Fall of Night

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Trout tried Goat a dozen more times and hit the same wall every time. Then he went looking for Dez and couldn’t find her. Disturbed and depressed, he drifted back to where the kids had been gathered. It was uncomfortably subdued for the number of young kids there.

“Coffee?”

Billy Trout turned to see one of the younger teachers, Jenny DeGroot, holding a tray on which were a dozen paper cups. Steam rose and clouded the petite woman’s glasses and put a flush on her cheeks. Trout fished for her name.

“Thanks, Jenny,” he said and took a cup.

She nodded and he stepped out of the way as she entered the big classroom. He hadn’t liked the glazed look in Jenny’s eyes. Too much shock, not enough hope. Way too much fear. It made him wonder what was in his own eyes.

He sipped the coffee and winced. Not because it was hot but because it tasted exactly like reconstituted horse urine. Possibly the worst coffee he’d ever tasted, and he’d worked in a newsroom for twenty years. He caught Jenny watching him from across the room and Trout hefted the cup in a salute and pretended to smile in appreciation of the taste.

A second sip only confirmed the bad news from the first taste. Horse urine with just a hint of hog feces. Maybe not as tasty as that.

He drank it anyway, standing in the doorway to the art room. The classrooms on this floor had been separated by partitions, but they’d all been pushed aside to create a space nearly as big as the auditorium. Even so, it was crowded. JT had estimated eight hundred survivors, but Billy had done his own count. The math was both more and less encouraging. There were eight hundred and forty-three people here. But that was all there was left of the population of Stebbins and its surrounding villages. Eight hundred and forty-three alive.

More than seven thousand dead.

Or whatever passed for dead now that the world didn’t make sense anymore.

“Infected,” he told himself. It was a much safer word than “zombie.”

He sipped the bad coffee.

Inside the combined classroom, hundreds of children were huddled into groups, their bodies wrapped in blankets or coats. The surviving teachers and other random adults — school staff, a few parents, and stray survivors — sat with them, trying to give comfort when there was no comfort left to give.

Everyone in that room, Trout knew, was in shock. Some were in denial. Some were completely broken. Across the room, by the teacher’s desk, a man in a business suit sat holding a little girl and rocked back and forth. Trout knew him. Gerry Dunphries. The little girl, though, was the youngest of the Gilchrist kids. Trout had no idea where Gerry’s daughter was. She attended this school, but she wasn’t here in the room.

She had to have been at the school, though. Or on one of the buses.

That thought, that knowledge, was dreadful.

He watched Gerry rock back and forth with the girl. His eyes were nearly unblinking and he kept murmuring the same snatch of song over and over again. A piece of a lullaby. Something old, but something that was as broken as he was. Only a piece of song, the lyrics mangled and mostly forgotten, the tune stretched thin by repetition, like a piece of old cassette tape that had been played so long the emulsion was wearing off.

Trout wondered if the girl heard any of it. Neither of her parents was here. Nor were her two brothers. Her eyes were fixed and focused, looking out at the world, but — he was absolutely sure — seeing and hearing none of it.

Broken, both of them.

Like so many others.

Even before the military had opened fire on them, these kids and the adults were teetering on the edge. The infected had attacked the buses, had dragged hundreds of kids out and torn the life from them. Parents and teachers had fought to protect their children, but as they succumbed to bites, they became the very things they’d tried to stop. They had become the monsters that preyed upon the children.

Trout prayed to God that no trace of the original personality was left in any of the living dead, though he knew that his prayer was a hopeless one. Yesterday he and Goat had interviewed Dr. Herman Volker, the former Cold War scientist — now working as a prison doctor — who had created the Lucifer 113 pathogen. Volker had told him that his latest version had been intended as a way of punishing convicted serial murderers. Volker’s sister and her children had been savagely killed by such a monster in East Berlin, long before the Wall fell. Volker had spent years working as a Soviet scientist — ostensibly serving the State but actually developing his ultimate revenge. The pathogen, based on genetically altered parasites and a witch’s brew of chemicals, kept the consciousness alive even after the body died. It was Volker’s desire that any prisoner executed for mass murder be conscious of his fate even while his body rotted in the grave. It was a horrible punishment, though had it only been used on its intended subjects — in this case the serial killer Homer Gibbon — Trout might have privately wished Volker all the success he could get.

But that’s not what happened.

Gibbon was infected with the pathogen during his execution by lethal injection, but instead of going immediately into a numbered grave on the prison grounds, a previously unknown relative had come to claim his body. Aunt Selma. Many years ago Selma had helped her heroin-addicted sister take the infant Homer to a shelter. At the time Selma considered taking the baby and raising him herself, even though she was the madam of a whorehouse. She did not, however, and instead Homer went into the system, going from one foster family to another. Some of those families cared for him, but others abused him. The abuse happened too soon, too early in Homer’s life to give him any chance of normalcy. In that meat grinder of a system, a true monster was born. Homer earned his conviction and his sentence, and no one was going to mourn him.

Except Aunt Selma. Driven by regret, by the last spark of her conscience, she claimed his body with the intention of burying him on the family farm where he might have some rest after a life in hell.

But the pathogen was already at work. Homer’s mind was alive in the dying body.

And the parasites that made up the substance of Lucifer 113 were alive, too.

Alive and hungry.

They kept his mind alive, they woke him up, and they awakened in him a hunger that was unlike anything nature could ever have created.

Trout was only now putting the pieces together of what happened here in Stebbins. He knew from Dez Fox that Doc Hartnup, the town’s mortician, had been killed along with Doc’s cleaning lady. Both of them reanimated, though, and from what Dez said, the first victims of Homer Gibbon did not demonstrate any awareness of self or recognition of other people. They were mindless monsters.

Zombies, to use Dr. Volker’s word.

And yet the doctor had insisted that the pathogen kept the consciousness alive, that in each of those zombies was a kind of helpless passenger. Aware of what his or her hijacked body was doing but totally unable to exert control. All it could do was feel the flesh rot and witness what the body did.

It was the most horrible thing Trout had ever heard.

And it was loose in Stebbins County.

It had consumed the town of Stebbins.

As he stood there looking at the traumatized man holding the traumatized little girl, he wondered what had broken each of them. Was it simply the shocking deaths of the people they loved? Certainly that would be enough.

Or was it worse?

Had they looked into the dead eyes of their own family members — wife, children, siblings, parents — and somehow saw the screaming ghost of the people they knew. Trapped like victims behind the windows of a burning building.

Had they seen that?

Billy Trout prayed that was not the case.

He knew that if — God forbid — anything happened to Dez, if she was infected and became one of those things, and if he looked into her beautiful blue eyes and saw the person he loved there, trapped in the body of the monster she became …

He didn’t know how to even think about that without screaming.

But he knew what he would do if such a thing happened.

He wouldn’t run. And he certainly wouldn’t — couldn’t — take the headshot that would bring her down.

No, Trout was absolutely sure he would simply drop whatever weapon he held, that he would stop fighting, that he would let her take him.

Slowly, slowly, Trout backed out of the doorway and turned away. He wandered down the empty hall, careful not to step in any of the pools of disease-blackened blood, mindful of the tiny larva that wriggled in the mess. He kicked shell-casings away with shuffling feet.

When he reached the end of the hall he stopped and leaned against the wall. The satellite phone hung from his belt and he removed it and once more punched in the number for Gregory “Goat” Weinman. The phone rang.

And rang.

Goat did not pick up.

From down the hall, through the open doorway to the art room, Trout could hear sobs and the eerie echo of a broken man singing a broken lullaby to a broken little girl.

Billy Trout leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out of this.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Scott Blair was admitted to the Oval Office and was pleased to find himself alone with the president.

“You made your changes?” asked the president, holding a hand out for the speech.

“I did, Mr. President.” He handed over the papers and waited while the president read through it. Then POTUS removed his glasses and sat back in his chair to appraise him.

“This is what you want me to say?”

“This is what I think needs to be said.”

“What about the Trout video?”

“Our people are tearing it to pieces online. By morning it won’t be any part of the official story.”

“What about the popular story?”

“We’ll manage it and we’ll weather it.”

The president smiled. “You’re beginning to sound like Sylvia.”

God forbid, thought Blair, but managed a bland smile. “We have to protect the administration if we’re going to win this.”

“We beat this, Scott. Not sure why everyone else thinks so and you don’t.”

Because I don’t have my head up my ass, he almost said, but managed to think it through first. Instead he said, “I know you and Simeon Zetter are friends, and I know you trust him…”

“Implicitly.”

“Understood. I, however, do not trust anyone implicitly. It’s my job not to make assumptions.”

“Are you saying that’s what I’m doing?”

“I’m saying that’s what everyone is doing, Mr. President. We are all in shock because of this, and we are all cognizant of the implications of last night’s events. Heads will roll here in Washington, even with the spin control we’re using. Heads will have to roll. Dietrich will take the most heat, but everyone knows that a soldier follows orders. Unless we intend to crucify him as a rogue who exceeded all authority including a presidential order — which would put him in jail — then we’ll have to hang others out to dry. That’s a political fact.”

The president shifted uncomfortably in his seat, but he did not disagree.

“But all of that is secondary, Mr. President. I can’t stress enough how strongly I believe that this matter is not over.”

“General Zetter is in Stebbins, Scott. You’re not.”

Neither are you, you officious moron, thought Blair.

“Sir,” Blair began slowly, but the president cut him off.

“I’m not ordering another attack on Stebbins.”

“I understand that, sir, but to put it quite simply, Simeon Zetter is nearing the end of his career, and even though he was formidable in the field once upon a time, I think now he’s become more of a politician than a soldier. He is supporting you and your presidency. I don’t know that I entirely trust his assessment of the situation in Stebbins, because we have to accept the possibility that he is wrong about containment, we must — absolutely must — get Dr. Volker’s research notes.”

“I thought you said we’d find Volker.”

“We will, but we haven’t yet, and every minute we spend looking is time not spent preparing for contingencies.”

The president considered, nodded. “Did you have something in mind?”

“Yes. Trout has that research on Volker’s flash drives. Sir, I would like to—”

“Stop right there, Scott. I know what you want to do. You want the Guard to storm the school and take those drives away from Trout. I won’t do that. What I have done is order General Zetter to obtain the drives. This he will do. End of discussion.”

Blair wondered if he could throttle the president before the Secret Service could stop him.

“Now … is there something else you’d like to discuss, Scott?” asked the president.

“Yes, sir,” said Blair tiredly, “but it concerns General Zetter. If … I may speak candidly—?”

The president steepled his fingers. “Go ahead,” he said guardedly.

“I think we need an independent assessment of the state of things in Stebbins County. We need unbiased eyes on the defenses, the deployment of resources. We need someone who has experience in ultra-high profile biohazardous situations — which, by the way, no one under Zetter’s command has. We need a diagnostician, not a general practitioner.”

The president pursed his lips, considering the point. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“Yes,” said Blair, “there’s a man we both trust, and he’s already in the area.”

“Who?”

Blair gave him the name. “I think you’ll agree that he’s well-suited for this particular assignment. He’s also available and close. I could have him and a small team inside the Q-zone in twenty minutes.”

The president gave him a calculating smile. “He just happened to be in the neighborhood?”

“No, sir. I called him yesterday and told him I needed him in the on-deck circle. Just in case.”

“And he’s there to observe, assess, and report only, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, sir.”

“I would take it amiss, Scott, if I found out that your pet shooter was there to do an end-run around Simeon Zetter. It would pain me to learn that he and his team put so much as a foot inside the Stebbins Little School. You understand me when I say that? We’re clear?”

“As glass, Mr. President.”

They studied each other, both wearing small smiles, both watching the other with cold eyes.

“Very well, Scott,” said the president. “Send him in.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Scott,” said the president with a gentler smile, “take a breath. This is over. We won. We saved the country, and you played your part. Be proud.”

“Yes, sir, I am,” lied Blair.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sylvia Ruddy, the president’s chief of staff, came in as Blair left.

“Scott looks like he’s about to explode,” she observed. “Is he still trying to nuke Pennsylvania?”

“Fire bomb,” corrected the president, “but no. Not at the moment, anyway.” He told her about the flash drives.

“He wanted to send a team after Trout?”

“I nixed the idea.”

“Good.”

“However, I am letting him send a team in to do an independent evaluation of the integrity of the Q-zone.”

Ruddy made a face. “Simeon won’t like it.”

“Simeon works for me. He doesn’t have to like it. Besides, I actually do want to know. Scott’s right about one thing — we have to make sure we don’t spike the ball before we’re in the end zone. I want to believe this is over, but quite frankly, Sylvia, I’m scared out of my mind.”

“So is everyone,” she countered, “but don’t let Scott drive you crazy. He’s such an alarmist. He was an alarmist when he was the national security director and he’s an alarmist now. Maybe more so now. I told you that when you appointed him.”

“Maybe, but he’s been right more than he’s been wrong.”

“Sure. But when he’s wrong he’s all the way wrong. And he’s wrong on this. He’s overreacting to a situation that now requires careful handling and a great deal of subtlety.”

“I know.”

“And yet you gave him permission to release the hounds?”

“Hardly that. Scott will do what he’s told,” the president said firmly. “He may have his issues, but he’s still one of us.”

He handed her Blair’s amended speech. As she read it her face went white and then dark red. “This isn’t a speech,” she snapped, “this is you begging to be impeached and indicted.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“No, Scott doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t have to worry about reelection.”

“There are more important things than winning another four years.”

“Are there?” she asked.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Oh, God — there’s another one!”

Billy Trout wheeled around but had no time to get out of the way as half a dozen people came running straight at him. The lead man was one of the teachers and he simply shoved Trout, and as Trout tried to take a step to catch his balance his back flared and his right leg buckled. He collapsed to the floor and half the people running down the hall tripped over him and went sprawling.

It was like a bad comedy routine, except no one was laughing. Most of the people had weapons. Guns, makeshift clubs, and fire axes. Everyone was ragged and dirty, streaked with grime, wild with panic.

Trout scrambled painfully to his feet and grabbed the sleeve of the closest man — Bowers, the art teacher. “What’s happening?” he demanded.

Bowers was a frail, frightened man with eyes that jumped and twitched. “Down in the gym,” he gasped. “I think it’s Mr. Maines.”

Trout didn’t know who Mr. Maines was. A parent of one of the children? A teacher? A refugee trapped in the school?

“Is he infected?”

Bowers’s face, already pale, turned a sickly white. His eyes were jumpy with shock. “They said … they said he bit one of the kids.”

It felt exactly like being punched over the heart. Trout wanted to sag back against the wall, slide down, bury his face in his hands, and weep. He wanted this to end, to go away, to not be real.

“Show me,” he said.

Trout heard himself say the words, felt his body launch into motion, felt his pulse quicken, but he did not want to see this. Not more pain. Not another kid.

No way he wanted to see another infected kid. Another hurt kid.

Another lost kid.

But he heard himself growl as he snatched up a fire axe dropped by one of the men who had fallen.

“Hey!” said the man, grabbing for it, but Billy ignored him and kept the axe.

At first he followed Bowers.

Soon, though, he simply followed the screams.

Billy Trout ran down two flights of stairs. Each step shot an arrow of pain into his back. Earlier, when he and Desdemona Fox had fought their way across the parking lot to the school, Billy had picked up a heavy bag filled with guns and ammunition. He grabbed it the wrong way, though, and something had exploded in his lower back. The pain was awful but it was also useful. It made him grind his teeth on it, to bite down on it to say fuck it to agony and everything else. Fuck it to his rage at what was happening, to his terror, and to his grief.

His fists were locked around the handle of the fire axe as he ran, but already he could feel fear sweat loosen his grip. Rage, he was discovering, was not a constant. It wasn’t armor that he could wear until this was all over.

If it was ever going to be over.

The screams echoed upward from the basement, bouncing off the walls of the fire tower.

Another one.

That’s what Bowers had said. That’s what he was running to see.

Another one.

God.

Another of the dead. And another child with a bite.

The small knot of teachers and other survivors lagged behind him, their determination to reach the source of the screams diminishing with every step. Trout couldn’t fault them. Not one bit. After all, what in their lives had ever prepared them for something like this?

They reached the basement and burst from the stairwell into the gymnasium. A big, damp empty space that Trout remembered from humiliating dodgeball games when he was in the fifth grade. That had been his hell year, before the growth spurt that would give him the length of bone and quality of muscle he’d later use in high school baseball and track. The gym was linked to his memories of being a weird, shy, strange little boy who didn’t have many friends. Dez Fox had been his first real friend. When two older boys tried to pants Billy here in the gym, Dez had beat the shit out of them.

He’d been in love with her ever since.

“In there,” gasped Bowers, pointing.

Only a few lights were on, pale cones of yellow that did little to push back the immense darkness. The screams were constant. High and thin. They tore through an open office door at the far end.

Please, begged Trout. Not another kid. Please, please …

The axe was heavy and he knew he’d have to use it on Mr. Maines — whoever he was. There was no Plan B for dealing with those who were so far gone that they had crossed over into—

Into what?

Even now Trout had a hard time calling it what he knew it was.

These people were infected.

These people were also dead.

Technically, dead.

Essentially, dead.

And yet they moved around, some of them shambling, some running awkwardly, all of them chasing, hunting, grabbing, biting.

Eating.

The dead consuming the living.

Zombies.

It was madness and Billy Trout’s orderly mind rebelled at it. Death was death and the dead don’t do this. Can’t do this.

The screams told him otherwise.

Despite the pain in his body and the agony in his soul, Trout ran faster.

He was six steps from the gaping doorway when sudden light and noise exploded within.

The deafening blast of a gun. The eye-hurting flash of shot after shot.

Trout skidded to a sloppy halt, lost his footing in something wet, fell, slid all the way to the mouth of the open door.

There was one last blast, one last flash.

The screams stopped.

Trout lay there on the floor. He could hear Bowers somewhere behind him. Panting, mumbling something. Maybe a prayer. Maybe he’d simply gone fucking nuts. Billy wanted to.

Something moved inside the office.

A shifting of the shadows, the scuff of a shoe.

