blew out and Trout was peppered with flying bits of glass; but the car was gaining speed now, clawing across the gravel parking lot of a closed down Denny’s, cutting over to a side road and blasting away from the soldiers. Bullets continued to whang and ping off the back of the car for a quarter mile.

Trout was panicking now. Wind and rain battered his face as he drove. He kept thinking, They didn’t care if I was infected or not. They didn’t care. God Almighty, they don’t care.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

The president of the United States sat in his big leather swivel chair, fingers steepled, brow knitted, staring at the satellite map of Stebbins County. Phones rang all around the crisis room as his staff worked to implement the Wildfire protocols. Above the main screen were several smaller screens, one of which was a Doppler radar display of the storm. The National Weather Service was giving a fifty-fifty chance that the storm could veer northeast or continue to stall over Stebbins County. If the latter happened, the computer models estimated that it might be as much as six hours before helicopters could fly. Six hours during which ground visibility was compromised.

Another screen showed men working in a raging storm to load thermobaric devices onto a row of parked Apache gunships.

The president’s mouth was dry, and he sipped water. There were a lot of people in the Situation Room, and it took effort to keep his emotions off his face as he studied the weapons being installed.

Thermobaric devices. Fuel-air bombs. Massive cluster bombs that explode in two stages, the first of which creates a cloud of explosive material which is then ignited. As a general had told him once, “Mr. President, this is the most powerful nonnuclear weapon currently in existence. It is, I can assure you, the very definition of hell on earth.”

Those words had been said with pride by an officer fighting the endless war in Afghanistan. Now, however …

He picked up a file from the table and opened it. The top page was a printout of the estimated rate of infection if Lucifer 113 could not be contained within Stebbins County. The numbers were impossible. They were bad science fiction. They were a horror story.

The president closed the folder and leaned forward to watch the loading of the fuel-air bombs.

“Dear God,” murmured the president.