And then a figure staggered out. Lumbering, uncertain, sagging sideways against the frame, clothes torn and streaked with blood, eyes dark and dead.

Trout looked up into the face.

“Dez…?” he whispered.

Those dead eyes shifted toward him.

Tears broke and fell down her dirty cheeks. The slack expression of shock disintegrated into horror and shame and grief.

“Oh … Billy…”

She sank down to her knees, the gun still held in one hand, but that hand was slack at her side, as if forgotten or disowned.

Trout scrambled to his knees and gathered her in his arms as the first terrible sobs detonated within her. In the bad light Trout could see the leg of a man — Mr. Maines — and the sprawled form of a child, lying tangled together in a pool of black blood. The smell of gun smoke burned in the air.

He wanted to push her away, he wanted to turn away from what she’d just done, what she’d had to do. But he loved this woman.

And this — all of this — was their world now.

So he held her close as she wept.

As they both wept.

“It’s okay,” he lied. “It’s all going to be okay.”

Except they both knew that it wasn’t.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“You’re listening to Gavin Finke and this is What the Finke Thinks, coming to you live from Pittsburgh. It’s the middle of the night but I don’t think anyone within the sound of my voice is sleeping. The eyes of the world are on the town of Stebbins down in Stebbins County, right on the Pennsylvania-Maryland line. And why? Well, my friends, that depends on whom you ask. We all know that Stebbins was ground zero for Superstorm Zelda — a real b-i-t-c-h of a storm that picked up a lot of water from the Three Rivers and dropped it on the Mason Dixon Line.

“Sure, that’s how it started, but then the cow patties hit the windmill, let me tell you. First there were unconfirmed reports of a double homicide in Stebbins. But within minutes there were all sorts of wild rumors about a riot at a funeral home. But buckle up, kids, ’cause it was a fast slide down the crapper from there. The governor released a statement saying that there was an outbreak of a new kind of virus in Stebbins. Then the Internet went—”

Gavin Finke took a long drag of his cigarette and winked at his engineer.

“I tell you, folks, I don’t know what to believe. Tell the Finke what you think is happening on this dark and stormy night.”

He gave the call-in number and before he’d even finished the board lit up like a Christmas tree.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After Scott Blair left the president he hurried to his office. He blew past three of his aides, growled at his secretary to hold his calls until further notice, and closed his door. As soon as he was alone he took his cell phone from his pocket, punched in a five-digit code to activate a scrambler, and ground his teeth while he waited through five rings before the call was answered.

“How’d it go?” asked the man at the other end.

Blair snorted. “How do you think it went?”

“Jesus,” said the man at the other end. “Did you show him the math? Did he see the projection numbers if this thing breaks the Q-zone?”

“I did, but for all intents and purposes that broadcast from the school cut his balls off. He’s almost afraid to act.”

There was a pause. “Which means what?”

“I gave him an alternative suggestion.”

“Which is?”

“You, Sam,” said Blair. “I told him I wanted to send you in.”

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. “Go in and do what?”

“Find out exactly what’s happening in Stebbins. You and a small team. I want to know how bad things are there. However, you are not to report to General Zetter. He and everyone here in Washington is acting like the Super Bowl is over and we’re all doing postgame chatter.”

“How’s that make sense? Surely they read the same report you forwarded to me. This pathogen isn’t a suitcase nuke. You can’t defuse it and sit back for a victory cigar.”

“Preaching to the choir, Sam.”

“So … what the hell’s happening? Why the shift from ‘move heaven and earth to win this’ to whatever the heck you’d call this shit? Is it that broadcast?”

“Mostly. That was like being hit by a cruise missile. It cut everyone’s balls off. There are people here who think that the attack on the school could be used to do more than bring down the president. They’re afraid it’s done permanent harm to the structure of government as we know it.”

“I watched the president on TV. He did a pretty solid job of pissing on that video. Don’t know if you watched the commentary afterward, but CNN, FOX, and even MSNBC are edging away from belief that Trout’s video was the real deal.”

“I know, but once the storm’s over and the press actually gets into Stebbins, some of what Trout said is going to be verified. The school looks like it was fired on by machine guns. We can’t change that.”

“Unless you blow it up.”

“Hiding the body after a murder isn’t the same as removing doubt about the crime.” Blair blew out is cheeks. “No, Sam, this is doing political damage, there’s no doubt about it.”

“But…?”

“But who the fuck cares?” growled Blair. “How did we ever allow ourselves to get to the point where careers and political agendas matter this much? We are facing a doomsday scenario and they’re acting like it’s the midterm elections. Doomsday, Sam. It’s not even an abstract concept. It’s right there, and we’re handling it all wrong.”

“And you want me to go in and — what? Take photos of the Gates of Hell to prove they’re opening?”

“Pretty much.”

“Jesus.”

“I need irrefutable proof that we’re not on top of this so I can force the president to respond the way we should have responded from the jump. Can you do that?”

“I can try.

“Sam…”

“I’ll do it,” Sam amended.

“How soon can you be on the ground there?”

“Almost right away. I have some assets I can put into play. I … well, I kind of figured this was coming and I tapped some friends who were in the area.”

“You’re already there?”

“Not inside the Q-zone, but close,” said Sam. “We’re at a motel just outside. Me and four people I can trust.”

“I…”

“I anticipated this, Scott. Don’t act so surprised. If I was off my game we wouldn’t be having this call.”

“I knew I could rely on you.”

“Yeah, yeah, if the world doesn’t end, buy me a beer.”

“I’ll buy you a brewery.”

“Deal. Now,” said Sam, “if we’re done with the bullshit, Scott … tell me why I’m really taking a squad of first-team shooters into the Q-zone.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sam put down his cell phone and took a long breath, held it until everything inside his mind and body felt steady, then let it out with slow control. Both aspects of the job Scott Blair wanted him to do — the official and unofficial mission — were going to be a real bitch. Although Sam had run with a SpecOps team for a long time, that was years ago. He hadn’t fired a shot in anger in a decade.

His technical skills were still there. On the rifle range he was still one of the two or three top snipers in the U.S. military. But was he still fit and sharp enough to lead men into a situation like this? Had he have lost a step getting to first base?

Possibly.

More important, could he do what Blair wanted him to do? Would he do it? Sam certainly agreed with the NSA advisor’s logic and even, to a degree, with the plan. But it was ugly and it was risky. There were a lot of ways it could go wrong and very few ways it could all work out right.

He took a second calming breath.

And a third.

Then he called the four members of his team waiting in rooms here at the motel. They were all seasoned Special Operatives. None of them were active military. Like Sam, they had retired to contract work, but also like him their only employer had been Uncle Sam. Different groups within the government, and sometimes the agendas didn’t quite mesh, but since they were freelancers they could pick and choose their jobs. None of them ever wanted to follow an order they didn’t like or couldn’t square with their consciences. That adherence to a specific ethical code had earned the team the sobriquet of The Boy Scouts. Nice nickname but far from the truth. People in Special Ops never felt entirely comfortable in, say, a confessional. Certainly not Sam.

Sam caught his reflection in the mirror bolted to the back of the motel room’s door. The man he saw looked small, old, and guilty even though he hadn’t yet done anything except take a call from an old friend. But then he thought about what was at stake. He thought about his family back in California. His dad, his stepmom, his brother, and his infant half-brother. They were three thousand miles away from this, but with something like Lucifer 113 distance wasn’t a guarantee of safety. All it did was buy some time.

Time before what?

Before the inevitable or something that might already be over.

There was no way to know. No way to be certain.

Except to gather his team, saddle up, and cross the Q-zone into Stebbins County. The one place on earth that no one in their right mind wanted to go.

“The fuck are you doing?” he asked himself.

His reflection looked pale and sickly and it offered no reply.

Then Captain Sam Imura stood up, reached for his gear bag, slung his sniper rifle over his shoulder, and headed out to war.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Please…” he begged. “Don’t … please…”

Goat was crammed into a cleft formed by his overturned table, a couple of chairs, the wall, and a tourist who sat bleeding and weeping. He huddled into his niche, arms wrapped around his head, knees drawn up tight as if the bones of his limbs offered some real protection for what was happening. The air in the Starbucks was filled with screams and prayers.

And laughter.

Low, thick. Wet.

“Please,” Goat whimpered. He thought desperately about Volker’s information, uploaded to his email accounts but not sent. Not shared.

And with sudden screaming clarity he realized that he and Billy had made a serious mistake. That information should have gone out. Goat’s instinct had been to send it, but he hadn’t. It was in attachments. It was just sitting there. As useless as he was.

God …

Despite the carnage around him, Goat cut a sly, frightened look at his laptop, which lay on the floor not five feet away. How long would it take to locate the email and forward it to the listservs of reporters to which he belonged. How long?

Five seconds?

Less.

That’s all the time it would take to maybe save the whole fucking world.

A handful of seconds.

Goat felt himself begin to move, shifting away from his worthless hiding place, edging toward the laptop.

Then the laughter stopped.

“Hey,” said a voice, “I know you.”

The world seemed to freeze around Goat and for a terrible moment even the screams seemed muted as if those words had flipped a switch on everything. Goat didn’t look up, though, too frightened to risk acknowledging anything.

“Yeah,” continued the voice, “I seen you somewhere, ain’t I?”

Goat held his breath, refused to move.

Then pain exploded in his thigh as something hit him with jarring force. A cry burst past the self-enforced stricture in his throat, and he rocked sideways, suddenly whipping his arms out like defensive stabilizers. Despite his need not to see this man, Goat’s eyes opened and there he was. Standing right there, looming over him, bare-chested, ugly, covered in glistening red, eyes dark and wild, smiling mouth full of promise.

“Fucking-A, I knew I knew you,” said Homer Gibbon. “You were there when they killed me.”

Behind Gibbon and all around him was pain and horror.

People were broken.

Broken.

Arms shattered, mouths gaping to reveal broken teeth, handfuls of hair torn out from customers who had tried to run but were one step too slow. Everyone was bloody. Every single person.

Some of them lay sprawled, dead or dying.

But even as he thought that, Goat knew he was wrong.

Dying maybe. Dead?

Not really.

Death, as Goat had known it his whole life until yesterday, was no longer a fixed point in reality. It was no longer a doorway that, once entered, could not be passed again. All of that had changed.

Because of Dr. Volker.

Because of something called Lucifer 113.

And because of this man.

This monster.

Homer Gibbon.

When Goat didn’t answer, Homer kicked him again. Same spot, only harder.

Gibbon wore no shoes but he knew how to kick. And from the laugh that bubbled out of him, he enjoyed it. The way some kids like kicking cats. A small cruelty that spoke with disturbing eloquence about this man. Even if Goat had not known what kind of monster Homer was, even if Goat had not sat through weeks of testimony by clinical psychologists and forensics experts at this man’s trial, he would have deduced important truths about him from that kick and its accompanying laugh.

“I asked you a question, boy,” said Homer, his voice colored by an accent that sounded southern but was pure rural Pennsylvania. “Want to see what happens if I have to ask you again.”

“Y-yes…” stammered Goat.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I was there.”

Homer kicked him again. Even harder. Goat screamed in pain and tried to turn away to protect the spot on his leg that now burned as if scalded.

“You was there when what?” demanded Homer.

“Yes,” said Goat in a small, fractured voice, “I was there when they killed you. At the prison. At the execution. I was there.”

Homer nodded in satisfaction. “What’s that make you? Some kind of news reporter?”

Behind Homer one of the wounded people was crawling toward the door. Her shirt was torn, revealing a bra with little blue flowers on it. Most of her right shoulder looked like raw hamburger. Goat hadn’t witnessed the attack specifically on her, but he recognized the bite. Even from ten feet away Goat could see a thick black goo mixed in with the blood, and in that goo tiny threadlike worms wriggled. Dark lines ran crookedly from the torn flesh, delineating the pattern of her veins and blood vessels. Even though the bite had just happened a few minutes ago, the infection was spreading at incredible speed.

So fast, thought Goat, it’s happening so fast.

It was nothing Mother Nature could ever have created. Nothing natural could spread infection at that rate. Lucifer 113 had been genetically engineered to be a perfect rapid-onset bioweapon, and the modified parasites took hold inside the bloodstream with all the deadly speed of a neurotoxin.

Homer turned, following Goat’s line of sight, and again there was the low, wet laughter.

“Fuck yeah,” he said. “That’s right. That bitch is one of mine now.”

“One of yours?” asked Goat weakly.

Homer turned back and then squatted down in front of Goat, arms dangling off the tops of his knees like a gorilla. “You gonna lay there and tell me you don’t know what’s happening? You’re a reporter and you want to tell me you don’t know what I done in Stebbins? You going to fuck with me like that?”

“N-no…”

Homer reached out and patted Goat on the cheek. Three pats, each one harder so that the last one was a full slap that rocked the reporter back against the table. It was not as hard as the kicks had been, but hard enough, and Goat’s head banged off the wooden table. He twisted sideways, once more curling into a fetal ball, collapsing against the side of the badly injured customer who’d been sitting there weeping and bleeding.

It was then that Goat realized two very bad things.

The first was that the man was no longer weeping. Or breathing for that matter.

And second was that his eyes were open.

Wide open.

Staring right at Goat.

Black mucus ran from between the man’s slack lips. There was nothing in his eyes. No pain, no confusion over the way in which everything had suddenly gone wrong for him, no spark of anything. The eyes saw Goat, though; that much was certain.

The dead man opened his mouth to show his teeth.

Behind Goat Homer Gibbon chuckled.

“Look who woke up hungry,” he said.

He was still chuckling when the dead customer lunged at Goat, grabbed him by the shirt and hair, and pulled him toward those blood-streaked teeth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Desdemona Fox pushed herself back from Billy. The movement was abrupt, as if she’d suddenly reached the limit of the grief she allowed herself, though Trout knew it was more than that. People were watching. Civilians. And Dez was the only person of any authority left, even if that authority no longer carried any official weight. There was, after all, no Stebbins County Police Department anymore. All of the other officers and even all of the support staff were as dead as the mayor, the town selectmen, the director of public works, and the chief of the fire department. There was, in fact, nothing left of Stebbins except the small knot of people here and the real estate on which they stood.

Even so, Dez had to play her part. She knew, as he did, that her badge and gun, her uniform and the personal power everyone knew she had, formed the rails in a frail fence between order and chaos. If she lost it, then these people would likely lose it, too. And if that happened, then none of the children upstairs had a chance.

Not one chance.

Dez kept her face averted while she went through the mechanical process of removing the magazine from her Glock and thumbing in fresh rounds to replace those she’d fired. She did not bother to pick up her spent brass. Everyone stood mute as they watched this, and when she slapped the magazine back into place they all flinched. The face Dez showed them as she holstered her gun was composed, hard, uncompromising, and totally closed. If anyone noticed the drying tear tracks on her face they dared not mention them.

Dez nodded to two men who stood slightly apart from the group. “Bob, you and Luke get some of those big plastic trash bags from the kitchen. We have to wrap the bodies and get them out of here.”

The men stared at her and then past her to the room where the killing had been done. They didn’t move.

“Now,” she snapped, and they flinched again.

Bob opened his mouth, maybe to protest or maybe to ask a question, but then he caught the look in Dez’s eyes and answered with a curt nod. He tapped Luke on the arm and they turned and hurried across the gym floor.

Dez appraised the rest of the group.

“Listen to me,” she said in a quiet, dangerous tone. “The rest of you are going to search this place. Again. I don’t know who searched down here, but because some assfuck didn’t look in a closet or a closed office another kid’s dead. You hear me? Someone killed that kid and I’m not talking about the dead son of a bitch who bit him. For now I don’t give a shit who searched down here. But we need to search this whole building again and that means every nook and fucking cranny. You hear me? And if another kid gets hurt because one of you jerkoffs didn’t do your job, then God help you because when I get done with you there won’t be enough left to feed to the fucking zombies. Anyone think I’m joking, anyone has anything to say about that, say it now and I’ll shove it down your throat with your teeth. This isn’t a debate. Now move!”

They scattered like scared birds. As they moved away, Trout saw that their eyes were now filled with a different kind of fear. Not of the dead but of the living. Of her. Everyone in town knew Dez Fox. Most of the people in Stebbins didn’t like her, and Trout knew that a lot of them wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire, but no one could say that she wasn’t a good cop. There were a lot of stories floating around town about how Dez treated wife beaters and child abusers. None of those stories were exaggerations, Trout knew.

Add to that the things she’d done here in the school. She and JT, her partner. Partner, mentor, best friend. Father figure.

JT was outside, his body infected by a bite and torn by heavy-caliber machine-gun bullets. He’d sacrificed himself to help clear the school of the infected, and he’d gone down fighting to keep the infected children from being mauled by the dead before the military could use their guns to end all pain for them.

Trout wrestled with that, understanding on one level that the slaughter was necessary and even merciful in a twisted way, but on all other levels it was perverse. No matter from which angle it was viewed, the innocents were the victims.

Now the last surviving children of Stebbins County were here in this building. No more of them should have died.

The men hurried away, splitting into two-person teams, not saying anything until they were in the stairwell on the far side of the cavernous gym. All of them were bigger than Dez. Most of them were tough, hardened farmers and factory workers, some were even combat veterans. No one said a damn word to Dez Fox.

Dez stood there and watched them go. Trout saw that her whole body was trembling. Rage and pain.

He wanted to take her into his arms again.

That would probably earn him an ass-kicking, too.

So instead he said, “Dez — what do you want me to do? How can I help?”

It took a long time before she reacted, as if she was off in some distant place and there was so much distance to travel to get back to where he was. Her head turned slowly until she faced him, but even then there was no immediate recognition in her eyes.

She said, “What?”

“How can I help?” he repeated gently.

“I…” she began, but faltered. She shook her head, then without another word, Dez crossed the big empty room and vanished into shadows.

Billy Trout stood watching the emptiness of the open doorway to the stairwell.

“Shit,” he said softly.

He found a chair and dragged it over to a spot near where the child and the dead Mr. Maines lay. He didn’t want to see them, but he felt it was important to stay with them until Bob and Luke returned with their makeshift body bags. When he tried to understand this self-imposed vigil he found no useful answers. No insights.

He checked his sat phone to see if there was anything from Goat, but got no signal down here in the basement. It made him wonder how the story was spreading. Was it time to do another broadcast.

This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse.

That was what he’d said. It hadn’t sounded silly at the time. He meant it to be shocking. Now it sounded strange to Billy. It was less than one hour since the military attacked the school.

And yet it felt like forever. Like he and Dez and the others had always been here; like this was one of those nightmares he sometimes had where he felt trapped in a twisted funhouse experience that never ended.

Reporting live from the apocalypse.

Shock tactics or straight reporting?

The line seemed badly blurred right now.

Goat had told him that the whole thing had gone viral, but Trout didn’t know what that actually meant in terms of the survival of the people here and the handling of the outbreak. Was it all over?

Was his part in it over?

Trout was a career reporter, even though that career had dumped him back into his hometown of Stebbins. A one-stoplight dirt stain on the Pennsylvania map. Rarely had he gotten so much as a whiff of a significant story. Even his coverage of the execution of convicted serial murderer Homer Gibbon was not star-making. There were too many better-known reporters there. At best the pieces he filed for Regional Satellite News were folded into stories by bigger — and very likely better — journalists around the country.

But now he was the story, and that was a paradigm shift so radical it stripped all the gears.

He sat on the rickety folding chair, staring at the shadows, listening to the sounds of an old building settling into its own grave. He could still feel the dried tear tracks on his own cheeks. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the school, out there in the black night, he could hear the heavy drone of helicopters, the menacing throp-throp-throp of their blades.

“Ah, Dez…” he said softly. He thought about what this was doing to her. Hurting her, aging her.

Desdemona Fox was the most beautiful woman in the world to Trout. Tall, fit, powerful, blond, with great bones and every curve on his personal must-have list. Curves he knew more intimately than anyone. Granted he was far from the only person — or even the most recent person — to have explored that landscape, but he was the one who loved them and loved her. Not in that order.

They’d been an item more times than he could count, and they’d both logged mileage in breaking each other’s heart. The last time had been a doozy. He’d proposed marriage and the next day he walked in on her with a biker. That was her reply to the proposal. Classic Dez. Why cross a bridge when you could burn it?

Since then, she’d been a raging bitch to him. And, to hear others tell it, she’d been a raging bitch to the whole world. Even more viciously defensive than normal, which was saying quite a lot. There was, however, a corresponding increase in her efficiency as a police officer. She wrote more tickets, arrested more drunks, broke up more bar fights, and kicked more ass than before, all of it with a nasty fuck-you smile on her pretty lips.

Then the devil came to Stebbins County.

Even now Billy found it hard to reconcile the fact that his town was being destroyed by something conceived half a world away during the Cold War. It was spy movie stuff. It was horror movie stuff.

He wondered what the death toll was here in town. Seven thousand people had lived here. Were all of them dead now?

Was that even possible?

Add to that the kids bused in from neighboring districts and the parents who had come to get them out of the path of the storm. What was that — another thousand, maybe two?

Someone else’s madness had brought wholesale death to town.

Except in Stebbins County “death” wasn’t death anymore.

He put his face in his hands. Not to weep, but to try and hide.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Gavin muted the mike and hit the intercom. “How are we on calls?”

“We have them lined up from here to next year,” said Gavin’s producer, happy with this kind of call-in volume. “Sending you a hot one now.”

Gavin Finke punched a button to take the call. “And we’re on with Brenda from Harrisburg.”

“Hi, Gavin, longtime listener, first-time caller.”

“Glad you picked up the phone, Brenda. So, tell me, what do you think is happening in Stebbins County?”

“Zombies,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Zombies.”

“You’re saying ‘zombies.’”

“Yes. Zombies.”

“In Stebbins County.

“Oh, yes. They’re all over Stebbins County.”

“Zombies?”

“Zombies.”

“Oooo-kay, this a new one even for What the Finke Thinks. Tell me, Brenda, what makes you think there are zombies at large in western Pennsylvania?”

“My nephew told me.”

“Your nephew? And does he see zombies on any kind of regular basis?”

“Oh, no. He’s a soldier. He’s with the National—”

“Sorry, Brenda, I have to cut you off,” said Gavin. “I’m being told we are going to have a statement from the president of the United States. Going live to Washington…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Mr. President?” said the cameraman. “We’re on in five, four…”

He finger-counted down the rest of the way and then pointed to the commander in chief, who sat at his desk, neat and tidy and severe.

“Hello, everybody,” said the president, his voice deep and sober. “There are two issues confronting us this evening. The first is the major storm that has developed in western Pennsylvania. This storm, now being called Superstorm Zelda, has exceeded the predictions made by the National Weather Service. The severity and duration of the storm has caught everyone by surprise. However, I just received a full briefing from our emergency response teams, including FEMA, and agencies that are going to be helpful in the response and recovery efforts — the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”

Behind the teleprompter, Scott Blair nodded. He’d helped write this announcement, using his typical hands-on approach. The president had raised objections about much of the content, but in the end had been persuaded to handle things a certain way. In the way that Blair and the Joint Chiefs all agreed was the only way to keep the train on the rails.

“Obviously,” continued the president, reading it verbatim, “everybody is aware at this point that this is going to be a big and powerful storm, and that it is far from over. What were originally estimated to be a line of smaller cells moving behind the main storm front have taken an unfortunate turn and are strengthening. However, all across the region, I think everybody is now able to make appropriate preparations and everyone is taking appropriate actions. I’ve spoken to the governors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia. They have issued emergency declarations. Those have been turned around quickly here in the White House. We have prepositioned assets so that FEMA personnel are working closely with state and local governments. We’re making sure that food and water and emergency generation is available for those communities that are going to be hardest hit. But because of the nature of this storm, we are certain that this is going to be a slow-moving process through a wide swath of the country, and millions of people are going to be affected.”

Beside Blair, Sylvia Ruddy stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest, wearing what the French would call a mouth of disapproval. Blair disliked her because she was far more concerned about party politics and the president’s legacy than she was about actual national security.

“So the most important message that I have for the public right now,” said POTUS, “is please listen to what your state and local officials are saying. When they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate. Do not delay. Don’t pause; don’t question the instructions that are being given, because this is a serious storm and it could potentially have fatal consequences if people haven’t acted quickly.

The president paused and gave the camera a two-second beat of unblinking intensity. “But keep in mind that for folks who are not following instructions, if you are not evacuating when you’ve been asked to evacuate, you’re putting first responders in danger. We’re going to have to have search-and-rescue teams in and around multiple states all at the same time. And although we’ve got the Department of Defense all positioned, if the public is not following instructions, that makes it more dangerous for people and it means that we could have fatalities that could have been avoided.

Transportation is going to be tied up for a long time. And probably the most significant impact for a lot of people, in addition to flooding, is going to be getting power back on. We anticipate that there are going to be a lot of trees down, a lot of water. And despite the fact that the power companies are working very closely with their various state officials and local officials to make sure they are bringing in as many assets as possible and getting those ready in preparation for the storm, the fact is that a lot of these emergency crews are not going to be able to get into position to start restoring power until some of these winds have died down. And because of the nature of this storm, that may take several days. So the public should anticipate that there’s going to be a lot of power outages, and it may take time for that power to get back on.”

Blair glanced at his own copy of the prepared message. The groundwork was established, but the real game was about to begin.

Don’t fuck it up, thought Blair, knowing the president’s tendency to go off script.

“Now we come to the second matter before us this evening,” said the president in a voice that changed from firm control to something approaching cold steel. “Many of you are already aware of reports of an outbreak of a new kind of flu virus. This outbreak was first reported in Stebbins, a small town on the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland. There has been some wild speculation in the press as to the nature and severity of this disease, and that speculation has sparked a rash of irresponsible and inaccurate posts on social media. Much of the information being shared about this outbreak is false, and some persons have posted faked videos and audio files purporting to be from reporters in that town.”

The president paused for effect, and Blair believed that everyone in the country paused with him, taking the same deep breath, holding it in their chests, waiting for the heavy punch that follows the tentative jab.

“Those reports are false,” said the president with real edge in his voice, “and they pose a serious threat to the efforts of FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control. Reports like that are the worst kind of Internet manipulation, and investigations are currently under way to determine if these posts are an attempt to deliberately disrupt our ability to provide effective emergency response. I can assure you that the substance of these posts are false and I will promise you that the persons responsible will be found and prosecuted as cyber-terrorists. It is abhorrent when a misguided or malicious few attempt to exploit a catastrophic event in order to further their own agendas, especially if that goal is at the expense of the American people. We will not allow them to succeed, and we will protect the people of this great nation.”

Good — nailed it, word for fucking word, thought Blair, and he wanted to fist-pump, but didn’t.

The president almost glared at the camera. “Last point I’ll make, though — this is going to be a difficult storm, but the great thing about America is when we go through tough times like this we all pull together. We look out for our friends. We look out for our neighbors. And we set aside whatever issues we may have otherwise to make sure that we respond appropriately and with swiftness. And that’s exactly what I anticipate is going to happen here.

“So I want to thank all the federal teams, state and local teams that are in place. I’m confident that we’re ready. But I think the public needs to prepare for the fact that this is going to take a long time for us to clean up. The good news is we will clean up and we will get through this. Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

The camera lingered on the president’s face for a moment, then cut to a place card of the presidential seal.

“And we’re out,” said the cameraman.

The president sagged back and closed his eyes. He looked as exhausted as Blair felt. It was nearly an hour into a new day and they’d been at this since early yesterday. Blair knew that there was little chance any of them would get a moment’s rest any time soon. They were all wired with caffeine and whatever prescription stimulants they each had in pockets or handbags.

Even so, Blair smiled and nodded to himself, well pleased with the statement that had just gone out. He leaned toward Sylvia Ruddy. “That was letter perfect.”

The chief of staff swiveled her head like a praying mantis and glared at him with absolute hatred in her eyes.

“We’re all going to hell for this,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sergeant Hap Rollins crouched over the minigun and peered through the slanting rain at the endless rows of stalked corn eddying like waves beneath the rotor wash.

“Anything?”

The voice in his headphones was the pilot, Sully. It was maybe the fortieth time he’d asked the question since they’d come out to the farm country. Rollins wished Sully would shut the hell up. If he saw something he’d say so, and Rollins didn’t see shit. Nothing human, anyway. Bunch of cows lying down to try and get out of the wind and a few horses running free from an overrun farm. The farmhouse and outbuildings had already been destroyed by rockets. Thirty or forty times they flew over dead bodies lying on the road or on lawns or in the middle of fields. Dead bodies. Not walking dead.

Rollins was still processing that distinction.

The officers wanted them to use the word “infected,” but most of the guys were calling them zombies. A word from old Bela Lugosi movies. A word from comic books and horror novels.

Zombies.

Rollins didn’t like the word, didn’t like the way the word fit inside his head. It had too many sharp edges. It nicked the walls of his worldview. And it didn’t do anything good for his faith. Rollins was a Catholic and the only dead that were supposed to be walking around were the ones Jesus raised, like that little girl he said was only sleeping. Lazarus, too. And JC himself.

Only saints and saviors were supposed to be walking around if they were dead. Those were the rules, and Rollins didn’t remember reading anything about infected ordinary dead people getting up and walking around biting people.

That wasn’t death, no matter what the mission intel said.

That was something else. Something bad, sure, but dead people don’t do what these people were doing.

Even though Rollins believed in Jesus and God, he wasn’t as sure about the concept of the Devil. He knew he was supposed to believe that, and even though he could imagine a place where sinners went — his ex-wife and her boyfriend came to mind — a guy with hooves and horns directing traffic for lost souls was hard for a grown man to accept.

He wiped raindrops from his goggles and leaned out to look down the rows of corn.

Nothing.

“We’re good,” he said into his mike, and he had to repeat it over the constant crackle of interference. Some of the guys said the communications team was operating jammers in the area. Collins could believe it. He’d tried to call home to check on his parents, who lived in Pittsburgh, but there was no signal on his cell. That had been a couple of hours ago. So, jammers? Sure, he could buy that. “Let’s go check out the other field,” he yelled into the mike. “Looks like a pear grove. Come in low on the west side and we’ll see if there’s anything under the trees.”

“Roger that,” confirmed the pilot, his voice fuzzy and distorted.

The Black Hawk lifted away from the waving corn and began a shallow climbing circle. They were working with nineteen other helos, quartering and searching the vast farmlands that filled this corner of the county. It was a crazy job and Rollins, like everyone else, knew that it was pretty damn close to a fool’s errand. There were three hundred farms here, ranging from little postage-stamp herb gardens to the fruit and vegetable groves that stretched for miles. There were fifty teams in various ground vehicles and a couple of hundred two-man patrols. And with all of that it seemed like an absurdly impossible task to Rollins.

Even so, there was plenty of radio chatter from the ground and the other Black Hawks saying that they were finding spots to clean out. Infected trapped inside locked cars. A whole bunch of them trapped inside the Weis supermarket after downed trees knocked out the power. Some strays wandering through fields.

Like that.

The infection was out there, and the Q-zone seemed to be holding, but Rollins had his doubts.

His buddy Dave, who was a lot more Catholic than Rollins was, had confided to him that he was really scared by all this. Religious scared, not just regular scared. Dave couldn’t understand why God allowed something like this. The dead to rise.

Rollins told him, “This ain’t God, man, it’s science. This is weird science shit.”

“It’s the dead rising, man…”

“Nah. Just sick people acting dead. Like in that old movie, the one in London—Twenty-eight Days Later. It’s only a disease.”

“No, man,” said Dave, lapsing into a confidential whisper, “I think this is what they talked about in the Book of Revelation. The End Times.”

Rollins started to grin at that, but the look on Dave’s face killed that expression before it was born.

“C’mon man,” Rollins said mildly, “it’s just like that anthrax thing. It’s a disease and that’s all it is. Don’t mess your head up by thinking bad thoughts.”

But Dave wasn’t convinced and Rollins didn’t at all like the look in Dave’s eyes. No, sir, he did not like that look at all. Kind of wild. Maybe a little crazy.

He wondered how Dave was getting along. He was out working a checkpoint with their drinking buddy Tito Rodriguez. Out on the Q-zone line.

The pilot came out of his turn and slowed as he dropped down almost to the level of the road. The rotor wash blew into the field and raised the skirts on the pear trees. Muddy water swirled upward, but Rollins had a clear-enough view under the front four or five rows. He saw slender tree trunks and between those …

“Shit,” he said suddenly. “Got one.”

There was a man there. Dressed in farmer’s clothes that hung in torn rags from his burly shoulders. His eyes and mouth were black, and as the helo edged sideways toward him, the man snarled and reached for a man crouched in the open doorway.

Rollins took a small breath, let it out wrapped around a small prayer to Mary, and pulled the trigger. The captain said to go for a headshot, but that didn’t much matter when you fired a minigun. The heavy-caliber bullets tore the infected apart, splattering him to the wind. The parts that fell no longer seemed to belong to something that had once been human, and the rain pressed the red detritus down into the mud.

“Got the sumbitch,” said the pilot, sounding happy about it.

The feelings within Rollins were far less certain.

“Anything else?” asked the pilot.

“No,” said Rollins, though he wasn’t as sure as he sounded.

The helicopter drifted along the farm road, blowing back the boughs of the trees, tearing half-grown pears from the branches, looking for more things to kill.

As it flew, Rollins remembered the look in Dave’s eyes when he said that he thought this was maybe the End Times. Rollins mouthed the words of the prayer to Mary.

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

Hoping that he was just being ridiculous.

Hoping.

And praying.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A young lieutenant knocked and entered the general’s trailer just as Colonel Dietrich left.

“Sir,” said the young office to Zetter, “we’re still getting reports,” he said, holding out a clipboard wrapped in plastic.

Zetter took it, shook off the raindrops, and studied the data. Six patrol helicopters had encountered infected, two of them within a mile of the Q-zone. Sixteen ground patrols had also located and eliminated the walking dead. In all cases the infected were eliminated without any of his people taking injury. No additional loss of life was reported.

“And there’s this,” added the aide, handing over a second report. The general took it, and as he read he felt his heart sink. He turned away in case his feelings showed on his face.

Zetter stood there, considering the information in the second report. He sighed, read the rest of it, sighed again.

“Damn,” he said to himself.

During the ground search, his teams had encountered twenty-three people who displayed no signs of bites or other injuries, and who did not appear to be in any way infected. Five men, seven women, eleven children. Two of the children were babes in arms.

The report was written in the way that such reports had to be written.

All potential risks were removed with dispatch.

Removed with dispatch.

They didn’t even use the word “eliminated.”

Removed.

“Is there a reply, sir?” asked the aide.

“Just … proceed with the operation as directed,” said Zetter.

“Yes, sir.”

The aide left.

General Zetter sat heavily in his chair and stared bleakly at the report.

“Goddamn it,” he breathed.

He considered calling this in to the White House.

In the end, he did not. There was nothing new to report except that the cleanup was proceeding as anticipated. Proceeding, in fact, at something close to the best-case scenario outlined in the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center protocols.

“We’re winning this,” he told himself. “We’re winning.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The president met with his advisors for an update and learned that nothing new was happening. That should have been comforting, but wasn’t. He shooed them all out and told the Secret Service agents to make sure he wasn’t disturbed for ten minutes. They nodded like silent robots and pulled the door shut.

The president dug into his pocket for a pack of Winstons and the gold lighter given to him as a gift when he agreed to visit a NASCAR event in Georgia. He kissed one out of the pack, popped the lighter, leaned into the flame, inhaled all the way down to the bottom of his feet, and sank back into his leather chair. He held the smoke inside, enjoying the way the menthol changed from cold to hot in his lungs, and then blew a long stream of blue smoke at the ceiling.

On the big TV screen there were half a dozen windows showing various views of General Zetter’s efforts to clean up Stebbins County. Gunships filled the rainy skies. Armored personnel carriers were laden with guns of kinds he couldn’t name, some of which he’d never seen. The president was a lawyer and career politician and had never served. Not that it mattered, because many of his predecessors hadn’t either. Not everyone could be JFK.

He tried to understand the military, though, and felt he had a good grasp of its philosophies. He knew the big-budget technology, of course, the drones and missile programs, the fleets and the last jet fighters. All of those were big-ticket items that were constantly in the press. As he watched a line of soldiers in hazmat suits deploy from the back of a troop transport, he made a mental note to become more familiar with their gear, with the things they had to carry into fights like this.

He took another drag, wishing for a moment that he was back in college and hitting a blunt instead. That was a long time ago, and he hadn’t gotten high since junior year.

Now seemed like a good time.

Maybe it would take the edge off.

Or maybe not. He remembered the paranoia that sometimes accompanied the high, and he sure as hell didn’t need any more of that.

As he lifted the cigarette to his lips again he studied his hand. It was shaking.

Had it done that during the meeting?

He wasn’t sure.

Was it relief that the crisis was over — at least everything except the spin control — or was it something else?

Was Scott Blair right? Were the generals right? Except for Zetter they all agreed with Blair.

So what did that mean?

The president punched a button on the table.

“Yes, Mr. President?” asked his secretary.

“Doris, get General Zetter on the line. Private call.”

“Right away, Mr. President.”

It was just that. In less than a minute Zetter was on the line.

“General,” said the president curtly, “are you alone and is this a secure line?”

“Yes to both, sir,” said Zetter. The connection was still weak and static-filled because of the high-intensity jammers.

“Good. I’m alone as well, Simeon, so this is just the two of us. What I want is the bottom line. No politicizing, no padding or fluff. I want to know the absolute truth about where we stand in Stebbins County.”

There was a very small pause at the other end of the call. “We’re in good shape, Mr. President,” said Zetter. “However, with the storm strengthening we could use more men.”

“Have there been any fresh sightings?”

Another pause, a little longer this time. “There are scattered sightings, sir, but each encounter has been satisfactorily resolved.”

“How’s the line holding?”

“We’re confident that the Q-zone is absolutely solid,” Zetter said. “There have been no incidents at any of the checkpoints, and we have satellite and helicopter surveillance as well as roaming patrols and spotter planes. A mouse with a head cold couldn’t get out of Stebbins.”

“Simeon,” said the president, “I need you to be absolutely sure about this.”

“I am, sir.” Another hesitation. “However, we could really use the extra troops. National Guard, Reservists, or regular Army. Any or all. The more boots we have on the ground the tighter the lock and the quicker we can put a button on this whole matter.”

“Very well. Send your requests to Sylvia Ruddy and I’ll sign the order and make the necessary calls right away.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Of course. And Simeon—?”

“Sir?”

“I appreciate you stepping in to take control of this situation.”

“Doing my job, sir.”

“I know that Mack Dietrich is your friend. If there was time to have someone else ask him to stand down I would have made that call.”

“He’s a professional soldier, sir. He understands, as do I.”

But there had been one last little hesitation before Zetter said that.

The president took a long drag, considering the implications of that pause. He exhaled slowly.

“Simeon, there’s another matter that you need to be aware of.” He told Zetter about the flash drives believed to be in Billy Trout’s possession.

“That’s a wrinkle,” Zetter said slowly, clearly unhappy with the news.

“It is.”

“Do you want me to iron out that wrinkle?”

“Gently. You have a relationship with the police officer in the school? Desdemona Fox?”

“We spoke. It wasn’t, as you can imagine, a comfortable conversation for either of us.”

“Will she talk to you again?”

“I believe so.”

“Good. Do so, and ask her — and I mean that, Simeon, ask her for the drives.”

“I could send some of my people into the school to have that conversation, Mr. President.”

“In front of eight hundred witnesses? Do you think that’s the best move?”

“No, sir.”

“No,” agreed the president. “If, as you say, the situation is under control, then there is no immediate need to escalate an already tense situation.”

A pause. “Very well, sir.”

“Let’s repair bridges, not burn them.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Though…” the president said, drawing it out with feigned casualness, “have some people on standby. Just in case. Always good to be prepared for eventualities.”

“I agree, sir.”

“Thank you, General. Keep me apprised.”

And disconnected the call.

He sat in silence, looking through the smoke at the images on the screen, eyes narrowed, brain working, hands still trembling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“We have Merry from Philadelphia. Go ahead, Merry, you’re on the air. What do you think is happening in Stebbins County?”

“It’s not aliens,” said the caller.

“Glad to hear you say that.”

“It’s definitely not aliens.”

“So you say. Want to tell the listeners what you think is going on?”

“It’s the Chinese.”

“Chinese Americans?”

“No, the Chinese Chinese. The government of China, Gavin.”

“In rural Pennsylvania?”

“That’s where it starts. It starts off the radar. It starts right in the heartland. The Chinese already own America.”

Gavin signaled the producer for more coffee. This was going to be a long night.

“Tell me how they’re planning to do that, Merry.”

“It’s the Asian bird flu. That’s what’s killing people. The Chinese have sent agents over here to release their flu, and you know we don’t have anything that can stop it.”

“Why’s that, Merry?”

“’Cause it’s Asian.”

The coffee arrived and Gavin took the flask from his briefcase and added two fingers of Early Times.

Definitely a long night ahead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dez Fox ghosted through the empty halls of the Stebbins Little School. Her Glock was in its holster, her hands empty of everything except promise, her heart heavy with shame and grief. Every once in a while she paused and cocked her head to listen to the old building. Even the silence was not silent. With buildings this old there was always some sound. The faint hum of the battery-operated clock mounted high on the wall, its glass face covered by a heavy wire grille. The creak of timber and stone as the building settled. The faint banshee whistle of wind clawing its way in through broken windows upstairs. The muffled sound of children weeping beyond classroom doors at the other end of the hall.

No new shouts, though.

No screams and gunfire.

She was positive, though, that she could hear the discordant pounding of her own heart.

Without warning the walkie-talkie clipped to her hip squawked. The sound tore a cry of alarm from her.

“Officer Desdemona Fox, please respond,” said a voice clouded by harsh static. “Officer Des—”

Dez snatched up the device and keyed it. “This is Fox.”

The voice said, “Officer Fox, please hold the line.”

“Is this some kind of trick?” asked JT, but Dez didn’t reply.

Another voice spoke, one she hadn’t heard before. “Officer Fox?”

“This is Fox. Who’s this?”

“This is Major General Zetter.”

“Glad you remembered that we’re alive, General.”

“Is Mr. Trout with you?”

“No.”

“Can you put him on the line?”

“What is this about, General? If you’re thinking of trying to change our deal, then you can shove that right up your—”

“It’s my understanding that Mr. Trout is in possession of a set of flash drives belonging to Dr. Herman Volker. Are you aware of this?”

“Yes,” Dez said carefully, though she knew that Billy didn’t have the flash drives. Goat did. But Dez didn’t want to say so to Zetter, and definitely not without talking to Billy first.

“Are you aware of what’s on those drives?” asked the general.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“We would very much like to get our hands on that information, Officer Fox.”

“I bet you would. And I bet that one minute after you got them you’d shove a Hellfire missile up our asses. No thanks.”

“This isn’t a trick, Officer Fox.”

“Uh huh. And the check’s in the mail, I’ll call you in the morning, and I won’t come in your mouth.”

“Officer Fox—”

“Do you really expect us to believe anything you say?”

“You have been given assurance on behalf of the president of the United States that no further attacks would be made on the school as long as you followed the safety protocols.”

“Right. Tell that to the Sioux.”

“What?”

“As much as it causes me physical pain to say this out loud to another … what I assume is another Republican, our government doesn’t have a great track record for keeping its promises with people who have something they want.”

“Kennedy Democrat,” said Zetter.

“What?”

“I’m a Democrat. It may surprise you that there are plenty of us in the military, Miss Fox.”

“Whatever. You get what I’m saying? You know there’s not a lot of trust going on here.”

“I suppose that’s an unfortunate truth. But given that I was no more involved in making treaties with the Indians than I was behind the attack on the school, how about we avoid making assumptions that might confuse the situation? And it was I who ordered our troops to stop firing on the school.”

“Oh, blow me, Zetter. Billy Trout’s broadcast hit the news services and the president’s nuts crawled up inside his chest cavity. That’s what happened. He told you to stop trying to kill us only because it would look really fucking bad at the next elections. If you’re going to try and pretend otherwise then this conversation is over.”

Zetter took a moment with that. “Fair enough,” he said. “We don’t see things from exactly the same perspective, but I take your point.”

“Which leaves us where, General?”

“In the middle of a grave national crisis. Everything else aside, all bullshit aside, Officer Fox, the infection is still out there. Contained for the moment but still out there, still a major threat. You know that this is a bioweapon, one designed by Cold War scientists and then redesigned by Dr. Volker. If we stand any chance of eradicating it, then we need to have his research notes.”

“Why the fuck are you bothering us about this? Go ask Volker for them.”

“If that was a possibility, Officer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that right now we can’t locate Dr. Volker.”

Dez felt the floor tilt under her. She staggered into one of the classrooms, checked that it was empty, leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.

“Officer Fox—?”

“Didn’t he … didn’t he leave any records?”

“None that we have so far been able to find,” said Zetter.

“How the hell are you idiots allowed to run a country? I should have voted for a clown college. They’d at least have a reason for being this stupid.”

“I don’t want to debate politics, Officer Fox. We need what’s on Mr. Trout’s flash drives.”

A thousand thoughts raced through Dez’s head. None of them were good. Most were way across the line into paranoia, but she felt justified in thinking every one of them.

“Tell you what, General,” she said, “how about you do this? How about you airlift us the hell out of here? Take us to Pittsburgh or Philly or somewhere other than where people are eating each other. How about you do that and then we can talk about the flash drives.”

“You know we can’t risk that. You have to understand that.”

“Sure. Have a nice day, General. Thanks for calling.”

“Wait!”

“What?” she barked.

“We can’t take you out. You have to understand that. We don’t know enough about this disease to guarantee that it’s safe to bring you out. Until we look at Dr. Volker’s research notes we don’t know all the ways in which this thing can be communicated. We have concerns that anyone coming into close contact with the skin or blood of one of the infected might be at risk. We don’t know if someone can carry the infection without developing obvious symptoms. There are a lot of things we don’t know and until we do, we need to keep you in isolation. Surely you can appreciate the severity of this, surely you can understand the necessity of—”

“Okay, okay, yeah, I get it. Fuck.”

“So letting us have the flash drives is the quickest and surest way to help us understand this enough so that we can get you out of there.”

“I get the logic, General, but pardon me if I don’t trust your motives worth a wet shit.”

The general sighed. “Is there something else I can do for you that would encourage you to do the right thing here?”

“Fuck you.”

“Officer Fox, I—”

“No, General, fuck you. In fact, fuck you and that asshole in the White House, and fuck everyone else who had a hand in this. Fuck all of you. All of you. Am I making myself clear? Is any of that getting through? You deserve to burn in hell.”

General Zetter’s response caught her totally off guard. He said, “I know.”

A sob broke in Dez’s chest. She squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could, wincing at the effort not to see anything, even her own thoughts.

“You killed him,” she said.

“Who?” asked Zetter sharply, clearly alarmed. “Is Mr. Trout—”

“Not him, you douchebag. You killed JT.”

“Who is that, Officer Fox? Was that a friend of yours?”

“Patrol Sergeant JT Hammond, Stebbins Police. A good man. A family man. A decent person who only ever cared about other people. You maniacs killed him.”

Zetter said, “Was he the officer who went outside with the other infected?”

“Yes.” It hurt Dez to say that one word.

“I … he…” Zetter cleared his throat. “I saw what happened to him. I saw what he did. He protected the children from the infected. Officer Hammond died a hero.”

Dez banged the back of head against the wall. “JT was murdered and you bastards killed him. And now you want us to spread our legs and let you fuck us.”

“That’s not how it is, Officer.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

Neither of them spoke again for several burning seconds.

Then Zetter said, “We need those flash drives.”

“If you try to take them, General, I’ll burn them. You can come in here with guns blazing and you won’t find shit. But I can promise that every single thing you do will be streamed live to the Net. The world’s watching, General.”

“Officer Fox,” said the general, “be careful not to overplay your hand. You might not have as many good cards as you think. I’m trying to work something out we can both live with — and I do mean live—don’t make fools out of both of us, and don’t make martyrs out of the children in that school.”

Dez almost told him to eat shit, but she kept her tongue. What he’d just said chilled her, filling her mind with awful possibilities.

“Look,” she said, “Volker gave the flash drives to Billy. It’s his call. I’ll talk to him and get back to you.”

“Very well, Officer Fox, I apprec—”

She switched off the walkie-talkie.

Moving slowly, like someone awakening after surgery, she got to her feet, closed the door, crossed to the teacher’s desk, pulled out the chair, and crawled into the footwell. It was a tight, dark space that smelled of shoe polish, crayons, and old coffee. Dez pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around her shins, and laid her head down. Sobs shuddered through her whole body and tears steamed hot and thick down her face.

“Oh, God,” she wept. “JT.”

The shakes began then.

Dez crammed a fist into her mouth to block the scream that tried to tear its way out of her throat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The president returned to his office and there received an endless flow of advisors, including generals of different wattage; planners from FEMA; senators from Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio; scientific advisors; the senior members of his staff; and Scott Blair. Over and over again, Scott Blair.

His desk began piling up with reports on everything from estimated casualties — the current guess was more than nine thousand — to letters from heads of state expressing sympathy and offering assistance. The offers were rote lip service that carried as little actual weight as people at a funeral suggesting the bereaved call on them if there’s anything they can do. Most people wouldn’t want to take that call, and that was doubly so in global politics. Besides, the quickest way for his administration to look even weaker than it was would be to ask for help from another country.

However, that was secondary.

When he was alone for a few minutes, the document that caught and held the president’s attention was the estimated loss of life. He read the numbers, then closed his eyes and winced as if each digit gouged a fishing hook under his skin.

Nine thousand people.

Three times as many people than died in the fall of the Twin Towers.

Nearly twice as many as died during the Iraq War; more than twice the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan.

Nine thousand. All in one day, on American soil.

On his watch.

During 9/11 he’d been a junior senator from a midwestern state, and he’d been at home when the tragedy happened. He met with dozens of groups of citizens, from a few dozen at a Rotary Club to tens of thousands at a memorial service in a baseball stadium. He saw something in each one of them, something that connected them, one to another, while also binding them to that moment in time. It was a pervasive, shared wound that would never really heal. The scar itself would hurt, and it would continue to hurt for years, possibly for the lifetime of each person who’d lived through that terrible day. Even now, so many years later, if you mentioned the Towers or 9/11, there was a flicker behind the eyes. Not exactly pain, but a memory of pain, an awareness of that scar gouged into the national soul.

Now this.

Nine thousand people dead. Not from a foreign enemy or fanatics prosecuting a radical ideology, but from within the U.S. government. Illegal bioweapons research. Military action against civilians.

It wouldn’t matter that the research was initiated before his presidency and conducted without his knowledge. He would still be blamed.

It didn’t matter that the Colonel Dietrich’s attack on Stebbins and the school were desperate measures to prevent the pathogen from spreading and killing millions. If your dog gets out of the yard and bites people, you get no sympathy. You’re still to blame.

Which meant that in the eyes of the public he was the villain of this piece.

It would destroy him. His career, his credibility, and his legacy.

The only chance he had, the only way he could imagine to save some shred of his presidency, would be to prove that Volker acted alone and without sanction, that the man was mentally unstable, and that all actions taken were the only ones left.

All of which was true.

But none of which could be proved.

Without the flash drives.

As the night wore on, he began to regret Blair’s suggestion that they label Billy Trout as an anarchist hacker and cyber-terrorist. That was useful in the heat of the crisis, but if this thing was truly over, then the truth about Trout would come out and he’d become the hero opposing the big, bad villain in the White House.

“Shit,” he muttered. He decided that it was Scott Blair’s problem to fix.

His intercom buzzed. “Mr. President, the secretary of state is here.”

The president rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Okay. Send him in.”

He listened to that aide, and others, and still others; hearing what they said, interacting, pretending to give his full attention, while all the time waiting for General Zetter’s call. Waiting to be told that the drives had been obtained.

Waiting for a lifeline.

Then he got a call from Scott Blair.

“Mr. President,” said Blair, “the FBI have located Dr. Volker…”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The two FBI agents who parked in front of the motel were named Smith and Jones. Actual names, and the pairing was done by random chance rather than due to some supervisory sense of humor. Adam Smith and Miriam Jones were both of average height, average build, early thirties, with good hair and off-the-rack suits. They carried the same model handgun, wore identical wires behind their ears, and worked out at the same gym.

And they liked each other.

Smith privately thought that Jones was a closet liberal who was probably using the job as a way to leverage herself into the much higher-paying world of corporate security. Jones thought that Smith was a semiliterate mouth-breathing Hawk who yearned for the chance to shoot someone.

They were both entirely correct about the other.

Neither ever expressed their opinions to anyone, and certainly not to their partners. On the job they were clinically precise, appropriately efficient, and entirely humorless.

Smith nodded to one of the units whose door opened to the parking lot. A Toyota Rav4 was parked outside.

“Credit card trace says Volker booked that room,” he said.

Jones consulted her iPhone. “Tags match.”

As one they looked from Volker’s car to the one parked next to it, a Crown Victoria nearly identical to theirs. There were no other cars in that part of the lot. Sodium vapor lamps painted the falling downpour a chemical orange. Winds blew the rain across the lot in serpentine waves.

They got out of their car and Jones placed a hand on the hood of Volker’s Toyota.

“Cold,” she said. Neither of them wore hats or used umbrellas, and they were immediately soaked. Neither of them cared.

Smith felt the hood of the Crown Vic. “Warm.”

“Federal tags,” said Jones.

Smith cocked an eyebrow. “CIA?”

“They weren’t scheduled for this pickup,” said Jones, frowning his disapproval. “Not that I heard.”

The agents unbuttoned their jackets to facilitate reaching their guns, crossed to the motel unit’s door, and knocked. It was opened almost at once by a man dressed in a business suit very much like the one Smith wore. He had an ID wallet open to show them his credentials.

“Saunders,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Jones.

“Volker’s one of ours.”

“We know that,” said Smith. “But we were assigned to pick him up. The Agency doesn’t have jurisdiction here.”

Saunders was a tired-looking man in his fifties. Probably a former field agent relegated to scut work on the downslope of his career track. “Moot now,” he said, and he stepped back to open the door.

Smith and Jones gave him hard looks as they entered the motel room of the man who had created Lucifer 113.

They stopped just inside the door.

There were two other men in the room. One was Saunders’s partner, a gap-toothed and freckle-faced young man who looked like Alfred E. Newman, except he wasn’t wearing a goofy smile. Instead he was staring up at the second man.

Dr. Volker’s shoes swung slowly back and forth ten inches above the carpeted floor. His arms and legs were slack, head tilted to one side, eyes wide, and tongue bulging from between his parted lips. A length of heavy-duty orange extension cord was affixed to the neck of the ceiling fan and cinched tight around Volker’s throat.

A handwritten note was affixed to his chest with a safety pin.

“Ah, shit,” said Smith.

“Fuck,” said Jones.

“Yeah,” said Saunders.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Gavin Finke’s producer and engineer were screening a huge number of calls and putting them in queue.

“Okay,” said Gavin, “we have Ron from Fayette County. Thanks for calling.”

“Hey, Gavin, big fan of the show. Been listening for years.”

“Thanks, my man. So tell me, what do you think is happening in Stebbins?”

“It’s all a big government cover-up,” said Ron. “I heard they were testing some kind of bioweapon on the people in Stebbins County and it got out of control.”

“That’s quite a claim, Ron. What makes you think that?”

“It was on the Internet.”

“And if it’s on the Net it has to be real?”

“Well … no, but I saw a video by a reporter from Stebbins. Billy Trout. You know the guy, he does that Fishing for News with Billy Trout thing. Did all those stories about Homer Gibbon all the way up to the execution and all. He’s a real reporter.”

“Not sure there are any real reporters anymore, Ron, but sure, Billy Trout’s a friend of the show. We had him on with the Yardley Yeti story.”

“I heard that show. I think that was a chupacabra and—”

“Keeping on point here. Why do you think Billy has his finger on the pulse of a government conspiracy?”

“Well, c’mon, man … why else would they have tried to kill him?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The young sergeant stepped into the muddy road and made that air-slapping gesture that meant to slow down and stop.

Without turning to the captain, the driver said, “We good here, boss?”

“I got this,” said Imura. “Put on your poker faces and don’t say shit.”

The four members of his team — three men and a woman — said nothing, but they each removed credentials from their pockets and held them on their laps. The sergeant was a thin Latino with a precisely trimmed mustache and absolutely no air of authority. New to his stripes, thought Imura.

“Identification, please,” said the sergeant. He wore a white combat hazmat suit over which were gun and equipment belts. His protective hood was pulled off, though, and hung behind ears that stood out at right angles to his head. The sergeant looked cold, wet, far too young, and completely terrified. The rain had slowed to a steady, depressing drizzle and the two small all-weather camp lanterns set on either side of the road did little to push back the darkness. Lightning flashed behind the trees but the thunder was miles off.

Another storm was coming, though. The National Weather Service was calling for nearly five inches of rain over the next sixteen hours. The levees were going to fail, no doubt about it. And that would be proof that God or the Devil was using Stebbins as a urinal. Just like Scott thought.

The sergeant studied the ID, then handed it back and went through the process with everyone in the car. The credentials said that Sam Imura was a captain, which was true, but it identified the others as lieutenants, which they were not. All four of Imura’s group had once been sergeants of significant rank, from the former master sergeant at the wheel to the gunnery sergeant seated directly behind Imura. Sergeant was the most common rank among shooters in U.S. Special Forces. Each of them was certainly sharper, more knowledgeable, and more competent than most officers of any rank, and Sam Imura knew that was no exaggeration. But staying as an enlisted man kept them out of military politics. A nice, safe, sane place to be.

None of them, however, currently held rank in the United States military. Nor did Captain Imura. They were all officially retired, though because they were private contractors working for the government, their ranks clung to them like comfortable clothes.

The sergeant glanced at the other man working the roadblock. He was an even less authoritative slice of local white bread, stood on the far side of a sawhorse barrier that would provide no real defense against a determined intrusion. He held an M16 at port arms and tried to look like G.I. Joe because there was a Humvee filled with officers.

Imura accepted his ID case back. “How are you doing out here, Sergeant?”

“All quiet and secure, sir.”

An answer that meant nothing.

The young man gave the “officers” a crisp salute, which was returned in the casual manner used by career officers. Nice theater.

Imura said, “This should be a four-man post, Sergeant. Where are your other men?”

The young sergeant took a moment on that. “Sir, we’re pretty thin on the ground. As far as I know there are two men on every road.” He paused as if uncertain he should have said that. “They have four-man teams on some of the bigger roads.”

That last part sounded like a lie to Imura. He figured there were only two men on every road. Maybe fewer on some. Between main road, side roads, farm roads, fire access roads, and walking paths, there were ninety-seven ways to leave the town of Stebbins by wheeled vehicle. That was a minimum of one hundred and ninety-four men per shift. Figure twelve-hour shifts and that’s roughly four hundred men just working roadblocks. That didn’t cover supervisory personnel, reconnaissance, the men needed for reinforcing the levees, the men guarding the survivors at the Little School, and patrols hunting down stray infected.

It also didn’t really address all of the ways out of Stebbins on foot.

And the infected don’t drive, he thought.

There was no point in discussing this further with someone at the sergeant’s pay grade.

“Stay sharp, Sergeant,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

The white boy picked up the sawhorse and walked it to the side of the road. The Humvee began rolling through the mud into the town of Stebbins.

Imura caught the driver looking in the rearview mirror. “What?” he asked.

When alone, there was always a speak-up and speak-plain policy with Imura’s team.

The driver, whose name was Alex Foster but who was known on the job as Boxer, said, “You realize that if anything really comes out of the woods those two kids are a late-night snack.” It wasn’t a question.

“Can’t all be that bad,” said Rachel Bloom, combat call sign Gypsy. She was second in command of the Boy Scouts. A tough woman with five full tours under her belt, running special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many more since signing with Sam.

The man seated behind Boxer, DeNeille Shoopman, known as Shortstop, said what they were all thinking. He was a pragmatic man who preferred maintaining a big-picture view of everything. “It only takes one hole.”

“These infected sonsabitches aren’t armed,” said Bud Hollister — Moonshiner, the rowdy former biker-turned-soldier. “You see the footage from the school? They walked right into the bullets and didn’t give much of a wet shit.”

“Headshots put ’em down,” observed Shortstop.

“Yeah?” Moonshiner snorted. “And how many soldiers do you know who can reliably get a headshot in a combat situation? In the dark? In the rain? In a running firefight? Please.”

No one answered. Everyone cursed quietly. Gypsy and Shortstop turned to look back at the small glow of lantern light that was quickly being consumed by darkness and distance.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Scott Blair put down the phone and sat there staring at it. Wanting to smash it. Wanting to burn his office down just so the damn thing wouldn’t ring again.

Dr. Herman Volker was dead.

God almighty.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A bloody hand shot out and clamped around the throat of the zombie a split second before those teeth could snap shut on Goat’s flesh.

“Hold on a minute, slick,” said Homer Gibbon. He was smiling and there was a crooked playfulness in his voice. “I’m trying to have a conversation here.”

The zombie tried to pull free. It clawed at Homer with its fingernails and squirmed around, attempting to bite the wrist of the hand that held it. Goat shrank back from it, and then he saw the look in Homer’s face. There was no trace of fear. Nothing. The man squatted there, his face and body covered with fresh blood, maggots wriggling in open wounds in his skin, and yet his mouth wore a smile of curious wonder like that of a child watching a butterfly. Homer’s eyes were filled with dark lights.

“I know you,” he said softly, directed his words to the struggling zombie. “I see you with the Black Eye, yes I do. I see all the way into your soul. Do you believe me?”

The creature writhed and snapped, but he was helpless in Homer’s powerful grip.

“The Red Mouth has whispered to you, hasn’t it? You understand its secrets now, don’t you, boy? Yes … I can see that you do. And that Red Mouth is screaming so loud inside your head that you have to do something. You have to let it speak through you. You have to feed it because it’s so goddamn hungry, tell me if I’m lying.”

The zombie did not respond, though Goat turned to look at it, to seek for something in its eyes. Was there something there? Was there a flicker of something deep in those dark wells?

They say that the eyes are the windows of the soul. Goat had heard that a million times. If so, then these windows looked into a landscape that had suddenly become blighted, like the floodplains of Mississippi and Louisiana after the levees failed. Like Japan after the tsunami. There was wreckage that proved that life had once existed there, but the life itself was gone.

Or … was it?

“Yes, you’ve heard the Red Mouth speak and you’ve listened, haven’t you, boy? You listened real good and you took it all to heart. That’s nice. That’s real nice.”

For the briefest of moments, as Homer spoke to the infected in his slow, rhythmic backwoods voice, Goat thought he saw a shadow move behind the zombie’s eyes. Was it the mind of the dead leaving a deserted house? Or was it something else? A lingering trace of the man Homer had killed? A ghost haunting the body it once owned.

Whatever was happening, it was horrible from every angle. A life destroyed. A monster created. And a soul …

What?

Lost?

Trapped?

Goat’s mind rebelled at placing too precise a label on it.

The zombie pounded at Homer’s hand with soft, clumsy fists.

Without turning to Goat, Homer spoke to him, “I done this, you know.”

“What?”

“I done this. This plague thing. It ain’t no bioweapon like they’re saying on the radio. It was me that done this. The Black Eye opened in my mind and now I speak with the voice of the Red Mouth. Used to be I was a slave of the Red Mouth, or at least I thought I was, but after I died and woke up in that body bag…? Well, hell, I knew. I realized that all this time the Black Eye was my own mind’s eye, and the Red Mouth is my mouth. You understand what I mean by that, son?”

Goat didn’t know how to answer that question. It seemed like there was a thin tightrope between possible answers and that rope was covered in slippery grease. He clamped his mouth shut and shook his head.

“Go on, son,” said Homer, clearly understanding Goat’s reluctance. “Don’t be shy. I won’t bite.”

There was a beat after that last phrase came out and then Homer realized what he’d said and what it meant, and he burst out laughing.

The zombie pounded on his arm, tore at the flesh of the hand holding him. Black saliva dribbled from the corners of his mouth.

Suddenly Homer got to his feet and dragged the zombie upright. It was a display of enormous strength because the struggling infected had to weigh at least two hundred pounds. Homer let go of the creature’s throat, grabbed both shoulders, spun him around, and shoved him toward the door. The zombie staggered and tripped over the twitching leg of a barista who was just now returning from some dark place to a world that was darker still. Homer looked down at her and at the man he’d just shoved.

“This is about to get twitchy,” he said, though Goat didn’t know if he was speaking to himself or not. Then a slow smile began to form on the killer’s pale lips and he turned fully toward Goat. That smile was perhaps the most frightening thing Goat had ever seen. Homer once more stabbed a finger at Goat. “You tell stories, right? I mean, that’s what reporters do, right?”

Goat nodded. A tiny, frightened nod, but there didn’t seem to be any traps built into so simple a question.

The zombie Homer had shoved, spun back around, and he lunged forward. Not at Homer, but to try and barrel past him to get to the only person in the whole place who wasn’t dying or dead. Goat.

Without a blink, without a fragment of hesitation, Homer drove an elbow into the zombie’s face with such sudden, shocking force that the infected’s whole upper torso froze in place while his legs ran up into the air. Then the creature’s body canted backward and he fell bonelessly to the floor. The back of his head struck the marble floor and exploded, spraying red and black outward in a starburst pattern. His legs and arms instantly stopped moving and he lay dead. Truly dead.

“Impolite motherfucker,” muttered Homer. Then he smiled once more at Goat. “Where was I? Oh yeah, telling stories and shit. During my trial and when they killed me, you were one of those asshole reporters who was there nearly every day. Telling the court’s version of my story. Only the thing is it isn’t really my story. It isn’t the story of the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. No, sir, it is not. It isn’t the full story and it sure as shit ain’t the right story. And, let’s face it, son, I got a story worth telling. Look at me. I mean, seriously, look at fucking me.”

Goat couldn’t take his eyes off of Homer Gibbon.

The man was huge, powerful, covered in blood, and …

And he was a monster.

An actual monster.

Something the world had never seen before.

Dead and yet not dead. Infected with the Lucifer 113 plague and yet still capable of thought — though whether that was “rational” thought was up for debate in Goat’s mind. A man who had been the nation’s most notorious serial killer — up there with legendary murderers like Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Saint John, and Ted Bundy — and who had been tried, convicted, and executed.

And who was now what, exactly?

Was he a victim of Dr. Volker’s insane desire to punish criminals of this kind? Yes.

Was he the brutal and sadistic maniac who slaughtered __ __ people and deserved the punishment given him? Absolutely.

Was he patient zero of a new plague, something that, should it be allowed to spread, could become an unstoppable pandemic?

Yes.

God almighty, thought Goat. He felt like fireworks were exploding inside his head. Everything was too bright, too loud, too massively wrong. And all of these thoughts tumbled through his brain in a burning moment.

Homer was still speaking, but his smile had dimmed. “You listening to me, boy? You’d better be ’cause it looks like you’re ankle deep in shit right about now. Tell me I’m wrong. No? Nothing? But I got your attention, right? Give me a nod or something, boy.”

Goat nodded.

“Good boy,” said Homer, his grin returning. A few of the other dead were starting to rise. “We ain’t got no time at all, so how about we cut the shit and get to it?”

Goat found himself nodding again, though he had no idea what the “it” was Homer wanted to get to.

The twitching woman rolled over onto hands and knees and began to rise. Homer took two short steps closer and snapped his foot out in a powerful kick that sent her sprawling into the path of two other dead who had managed to get to their feet. The three of them collapsed into a hissing tangle of arms and legs.

Homer snorted, amused by it. But at the same time he seemed momentarily uncertain as he watched his clumsy victims.

“Shi-i-i-i-i-i-it,” he breathed, drawing it out. Then he blinked and turned back to Goat. “Okay, boy, here’s the deal. I’m going to get my ass out of here before this becomes a buffet. I don’t think these fuckers will hurt me — not with the Black Eye open inside my mind — but they’ll definitely go ass-wild on you. You’re a bag of bones, but I’ll bet there’s some tasty meat on you, yes, sir.”

Goat felt blood drain from his face.

“But I think I’d rather let you keep sucking air. For a while, anyway. You game with that?”

The sound that escaped Goat’s throat might have been a yes, but it sounded like a mouse’s squeak.

Homer took it as assent, though, and he nodded. “So, here’s the deal. You come with me. You do what reporters do. Interview me, whatever. You do that for me, you tell my story, my side of it, you let the Red Mouth speak through me and you write down every word and then pretty it up some for the newspapers. What do they call it? Edit it? Rewrite it? Whatever. You do that, and you play fair with me while you’re doing it, you make sure to tell the whole truth, and you might just walk away from this. How’s that sound?”

The dead were getting up now. The three who’d fallen and others. Goat didn’t know how many people had been in the Starbucks when Homer came in. Fourteen, give or take? Some of them were hurt but not dead, victims of Homer’s rage. Shattered bodies, torn limbs, bitten flesh. No one was whole. No one was uninfected.

Except him.

The moans of the newly resurrected dead filled the store.

“Think quick, son,” said Homer. “Big ol’ fucking clock ticking right here.”

Goat tried to answer, squeaked again, coughed his throat clear and forced out a reply. “You promise you won’t hurt me?”

He hated how weak and small and terrified his voice sounded.

And he hated it much more when he saw how his words and his tone changed the grin on Homer’s face. The killer licked the blood from his teeth and lips.

“I just said I wouldn’t hurt you, boy.”

“No,” insisted Goat, grabbing whatever thread of a lifeline he could, “listen, listen … you want your story told? I mean really told? Told so that it reaches everyone and everyone knows who you really are? That’s what you want? Then I can give it to you. I’m the one who broke this story. Me and my friend Billy Trout. I got the story out that no one else could. I know how to make sure it gets out.”

Homer narrowed his eyes.

There were sudden screams behind Goat and he turned to see the newly risen dead falling on the dying victims of Homer Gibbon. The infected snarled and growled as they tore into living flesh. Blood sprayed the walls and the screams were high and piercing and entirely without hope.

“You broke that story?” said Homer slowly.

“Yes. Billy and I.”

“I heard that Trout fellow on the news.”

“He’s still inside the town. In Stebbins. He’s at the school.”

The screams rose and rose. Goat cringed away from it, edging toward Homer only because he was closer to the door. If he could get Homer to take him outside, then maybe Goat could make a break for it. The highway was right there. He’d take his chances with high-speed traffic in the rain.

Homer was still studying him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.

Then his eyes flicked to what was going on behind Goat.

“Shit,” he grumbled, “those are some persistent fuckers.”

There was no need for Goat to look. The slap of slow feet on the wet floor told the story.

“Please,” begged Goat.

Homer snaked out a hand, caught Goat by the front of his shirt and jerked him forward just as something brushed the nape of Goat’s neck. As he stumbled forward, the cameraman craned his head around to see long, red fingers clutching at the air where his head had been a moment ago.

“I need my laptop,” Goat said. “And my camera bag.”

Homer shrugged. He picked up the MacBook and tossed it to Goat, then snatched the handle of the canvas camera bag out from under a murder victim who was twitching his way back from death. Homer slung the heavy bag on his brawny shoulder and began backing toward the door as the zombies shuffled forward.

“Get your ass in gear,” warned Homer as he grabbed Goat again and hauled him away. Goat staggered toward the door and then thrust through it into the rain. He wanted to slam it in Homer’s face, but the hydraulic door closer was too strong, Homer came outside and he tried to slam it, too. When it resisted him, he leaned his full weight against it. The dead hit the door with enough slack weight to push it several inches outward again.

“Shit,” said Homer, though he did not seem particularly concerned. He still held Goat with one hand and had the other pressed against the glass. He cut a sharp look at Goat. “Listen to me, boy. We got to make a run for the car or they’ll eat your dick sure as God made little green apples. But … and I want you to listen real hard to what I have to say now. If I let you go and you try to run, then you better pray that I can’t run faster than you, ’cause if I catch you then I’m going to bite your dick off and make you eat it. You believe me when I tell you that?”

Goat did. And he said so.

Homer pushed back against the door. “Then let’s go. Car’s unlocked. Go!”

He shoved Goat toward the passenger side and held the door long enough for the cameraman to take a few stumbling steps, correct himself, and begin backing toward the car. Goat clutched the laptop to his chest as if it was a shield. Forty feet away the highway was bright with headlights and fast metal. Could he make it? Then he caught Homer watching him; the killer turned to follow Goat’s line of sight, then turned back and smiled.

“Call the play, son.”

Goat’s heart hammered like desperate fists. Tears fell down his hot cheeks. His legs and muscles trembled with adrenaline and terror.

Go, he told himself. Go, go, go!

A sob broke from his chest as he spun around and reached for the door handle of the metallic green Nissan Cube.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Billy Trout left the basement gymnasium after the bodies had been taken care of. Because they were forbidden to open the exterior doors to the school, the two corpses in their makeshift body bags were placed in one of the shower stalls. After the others left, Billy lingered and stared down at the silent forms.

He wanted to say something, a prayer or something of importance, but even though he kept calling on God since this whole thing started, his actual faith was as dead as the town. This sort of thing did little to rekindle what had always been a weak flame in him. Even so, he mumbled something, a fragment of the Lord’s Prayer, getting some of the words wrong but getting the gist of it out there. For the dead, in case they believed. And … in case he was wrong about there being no God. Trout was open to taking any help they could get. He’d have prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster if he thought it would earn the people in this school even a small measure of grace.

Then, heavyhearted, he turned away and climbed the stairs to the first floor. He tried again to call Goat, but he still had no signal. Frowning, he went to the second floor and found a room with big windows so there was no chance of interference.

Nothing. The little meter on the satellite phone said that he still had half a charge. Power, but no signal. No contact with Goat, or with anyone.

The explanation for it was obvious to the realist in him, but Trout resisted it nonetheless. He didn’t want it to be the case.

“Uh oh…” he murmured.

Depressed and frightened, he went downstairs and looked once more into the big classroom. Two of the teachers were handing out little plastic containers of fruit cocktail. Trout thought it was such a bizarre sight. He remembered getting those little cups when he was a kid in this school. It was always a happy moment. They packed a ton of sugar into those cups, and it was nice to see halved maraschino cherries floating among the chunks of peach and pear. Now it seemed incredibly sad. The children took the cups, opened them with clumsy fingers, spooned out the fruit, chewed, swallowed, and all in a ghastly silence.

Trout backed out of the room and went to find Dez.

At first she seemed to be nowhere at all, and he poked his head into every room. Then he caught sight of her heading toward the fire tower at the far end of the hall. He immediately understood where she was heading. He limped down the hall as quickly as he could, hissing whenever the pain shot down the back of his leg. The heavy fire tower door creaked as he opened it, and for a moment he listened to the sounds from below. Soft footfalls fading into silence. He descended slowly and silently, and finally paused on the stone steps and saw her there, standing with her palms on the steel door, shoulders slumped, head bowed.

On the other side of that door was what was left of the infected from the school.

And JT. He was out there, too.

“Damn,” breathed Trout. His voice was soft but in the utter stillness of the fire tower it carried and Dez suddenly stiffened. She didn’t turn though.

“Billy?”

“Yeah, babe.”

There was a beat. “Don’t call me that.”

“Right. Sorry.” Now wasn’t the time to test the limits of whatever new connection they’d forged.

He descended the last few steps and moved toward her, mindful to come into her peripheral vision well out of strike range. Experience is a wonderful teacher.

She stared at the closed door as if it were made of glass. “What do you want?”

He almost said that he came looking to see how she was, but Trout preferred his balls still attached to his body. So, instead he said, “They said they’d airdrop some food to us. That’s fine, but nobody I talked to knows how to get up on the roof without going outside.”

“There’s a fire access stairway.”

“Right, okay, that’s good,” he said. “But no one else knew that.”

She turned to look at him, but said nothing.

“Once they drop the stuff,” Trout continued, “it’s got to be inspected, sorted, and distributed. You’ve seen how people are reacting. They’re going to do it wrong. Some of these people are a twitch away from losing it. They might grab stuff or horde stuff. We have to take control of things. We have to make sure we do everything right.”

Her eyes searched his face and after a long moment she gave a single nod.

“There’s something else,” he said. “No, two things. The first is that we have to double — no, triple — check everyone. I mean everyone.”

“We did. No one has a bite.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. The guy who … I mean the guy down in the gym. I didn’t see a bite on him.”

A line formed between her brows. “Of course there was a bite.”

“No, there wasn’t. I, um, checked. Everywhere. I even had to cut his clothes off just to be sure.”

She pushed off from the wall and turned completely to him, her eyes hostile and hot. “The fuck are you trying to say, Billy?”

“That guy didn’t die from a bite. Maybe he got infected some other way. Maybe he got some of the black blood in his mouth. When Goat and I interviewed Volker he said something about the infected spitting. So maybe it was that.”

“Shit.”

“Or maybe it’s just enough to get blood on your skin. Everybody’s pretty badly dinged up. Maybe the worms in the blood can get into an open wound and…”

His voice trailed off. Both of them wore clothes that were caked with dried blood. A lot of that was black blood. Dez began wiping at her clothes — almost absently at first and then she started slapping at her uniform faster and faster until her hands became a hysterical blur.

“Stop it!” yelled Trout.

He had to yell it three times before she froze. For a moment Dez’s eyes were so wild that the whites showed all around. Crazy eyes. Trout had seen her like that before. Once, naked and wild-eyed, she’d chased him with a shotgun. Not one of their better moments as a couple.

“Dez … we wiped ourselves down with Purell, remember? Remember? You damn near did Jell-O shots of the stuff.”

The wild look slowly faded, and she gave him a slow nod. She was panting, though. “Right, right … sorry. Jeez … I’m sorry.”

Trout tried to touch her, to give her arm a reassuring squeeze or maybe coax her into a hug, but Dez walked a few paces away, hands on hips, and stared at the wall as she worked on her breathing.

Without turning she asked, “Volker gave you all that research stuff on a couple of flash drives, right?”

“Sure. Goat has them and—”

She half-turned. “Did you think to keep a copy of it?”

Trout shook his head. “There wasn’t time for that. Things were already falling apart. I dropped him at the county line and he walked across a field to the Starbucks in Bordentown and I went to my office to get the satellite phone. Things just kept going wrong from then on. Why?”

Dez chewed her lip for a moment, then tapped the walkie-talkie on her hip. “General Zetter called me on the walkie-talkie. They want the drives.”

“I bet they do.”

“He said that they need the science and research on them. Apparently that ass-pirate Volker did something to the Lucifer disease thing. Changed it somehow. They don’t understand what he did and they can’t come up with a way of stopping it without Volker’s notes.”

Trout slumped. “Ahh … damn it.”

“Zetter thinks you have them.”

“How do they even know about them?” mused Trout. “Wait, no, that’s my bad … I may have mentioned something in my last broadcast.”

“That was stupid.”

“I was making a point.”

“About being stupid?”

“Dez…”

“They need that stuff. Zetter didn’t go so far as making a direct threat, but with all those guns out there pointed at us, he doesn’t really have to. I told him that if he tried to storm the place and take the drives by force I’d destroy them.”

“What did you do that for?”

Her eyes shifted away. “I didn’t know what else to tell him. And I—”

“You wanted him to think we had something he needed. Okay, I get it. It was—”

“What? ‘Stupid’? Are you going to throw that back in my face?”

“No, I’m not,” he said with a smile. “I was going to say that it was an understandable stalling tactic.”

She grunted. “We need to get in touch with Goat. Maybe he can email stuff to us. There have to be flash drives here. If we can send the stuff we could actually have something to bargain with.”

Trout held out the satellite phone. “That was the second thing I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I can’t get a call through to Goat.”

“What?”

“I know.”

“Where’d you call from? Maybe there’s no reception down in the—”

“I’ve called from a dozen different places on the first and second floor. Right by the windows, too. Nothing.”

“Shit.”

“What I don’t get,” said Trout, “is why they’re bullying us about this. All they have to do is talk to Volker.”

“Zetter said they can’t find Volker.”

“Oh … crap.”

“So,” Dez asked, “what do we do now?”

Trout shook his head. “Geez … I really don’t know. Keep trying to get in touch with Goat.”

“Billy,” said Dez, “we could tell them where to find Goat.”

“And have them put a bullet in his head?” Trout fired back. “No thanks.”

“Would you rather they stormed in here? With all these kids?”

“I’d rather we find a way to get in touch with Goat.”

They looked at each other for a few moments, and then off into separate quadrants of the middle distance.

“Can we use the walkie-talkie to call Goat?” asked Trout.

“I don’t know. If so, I wouldn’t know how,” she admitted. Then she tilted her head to one side as if listening to a thought. “Could they be blocking the sat phone somehow? I mean, could they be jamming it or something?”

“Goat could tell you that,” said Trout. “He’s the techno geek.”

“But it’s possible, right?”

They thought about the situation for a long time, but neither of them had a solution. Dez’s knowledge of electronics didn’t extend much beyond downloading Hank Williams Jr. ringtones and watching YouTube videos. Trout was more savvy, but nowhere close to Goat’s level.

“I guess so,” Trout said at last. “It’s funny, we had a story scheduled about the twenty-first-century army, but I haven’t started the research yet. Bad timing.”

“Yeah, it blows that the death of our entire town got in the way of your job.”

“Bite me, Dez. You know what I mean.”

“I know. I was making a joke.”

“Hilarious.”

She ignored him. “So, where does that leave us other than five miles up shit creek?”

“Not sure what we can do beyond keep trying,” he said. “I’ll call Goat every minute if I have to.”

“Why bother?” she said.

“What?”

Dez walked over to the door that separated her from whatever remained of JT Hammond. “This is all totally fucked,” she said. “We’re wasting our time. Zetter is going to come in here whether we help him or not. We’re completely screwed.” She leaned her forehead against the cold metal. “Why don’t you go upstairs?”

“Why don’t you?”

“To do what? Count how many people we’re going to get killed?”

He walked over and stood a few feet away. “Dez, a few minutes ago you just gave a pretty good speech about searching the building and taking responsibility. That was good. It helped. You got this group of refugees in motion.”

“They searched the building. It’s clear. Mission accomplished. Now leave me alone.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Trout. “I’m trying to say that somebody needs to step up and be in charge of this mess.”

“Did you hear anything I said? They’re going to fucking kill us.”

“Maybe they will,” said Trout, “and maybe they won’t. Maybe I’ll get in touch with Goat. Maybe they’ll find Volker. Maybe this whole thing is over. We don’t know what’s happening or going to happen, Dez. All we do know is there are six hundred people upstairs and every single one of them is lost and scared. They need someone to look to so they know how to deal, how to act. They need an anchor. They need you.”

“The principal can handle all that stuff.”

“No,” said Trout. “Mrs. Madison doesn’t have the power and she doesn’t have the authority.”

“She’s the principal.”

“Of what? An elementary school? C’mon, Dez, are you trying to tell me that she has the goods to bring this whole place under control and keep everybody in line? Some of the people here aren’t even from the school. They aren’t parents or staff. They’re survivors who came here because it’s the town’s emergency shelter. What do they care if a grade school principal gives them an order?”

Dez barked out a harsh laugh. “And you think they’ll listen to me? Are you high or stupid? I’m only a small-town cop.” Dez looked at him and her eyes were haunted. “And let’s face it, Billy, cops didn’t exactly save the day. There wasn’t a lot of protecting and serving going on. Or have you forgotten that the entire Stebbins Police Department is dead?”

Trout slapped his palm flat on the door six inches from her head. It was as loud as a pistol shot and Dez jerked backward.

“Now you fucking well listen to me, Desdemona Abigail Fox,” Trout growled. “I know you’re hurting because of JT. I know what losing him means to you.”

“No you don’t—”

“The hell I don’t. I lost a lot of friends, too. Everyone I work with except Goat. All of my close friends except for you. And as for you, I know you a lot better than you ever gave me credit for. Maybe I know you better than JT did. Go ahead and punch me if that offends you, because—”

She did punch him.

It was very fast and very hard and it felt like being shot in the chest. Trout staggered four paces back and then fell hard on his ass. He sat there, legs splayed, gulping for air like a trout on a riverbank.

“Goddamn it, you crazy bitch,” he wheezed when he could finally speak. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever punched him, but it was harder than he’d ever been hit by anyone in his life.

Dez loomed over him. “You don’t talk about JT.”

Trout struggled up off the cold concrete. “I wasn’t talking about JT,” he roared. “I was talking about me and you.”

“What do you want from me, anyway?” she demanded, getting up in his face.

He thought, fuck it, and got up in hers.

“I want you to step up, Dez. I want you — I need you — to stop being Dez Fox the injured crazy person and be Officer Dez Fox the cop. Yeah, okay, the rest of the Stebbins cops are dead, and that sucks. And, yeah, you have no real authority left. Yeah, life sucks, too, and everyone we know is dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah to all of that. But I just came from a roomful of terrified children. Children, Dez. Hundreds of them. Children who are probably going to die unless we put on our big-girl panties and take charge. And by we I pretty much mean you. Hit me again if it’ll make you feel better. Kick my ass and stomp me if that’s what it takes, but then put your big-girl panties on and go do what you know you have to do.”

For a long handful of silent seconds Trout was absolutely positive that Dez was going to pistol-whip him. He could see the desire to do that in her eyes. Her lips compressed and he heard the creak of her knuckles as her hands balled into fists.

Then Dez abruptly took a step back. The action looked like it hurt, like it physically tore her away from the moment. She glanced wildly around as if looking for a doorway that would open onto a different world. Maybe the world of two days ago, when everything made some kind of sense; or a world where there was no Stebbins County, no Billy, no JT, no Lucifer 113, and no zombies.

She exhaled a long, deep, ragged breath.

“Fuck you, Billy.” She said it in a whisper.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Fuck me.”

Then Dez nodded. Not to Trout. Maybe to herself. A single, curt bob of her head.

Without another word Dez turned and climbed the steps as heavily as if mounting the stairs to the guillotine.

Trout watched her go.

When he was alone, he leaned against the wall and he, too, exhaled. His chest really hurt. Oddly, his back felt a little better, as if falling had knocked something back into place.

“Why, thank you, Billy Trout, for that crucial sanity check,” he said aloud in a bad approximation of Dez’s voice, then switched to his own. “Oh, you’re quite welcome, Officer Psychopath. Anything for a friend.”

Then he pushed off the wall, rubbed his aching chest, and limped up the steps after her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“We have Borden on five.”

“Borden? Is that a first or last name?” asked Gavin.

The producer spread his hands. “It’s all he gave us. Coming to you now.”

Gavin took the call. “We have Borden from Bordentown. Thanks for calling in.”

“Yeah, okay, I listen to this show all the time and you talk about a lot of really weird stuff but I saw something tonight that’s weirder than anything you ever talked about.”

The man had a thick Kentucky accent and Gavin figured he was right out of one of those deep woods hollers. A good old boy’s good old boy.

“I’m all ears, Mr. Borden.”

“It ain’t ‘mister.’ Just Borden.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’m a trucker—”

“You shock me.”

“—and I’m doing a run from Chicago straight through to Baltimore and I pulled off the interstate to get me a cup of coffee. One of them Starbucks places.”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“And as I’m walking out I see this car pull up. And who do you reckon I saw getting out of that car just as bold as you please?”

“I don’t think I’d want to hazard a guess.”

“It was Mr. Homer Gibbons.”

“Wait, the serial killer?”

“The very same.”

“Excuse me, Borden,” said Gavin, “but it’s my understanding that Homer Gibbons was executed at Rockview Prison two days ago.”

“That’s what I’m saying. They kilt that boy deader’n dead and there he was getting out of one of those little Nissan thingamabobs. The Cube. Bare-chested, barefooted, bold as you damn please.”

“Homer Gibbon.”

“Yessiree bob.”

“Alive?”

“Well, sir, to be fair, he didn’t look all that hot. I think they must have messed him up some when they kilt him.”

Gavin looked at the producer, who was laughing silently on the other side of the glass. Gavin grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Tell me exactly what happened, Borden. This is absolutely fascinating.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Lonnie Silk did not understand the hunger.

He was too hurt, too tired, too sick to even think about food, and yet it was all he could think about. With every staggering step he took, the need for something to eat turned like a knife in his stomach. It was worse than any hunger he’d ever felt. It was so much bigger than the pain of his wounds. So much more important than the disease that he knew was at work in his blood and flesh.

He was so hungry that he wanted to scream.

Or maybe he had screamed. Lonnie couldn’t quite remember. If he had, then the storm winds had blown it away.

He sagged against a wooden post at the corner of a big rail fence that bordered a field of swaying corn.

Corn.

He looked at it. He’d eaten raw corn before. Everyone who grew up in farm country had tried it.

Before he knew he was doing it, Lonnie climbed up onto the rail fence, leaned over, let himself fall into the mud on the other side. He landed hard and pain flared in every damaged inch of him.

It didn’t matter.

He was too hungry to let it matter.

Lonnie tried to get up. Couldn’t.

So he crawled to the nearest stalk, grabbed it, pulled it down, tore the ear from the stalk, ripped the green leaves away, and bit savagely at the kernels.

And immediately spit them out.

He flung the corn away, disgusted by it. This isn’t what his hunger wanted.

Needed.

Craved.

Lonnie cried out in frustration, and this time he heard his voice. It was not an articulate cry. There were no words. Instead it was just an expression of need.

Of hunger.

Lonnie looked wildly around as if expecting to see plates of food right there. Needing to see food.

Drool ran from the corners of his mouth and Lonnie dared not wipe it away; if he did, then he’d see what was in that spittle. What white, wriggling things were there.

Things that were also hungry.

So hungry.

He moaned again, and wept at the sound of his own voice.

Lonnie grabbed the slats of the fence and slowly, painfully pulled himself up. Then, holding on to the rail, he began walking again. He didn’t know where, he had no specific destination. He wasn’t even sure where home was anymore.

Down this road?

Or farther along the road he’d been on?

He didn’t know, couldn’t tell. Didn’t really care.

He went the way his weak legs could go, using the fence to stay upright. Following his moans. Following his hunger.

Looking for something to eat.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Sam Imura told Boxer to pull onto a side road, and the Boy Scouts climbed out of the vehicle. Moonshiner hefted out a big duffel bag, zipped it open, and began handing out heavy-duty protective garments. These were not the standard white hazmat suits but were instead SARATOGA HAMMER Suits. They were permeable chemical warfare protective overgarments with composite filter fabric based on highly activated and hard carbon spheres fixed onto textile carrier fabrics. Sam had rolled into action on dozens of occasions wearing a HAMMER Suit. They were tough but light enough to permit agile movement during unarmed and armed combat.

“Hoods?” asked Shortstop.

“Not unless we know we’re heading into close-combat,” said Sam. “It’s a serum-transfer pathogen. No airborne components.”

“Shit,” said Boxer.

“You don’t want these fuckers to French kiss you, brother,” said Moonshiner.

“Be a lot more action than I’ve been getting lately.”

They all laughed. Sam turned to them and when they saw the look on his face the laughter faded.

“What?” asked Moonshiner.

“Let’s understand something right from the jump,” Sam said. “The infected are designated hostiles and we react and respond the way professional soldiers should while in combat. But … these are people. We don’t disrespect them. If we have to pull a trigger then it’s a mercy kill not a booyah moment, feel me?”

The others took a moment, then nodded.

Moonshiner said, “Sorry, boss…”

“No,” said Sam, “it’s cool. None of you have ever been in this kind of fight before. There are no rules except the ones we make. So let’s make rules we can live with when we’re done.”

“Yeah, I’m down with that,” agreed Moonshiner.

Gypsy, however, cocked her head and appraised Sam. “Boss … you said that none of us have ever been in this kind of fight. Have you? I mean, I thought this was all new shit.”

Sam gave her a weary smile. “The team I used to run with dealt with something a lot like this. Different pathogen, but similar effect.”

“Zombies?”

“Close enough for government work,” said Sam.

“What happened?”

Sam adjusted the fittings on his HAMMER Suit. “Bad things.”

They climbed back into their Hummer. No one spoke at all for nearly a mile.

Shortstop finally broke the silence. “Boss, they’ve got jammers running, right?”

“Yes. Nothing’s getting through except one channel reserved for the Guard.”

“What about us?” Shortstop tapped the small earbud he wore. “What about the team channel?”

Sam jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We have a booster in the back, tuned to provide a dedicated channel for this mission. Good news is that we’ll have a clear signal. Bad news is that the effective range is about one mile.”

“That kind of blows,” said Moonshiner.

“Yes, it does,” said Sam. “So consider it an intimate conversation between friends.”

“Makes me all tingly,” muttered Gypsy.

Then Boxer tapped the steering wheel to get their attention and pointed to something at the extreme range of the headlights. “We got movement, boss.”

Imura saw it. A pale shape, vague and indistinct more than a hundred yards away. “Get off the road.”

Boxer killed the lights and pulled off the road, climbing the verge into a field. A tractor sat cold and quiet in the rain, and beside it was a huge flatbed piled high with harvested vegetables. The humid air was thick with the smell of onions and dirt.

Gypsy leaned between the seat backs and handed a pair of night vision goggles to Imura. He put them on and adjusted the settings, then opened the top hatch of the Humvee and leaned on the big machine gun to steady his line of sight. There were no streetlights this far into farm country, and the sky was utterly black. Then, as he turned on the night vision goggles, the landscape was transformed into a thousand shades of sickly green and ghostly gray.

Because of the new position of the Humvee it took almost a full minute before the thing that Boxer saw came into sight.

“Looks like a group of people. Three of them. Just them. Don’t see anyone else.” He didn’t whisper because the sibilant “S” sounds carried, and instead he spoke quietly. “Civilians. Two men and a kid.”

“Are they infected?” asked Boxer.

Sam slid back down into his seat, pulling the hatch closed. “Can’t tell.”

Moonshiner pulled on a second pair of goggles. “Let me go take a closer look.”

“Roger that. Gypsy, go with him.”

They opened the doors and got out. The dome light of the Humvee had been disabled. Gypsy put on her night vision goggles, then drew small arms and began moving down toward the side of the road. It is impossible to move with total silence through ankle-deep mud; however, the sound of the rain masked most of the noise. Moving without haste hid the rest. Moonshiner was on point with Gypsy behind and to his right, mindful to keep him out of her line of fire.

The three figures were a hundred yards away. Both men were dressed in work clothes that were pasted to their bodies by rainwater. The child wore jeans but no shirt. No one carried an umbrella. No one seemed to give much of a damn about the cold rain.

“Uh oh,” said Gypsy very softly.

An old slatted wooden fence ran along part of the road and angled up to create a property line with the next farm. Moonshiner angled that way and he and Gypsy squatted down by the corner post. While Moonshiner kept his pistol aimed at the three figures, Gypsy tapped her earbud.

“You seeing this, Ronin?”

Ronin — Sam Imura — said, “Rain’s too heavy. What are you seeing?”

She told him. “You want us to let them pass or take them down?”

“Hold your position,” he said. “I’m coming out.”

A few seconds later the rest of the team converged on the corner post.

The lead figure was the oldest. Maybe forty-five. A tall man with a black beard.

“See any bites?” asked Boxer.

“Negative,” said Moonshiner.

“We can front them to make sure,” said Shortstop. “See if they’re responsive to verbal commands.”

“Let’s try it,” said Sam. He stood up and began walking slowly toward the road, his pistol down at his side. Shortstop followed in his wake. The others fanned out to cover the road from several points.

Come on, thought Sam, happy ending here.

Sam stepped into plain view. “U.S. Army,” he announced in a clear voice. “We’re here to help, however I need you to stop right there. Raise your hands and allow us to check you for signs of infection.”

At first it seemed that the three figures would walk past him without taking note of him. But then Sam realized that with the heavy rain they may not have heard him. He tried it again, repeating what he’d said.

Be cool, now, he thought. Let’s everyone be cool and be friends.

The bearded man peered at him for a moment, his eyes dark in a pale face. Then he smiled at Sam, showing big white bucked teeth.

Only it wasn’t a smile.

“Sir,” said Sam with flagging optimism, “I need you to—”

And those teeth parted as the lips curled back from them. With a howl of aching hunger the man came rushing at Sam Imura, pale hands reaching, pale teeth snapping at the air. Behind him the younger man and the boy immediately rushed after him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Dez tagged six adults to stay with the kids and stand watch and ordered everyone else down to the gymnasium. Not asked, ordered.

Trout knew the six she picked — middle-aged farm owners. Fathers and mothers. The kind of steady people that you could count on.

Everyone went. Even Gerry, the dazed man who had been singing to the little girl. One of the women in the group held his hand, though Trout didn’t recognize her. It was a comfort gesture, he supposed; nothing even remotely romantic in it. Human contact.

The stick-thin principal, Mrs. Madison, walked with Dez with Trout following behind. They were the two most powerful women left in Stebbins and they were as different as two people could possibly get. Mrs. Madison was tiny, older, highly educated, very cultured and mannered, and the exact opposite of what Trout would consider a “physical” person. He couldn’t even imagine her going to the bathroom.

Dez, on the other hand, was raw and powerful in a way that was entirely different from male power. She was never mannish, and could even be feminine — or so Trout remembered with an aching fondness — but she was neither delicate nor mannered. If anyone had the sheer lack of personal survival skills to suggest that Dez was a member of a “weaker sex,” Trout knew that what was left of that sorry individual would regret the ill-chosen and archaic sentiment for what remained of his life. Dez was a boozy redneck country girl who would be equally at home in a Mississippi trucker bar or a Kentucky holler. She exuded a feral power in exactly the same way the big hunting cats do. Quick to anger, glacially slow to forgive. And yet, Trout loved her and respected her even though at times he felt like they were from entirely different branches of the evolutionary tree.

When everyone was downstairs, the group formed a loose circle around Dez and Mrs. Madison. Trout did a quick head count. One hundred and eight-two, plus the two upstairs. More women than men by a two-to-one ratio.

Mrs. Madison took point and raised her hand for silence. Trout remembered her doing it the exact same way when she was his fourth-grade teacher. So, apparently, did most of the people here. An uneasy, expectant silence fell over the group.

“Thank you,” said the principal. “Officer Fox would like to say a few things. She and I have already discussed these matters and we are of a mind. I believe that what she has to say and the things she will suggest are what’s best for everyone concerned. Officer Fox?”

Mrs. Madison stepped aside and turned to face Dez, and Trout recognized it as a tactic used by speakers who are practiced at validating another speaker through their own visible attention. It worked, too, because Trout saw the focus of the entire crowd zero in on Dez. He suppressed a smile, appreciating the way that was handled.

Dez, however, was no public speaker. She glared at the crowd with open suspicion and hostility, and Trout prayed she wasn’t going to use more threats and bullying to get things done.

She surprised him, however.

“Okay, listen up,” she said in a neutral tone, “here’s the situation as we know it. We finished our sweep of the building and there’s no one else left inside who has any bites or any sign of infection.”

The crowd nodded. They’d all been part of that search. Even so, it was good to hear it said.

“We have to face some realities here,” Dez continued. “First, we have to stay inside the building. The National Guard made that clear and I don’t think they’re going to cut us any slack. So, for all intents and purposes we’re stuck on an island in the middle of the ocean. The good news is that we have our own generator and enough fuel for five days. Because this is the town’s emergency shelter, we have blankets, flashlights, batteries, first-aid kits, water, and a lot of food. Enough for maybe a week with the number of people we have. When we get low, the Guard says they’ll drop more on the roof. So we’re good for now, and this thing will all be over by then.”

“Over?” asked Jenny DeGroot, one of the teachers. That one word was heavy with meaning and implications.

“You know what I mean, Jenny,” said Dez. “They’ll get us out of here and then we can all…” She paused, fishing for the way to say it. “So we can all take care of what needs to be taken care of.”

Most of them said nothing and just looked at her; a few — the ones Trout thought were the steadiest among them — nodded. Grief was tomorrow’s problem. Today’s agenda was all about survival.

“Now, the first thing we really need to talk about,” said Dez, her mouth, eyes, and voice hardened, “is rationing. We are going to share everything. I’m going to put a few people in charge of inventory, someone else will be in charge of allotment, and some others will take care of cooking and food prep. No one else touches any food unless it’s on their own plate. No one hoards anything. Not food, not anything. If the supplies do get low, then the kids eat first and we eat second. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

Trout scanned the crowd. If anyone had a problem with it, no one said so. He even thought he saw some relief on their faces, and Trout could understand that. A plan was evidence of structure, and structure was stability. It was something they could react to.

“Good,” she said. “Next is the generator. The town’s power is out, so the generator is all we have. I don’t want to use it anymore than we have to. If we turn it off during the day we can stretch it out for longer than a week if we have to. That means that we eat the stuff in the cafeteria freezers first. After that it’s Spam and canned beans, unless they drop us some McRib sandwiches.”

That got a few small smiles. It was a dent, and Trout was relieved to see Dez attempting humor. It meant that she was on sounder emotional ground herself.

“Now we come to the real issue,” continued Dez. “Security. We need to secure this building. If the Guard is wrong and there are more of those — things — out there, then we need to make sure they don’t get inside. Partly because we don’t want to turn this place into a Denny’s for dead motherfuckers.”

No one laughed at what was an intensely lame joke. Dez colored a little but plunged on.

“And if the Guard think that our security has been compromised then they’re going to finish what they started.”

She cut an inquiring look at Trout, who mouthed the words, Go for it.

“And there’s more,” said Dez gravely. “We all know that the military wants to sterilize all of Stebbins, which means wiping out everyone and everything. Right now the only thing stopping them is the broadcasts Billy made. That … and one other thing. They think Billy has some information that might help them fight this disease or whatever it is.”

The people turned to Trout, and many of them moved back from him like he was infected.

“Does he?” asked Mrs. Madison.

“No,” said Trout, and he briefly explained about Volker, the flash drives, and Goat.

“As long as they think he has the stuff, we’re probably safe,” said Dez. “But there’s also a chance they could kick down the doors and come in here to take it.”

A murmur of dismay rippled through the crowd.

“Wouldn’t they leave us alone if they thought we didn’t have it?” asked Jenny. “Wasn’t that the deal? We stay in here and they leave us alone?”

“That was the deal,” said Dez. “Sure. But right now I’m not feeling too filled with the spirit of trust and belief.”

One of the farmers asked, “So what do we do? Looks like we’re in deep cow shit no matter how this thing goes.”

Dez nodded. “We do the only thing we can do. We fortify this place and do whatever it takes to protect the children, and everyone else in this building. It’s as simple as that.”

“That’s all well and good,” said Jenny, “but nailing boards over the windows isn’t going to stop those helicopters.”

“I don’t think they’ll use the helicopters again.”

“Why not? We can’t fight them.”

“No,” Dez agreed, “but if they use heavy weapons then they can’t guarantee they won’t kill Billy and destroy those flash drives.” She shook her head. “If they come in here, it’s going to be with regular men and guns, and we can stop them.”

The farmer looked uncomfortable with that. “I don’t want to get into a firefight with our own troops.”

“Neither do I,” said Dez. “You think I’m nuts? I’m not saying we start a war, but we have to be ready to defend this building if they try something. I mean … what choice do we really have?”

No one had a good answer to that. Trout wanted to punch a wall because the situation was so frustrating and awkward. Nothing was a clear choice. Nothing really made sense to him. All trust in the system was gone.

One of the parents cleared his throat. “Okay, so … um, how do we do that? Secure the place, I mean? Do we, like, barricade the doors and stuff?”

Daz managed an encouraging smile.

“That’s a start,” she said.

CHAPTER FORTY

The three infected left the road and came splashing and slogging through the mud toward Sam Imura. Each of them ran differently. The boy’s gait was erratic, like a stroke victim trying to run. The younger man barely shuffled along, his limbs stiff and awkward. But the older man ran with an almost normal gait. Fast and with clear determination.

“Ahh, shit,” said Boxer’s voice in Sam’s earbud.

“Boss?” asked Moonshiner.

“I got this,” said Sam, and he could hear the sadness in his own voice. He raised his pistol and sighted along the black length of the Trinity sound suppressor. He slipped his finger inside the trigger guard and squeezed.

A black dot appeared an inch above the right eyebrow of the bearded man, and his head snapped back. Sam used a .22 automatic. The bullet punched in through the front of the skull but it lacked the force for a through-and-through. Instead the lead bounced around inside the man’s skull and destroyed the brain. The efficient mechanics of the infected man’s gait were destroyed in a microsecond. His legs and arms stopped pumping and instead they flopped uselessly, like a puppet whose strings had all been cut. He fell badly, landed on his face, and did not move.

The younger man was three paces behind him and only with the third of those running steps did he try to move around the obstacle. As if it took that long for whatever drove its brain to identify the obstruction and attempt a course correction. It was too little and too late, and his foot struck the dead man’s outflung leg. The younger man pitched forward, hit hard, and slid five feet through the mud.

Sam Imura ignored him for a moment and watched the boy. He was maybe eleven or twelve. A good-looking kid in a hayseed kind of way. Probably would have been a farmer when he grew up. Probably liked sports and girls and his folks. Probably a pretty good kid.

Sam shot him.

The boy fell and stopped being anything. Not a boy, not a monster. He was meat that would cool in the relentless rain.

Something ignited in Sam’s chest. He’d been in firefights before with other kinds of infected. He’d had to pull the trigger on what the military shrinks called a mercy killing and what his commanding officers filed away as a righteous shoot. However Sam knew full well that when any sane person pulls a trigger on a child — even an infected one — there was no mercy in the action. And it was in no way righteous. It was an act that made him feel complicit in a process of deception and abuse that was as old as warfare. Once, when a fellow operative made a crude joke about such kills as “collateral damage,” Sam took him outside and attempted to beat some conscience into the sonofabitch. The lesson hadn’t worked, it didn’t change the asshole and it hadn’t made Sam feel any better. Though it felt good at the time.

His shrink had a field day with that.

Now, standing in the rain and watching the boy fall, Sam thought about the pathogen. Lucifer 113. Named for a fallen angel.

He wondered how far he was falling. How far he had yet to fall.

The third infected was struggling to his knees. Sam almost shot him.

He didn’t.

It wasn’t a matter of mercy, even now.

He tapped his earbud. “Converge on me. I need a spit hood and flex cuffs.”

The man crawled like an arthritic toward Sam, and as he did so he uttered a low, terrible moan. Was it hunger? Or was it something else? Sam thought he could hear desperation in that moan. Like a person trapped in a burning building.

The rest of the Boy Scouts swarmed in, coming at the infected man from four points. Moonshiner, the biggest of the team, swept the man’s hands off the muddy ground and as the young man collapsed, the big man dropped his knee onto his back. He caught the back of the dead man’s neck and forced the pale face into the mud, keeping it there despite all of the struggling. Sam observed those struggles. There was no art to them, no plan. It was pure reaction.

Gypsy pulled a spit hood over the man’s head and the others bound his wrists with plastic flexcuffs.

“What do we do with him?” asked Gypsy. “Leave him here?”

“Pop him,” suggested Moonshiner.

“No,” Boxer said quickly. “What if the doctors can do something for him?”

Shortstop shook his head. “Intel I read says that this disease is a one-way ticket. No one comes back.”

“That’s theory,” insisted Boxer. “We don’t know that. It’s not like this thing’s ever been field tested.”

Moonshiner made a dismissive sound. “Kid, look at this fucker. He’s cold. I’ll bet his body temp is already down five, six degrees. Take his pulse if you want to. Check for pupillary dilation. Do whatever you need to do, but he’s not sick, Boxer, he’s dead.”

But Boxer shook his head. “Seen a lot of dead, man, and he doesn’t look dead to me.”

“Okay, then deadish. Deadlike. Pick whatever word you want to use. Make something up. Point is, this stuff’s already eating his brain. What do you think the docs could do for him? Build him a cage with an exercise wheel?”

“It’s not—”

“No,” said Sam, cutting him off, “it’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s damn well not normal. But it is what’s happening. The assholes who invented this took the concept of death and broke it. Doesn’t mean what it used to and we have to accept that. No matter how it looks, this man is dead. He’s also infected and dangerous.”

“Okay,” said Gypsy, “so what’s the call?”

“We have a to-do list and one item on it is to determine if all of the infected are at the same level of coordination, aggression, and mobile speed.”

“We saw some variety right here,” said Gypsy. “All three of these cats were different.”

“Yeah,” agreed Shortstop, “but why?”

“I’ll take all theories,” said Sam.

They thought about it as they watched the bound infected struggle.

“Damage,” said Moonshiner after a few moments. “That could be some of it. Head trauma, joint damage, even other infected gnawing on their tendons.”

“Jesus,” breathed Boxer.

“It makes sense,” insisted Moonshiner. “They’re all injured, right? So, think about any group of ordinary people who are injured in a battle or an explosion. You get all kinds of different mobility.”

“Makes sense,” agreed Gypsy. “These are all going to be walking wounded.”

“That covers coordination,” said Sam. “What about speed?”

Boxer said, “Maybe … rigor mortis?”

They looked at him.

“C’mon,” he said, “think about it. If these things are really supposed to be dead, and only some of them are functioning because of those parasites, then wouldn’t the rest of them do what pretty much all dead bodies do?”

Gypsy glanced around. “How fast does rigor set in? Three to four hours, something like that? Up to that point the infected — actually, can we call them zombies? Infected makes them seem like sick people.”

“And what?” asked Shortstop. “‘Zombies’ is easier?”

She shrugged. “It’s not as real.”

They all got that. Everyone nodded.

“So, these zombies start stiffening up within a couple of hours, so that’ll account for different rates of movement right there. Freshies move more like real people, stiffies kind of stagger, like we saw on the video feeds we watched.”

Shortstop nodded. “Rigor hits maximum stiffness in something like ten, twelve hours, right? Makes me wonder if there are any zombies out there who can’t move at all. Or can’t move worth a damn. Standing there, or maybe lying in a field somewhere ’cause they can’t move.”

“Okay,” said Boxer, playing devil’s advocate, “but nobody’s reported a bunch of human scarecrows. These things are walking.”

“But not well,” observed Shortstop. “General Zetter’s report talked about a lot of the infected moving in a slow, shuffling manner. I think that’s full rigor right there.”

“What about when the rigor wears off,” asked Boxer. “It does that. Wears off.”

“Sure, but in like four, five days after death,” said Gypsy.

“Even so, how will they be able to move then? Will they get fast again?”

Sam said, “We don’t know. There hasn’t been that much time yet. The first infection was early yesterday, so we’re not even one full day into this thing.”

The bounded infected continued to struggle.

“So…” drawled Shortstop, “what do we do with Sparky here? Do we take him back so they can study him? Is that what they want?”

“No,” said Sam. “The Guard can get as many samples as they want. We’re on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. And yes, I realize how that just sounded. Zombies and all.”

Everyone grinned at him.

“Point is that if we go on the basis that there are zombies and that a combination of injuries and the onset of rigor will explain most of how they walk and act, then what we look for is something that doesn’t fit that model. A mutation, maybe.”

“Why?” asked Moonshiner.

“Because we’re hoping this disease isn’t as perfect as everyone thinks it is,” said Sam. When the others looked blank, he explained. “A mutation, should one even exist, is more likely to tell the scientists something about the stability of Dr. Volker’s variation of the Lucifer plague. If mutations are possible and — better yet — reproducible, then that opens a door for introducing other mutations that could disrupt the function of the parasite.”

Boxer said, “Wow, I actually understood that.”

They stood for a moment longer, all of them in a loose circle around the writhing dead man.

“Again,” said Shortstop, “what do we do with Sparky here? Strap him to the hood like a six-point buck?”

“No,” said Sam. “We leave him.”

“Like that?” asked Boxer, pointing to the cuffs and spit hood. “It doesn’t seem right.”

Gypsy shrugged. “It’s not like he’s suffering, man.”

Moonshiner leaned close and whispered, “He’s dead, Jim.”

Boxer shoved him away. “Yeah, yeah, very funny.”

“Leave him,” repeated Sam.

Nobody moved, though. They glanced around, at the rainswept road, at the body that lay struggling at their feet, and back the way they’d come.

“Boss,” said Shortstop, “if these three kept walking down the road they’d have come right up to the checkpoint we passed.”

“Uh huh,” agreed Sam.

“Three of these fuckers against those two kids back there?”

“Uh huh.”

“You think those kids would have stopped them?”

“What do you think?” Sam said, making it an open question.

They looked down at the infected. The man continued to writhe and fight against the restraints. His jaws snapped at the material of the spit hood. Gypsy made a disgusted noise. Moonshiner’s grunt was dismissive. But it was Shortstop who answered the question.

“Not a chance in hell, boss,” he said. “Not one chance in hell.”

Together the Boy Scouts walked up the slope to the Humvee. The big Browning .50 mounted on the roof looked ominous. Waiting.

Hungry.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“Ground-floor windows are a priority,” said Dez.

“All of the windows are security glass,” said Mrs. Madison, “with wire mesh in each pane.”

“Won’t stop a bullet,” said a farmer.

“So we block the windows,” said Dez. “Look, this school is built like a blockhouse. There aren’t all that many windows anyway, not on the first floor.”

“Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Madison, and Trout felt like kicking her.

“Twenty-two, okay,” conceded Dez. “So we lock them and cover them with paper or cloth so no one can see in. Then we stack stuff in front of them. Cans with marbles or pieces of metal, anything that will make a lot of noise if the window is forced. We’ll post people in the halls and if anyone hears those cans falling over then they shout out and we all come running.”

Several people nodded, and Trout felt the first splinter of encouragement.

“All of the classroom doors open out,” said Jenny DeGroot. “We can get benches from the gym or other stuff and put them in the halls. If we hear someone breaking in, we can wedge the benches crossways so the doors won’t open out.”

“Great idea,” said Dez, jumping on it.

And suddenly everyone was throwing ideas out. Some were poorly thought out, just things to say from people who needed to be part of a solution — any kind of solution; but there were some good ones, too.

“There are tools and hammers and nails and all that stuff in the janitor’s office,” said one of the teachers.

Someone cleared their throat loudly and the crowd turned toward one of the farmers, a young man with old eyes. Trout fished for his name. Uriah Piper.

Piper shook his head and said, “There’s a better way to secure the doors.”

“Okay, Uriah,” said Dez, “what have you got?”

“Well, first,” he said, speaking in the slow way some farmers do, “we don’t need every door to even open. Once we secure the windows, we can seal off a bunch of the rooms. We can set those noise-making cans you mentioned, but otherwise make sure those doors won’t even open.”

“How?”

“Easiest and fastest way would be to nail a piece of wood along the bottom of the door. Nail it, or better yet, screw it right into the floor, and position it so that it also attaches to the wall right there at the bottom, and maybe again at the top. Or we could erect a brace at an angle to the floor and toe-nail it in, then nail another piece to the floor behind that. Take a battering ram to open a door like that, and even then it wouldn’t be easy. You’d have to tear the whole door apart to get through, and I don’t think even soldiers can do that without us knowing about it.”

“Are you a carpenter?” asked Clark, one of the teachers, his tone filled with skepticism.

“No, sir, I’m a dairy farmer, as I believe you know.”

“Then how do you know that will work?”

Piper gave him a small, cool half-smile. “You live in farm country, Mr. Clark. How do you not know that would work?”

That coaxed a few chuckles from the crowd.

“Okay, okay, you’re right,” interrupted Dez, clapping Piper on the shoulder. “It’ll work and it conserves our supplies. Uriah, you’re in charge of securing the doors and windows. Everyone else helps you. Set up work parties and get going.”

She glanced around, saw some nods, a few blank stares, and Clark’s doubt-filled scowl. Dez locked her eyes on him.

“We’re not going to have a problem, are we?” she asked.

Trout wondered how long Clark could meet that uncompromising blue-eyed stare. As it turns out, the teacher lowered his eyes after maybe a full second. Trout was pleased that Dez wasn’t so small that she nodded to herself to acknowledge the victory. Clark wasn’t a bad guy or an asshole. He was scared and confused and defiance or resistance was probably the only way he knew to try and find solid ground or a scrap of personal power. Dez apparently knew that, too.

“Okay, then let’s get started,” said Dez. “I want this all done an hour ago.”

The group started to break up, but then Gerry Dunphries, the man who’d sung the fractured lullaby, grabbed Dez’s arm. “Wait, wait, hold on, let’s not go crazy here.”

Everyone paused, looking at him. His eyes were wide and wild and Trout was sure the man was a very short step away from screaming.

“Hold on for what, Gerry?” asked Dez.

“We’re acting like this is all really happening,” he said. “And it’s not. It can’t be. None of this is really happening. I mean, come on, people going crazy and … eating each other. That’s not happening. That’s not what’s really going on.”

Mrs. Madison took a step toward him and in a gentle voice asked, “Well, Mr. Dunphries, what do you think is happening?”

“It’s something in the water,” he said. “I mean, that’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s happened before. Like when they put LSD in the New York subways. They did that at the Chelsea Hotel, too. And in France back in the 1950s, the CIA did it in France, they put psychedelic mold in bread and freaked all those people. It was in, in, wait a minute, in … yes, in Pont-Saint-Esprit. And remember what Jim Jones did at Jonestown with the Kool-Aid. That’s what this really is. They’re doing something to us. They’re messing with our brain chemistry. This isn’t really happening. It’s something in the water. Maybe they seeded the clouds and that’s why it started happening when it started raining. Nobody’s really killing each other. My wife didn’t kill anyone. My kids are fine. Tracy and Sophie are just fine, and don’t you dare try and tell me different. They’re fine, but they’re probably freaking out, too, and we have to get out of here, not lock ourselves up. We have to get out and—”

And Dez Fox spun him around and slapped him across the face.

It was, after all, what you do with hysterical people. Trout had seen it a thousand times in movies and on TV. You slap the crazy out of them and knock some sense into them with a big opened-hand wallop across the chops.

The sound was as loud as a gunshot. Gerry Dunphries spun in nearly a full circle and caromed into Clark, who tried to catch him and failed. Gerry crashed to the floor, his face blossoming with a bright red handprint.

Dez loomed over him, hand raised for a second blow, her mouth starting to form words that Trout knew would be some variation of the “cowboy up” speech.

But Gerry screamed.

He scuttled away from her, tears breaking from his eyes, his mouth trembling as terrified sobs tore their way out him. He crawled all the way to the wall and huddled there, hunched and cowering, arms raised against the next blow. Against the next inevitable hurt.

The moment ground to a halt.

Everyone froze into a tableau that came close to breaking Trout’s heart. Dez was caught in a role for which she was totally ill-suited — that of a bully terrorizing a helpless person. The other people looked shocked but there was guilt there, too; everyone was complicit in this moment. If the slap had worked — and Trout doubted that it ever did outside of Hollywood or a bad novel — then they would have tacitly supported what Dez did. Instead they were bystanders to injury and there was no way to step back onto the ledge.

“I…” began Dez, but even that small a thing, a single tentative word, made Gerry flinch again. He buried his head under his arms and wept brokenly. Dez turned right and left as if looking for the doorway back to a minute ago. She spotted Trout. “Billy, I…”

Trout moved past her and knelt in front of Gerry, who instantly shied away. But Trout made very soft, very slow shushing sounds. He sat down on the floor next to Gerry, wrapped his arms around the man, and pulled him close, rocking him the way the man had rocked the little girl. Trout fought to find the words of that old nursery rhyme. Found some of it. Sang it quietly, leaning over Gerry to comfort the man with the warmth of another body.

“Come along,” said Mrs. Madison in a hushed voice. “We have work to do.”

One by one everyone left until only Dez lingered, looking wretched and guilty and confused. Trout met her eyes. He gave her as much of a smile as he could muster, then a small nod. He mouthed the words “It’s okay.”

Near to breaking herself, Dez Fox backed away until she reached the far end of the gymnasium, then she turned and fled.

“It’s okay, Gerry,” Trout said to the sobbing man. “It’s all going to be okay,” he lied.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Scott Blair had a hard time keeping himself from committing a federal crime. He wanted to punch the president in the mouth.

No, he wanted to do more than that. He wanted to beat some sense into the man.

“Mr. President,” he said with as much control as he had left, “the intelligence we are getting from Captain Imura clearly contradicts the reports being filed by General Zetter. The situation in Stebbins is far from stable and—”

“And we have ten thousand additional troops inbound,” said the president. “We have another five on standby. The NBACC field team has arrived and they are making their assessment and, frankly Scott, I think they are in a better position to assess this kind of threat than a former special operator.”

“I couldn’t disagree more strongly,” insisted Blair. “Sam Imura is one of the most experienced people we have, with the except of Captain Ledger who is, unfortunately, out of country and out of reach.”

“Captain Imura is retired from active field work,” said Sylvia Ruddy. “He’s been out of the field, in fact, for years.”

“So what? I’d still trust his judgment more than anyone else on the ground in Pennsylvania.”

“That’s not your call to make,” said Ruddy.

Blair stiffened. “Mr. President, may I speak with you privately?”

The president scowled. “All right, that’s enough. I don’t want you two throwing rocks. This isn’t the time or place.”

Ruddy folded her arms and said nothing.

“Please, Mr. President,” said Blair, not budging. “Two minutes.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Ruddy, but the president held up his hand.

“If you don’t mind, Sylvia?” said the president.

She stared at him as if he’d kicked her. Then she turned on her heel and stalked about, slamming the door behind her. The president sighed.

“That’s going to cost me.”

Blair shifted to stand between the president and the closed door, forcing himself into the line of sight. The president sat back in his chair and gestured for him to speak.

“Two minutes, Scott.”

“Permission to speak candidly?”

“You keep asking that.”

“I keep needing to.”

They regarded each other, then the president nodded. “Go ahead.”

Blair leaned his fists on the edge of the desk. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What?”

“This isn’t like you,” said Blair, his voice low and even. “This isn’t even close to you. Yesterday you were in command, you were the voice of reason while all hell broke loose. Now you’re fumbling at the edges of this thing. Wait, hear me out. You said I could speak my mind and this may be the last chance I have.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not planning on firing you.”

“Christ, who cares about that? How can you still think that this is about politics or anything but a crisis? Sam Imura knows biohazardous threats better than anyone currently on U.S. soil. Anyone. He trained most of the people in the NBACC teams. He wrote their field response protocols. While Simeon Zetter was playing hide-and-seek with the Taliban, Imura was hunting — and bagging — world-class bioterrorists and he did so for four different people who sat in the chair on which you are currently resting your ass.”

The president didn’t respond, but his face grew steadily redder.

“Sam said that the checkpoints along the Q-zone aren’t adequate. There are a couple of thousand local and state police itching to be a part of this. I know that we pulled them because we didn’t want to deal with the complications of jurisdiction and we were afraid of how they’d react if they found out our ground forces had to terminate infected police officers inside Stebbins. That’s yesterday’s news and it does not matter. What matters now is getting armed, trained men and women to reinforce that Q-zone while there is still time. The National Guard reinforcements won’t cross into Stebbins sooner than two hours. We can put a thousand police officers on that line in twenty minutes.”

“And we’d lose all control of the situation in terms of media and—”

“—and that doesn’t matter.”

The president shook his head. “Scott, while I commend you on your passion, I simply do not agree that we are in danger of losing control of the situation. I’ve known Simeon Zetter too long and too well to doubt his word.”

“So have I, and it’s not his word that I doubt. It’s his ability to properly assess this kind of situation.”

The president spread his hands. “I’m not convinced, Scott. Sorry.”

Blair really wanted to hit him.

He wanted to kill him.

He took a breath and said, “Will you at least do this much? I have a scientist in my office, a Dr. McReady. She’s possibly the best virologist we have and she wants to talk to you. She has some things to tell you about Lucifer that you don’t know. And she would like you to open a dialogue with Dr. Price at Zabriske Point.”

“Who at where? I don’t know that person.”

“That,” said Blair, “is the point. Price is the man who knows more about the Lucifer project than anyone.”

“And Zabriske Point?”

“It’s a bioweapons research laboratory in Death Valley.”

“Since when do we have a lab there?”

“We’ve always had one there.”

“You knew about this and I didn’t?”

Blair offered a chilly smile. “Yes, sir. It’s my job to know about such places. Just as it’s my job to advise you when the national security is in genuine peril.”

The president’s eyes were hooded as he considered that.

“Okay, Scott. Go fetch your mad scientist.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Goat squeezed himself against the passenger door, long legs pulled up, arms wrapped around them, trying once again to hide behind his own limbs. Once again failing to accomplish an impossible task.

Beside him, Homer Gibbon steered the Cube from lane to lane. Windshield wipers slapped back and forth. On the radio Townes Van Zandt was singing about how he was “waitin’ around to die.” Homer had the volume so loud that it hurt Goat’s head and made his eyes twitch. Homer sang along, knowing every word.

When the song ended and a softer outlaw song by Willie Nelson started playing, Homer turned the volume down. Outside the rain was so heavy that the wipers were doing almost nothing. Homer never slowed down, though. He cruised at a steady seventy.

Goat found himself praying for an accident. He was willing to take his chances in a head-on collision. He eyed the wheel, wondering if he dared grab it and spin them into the oncoming headlights.

Maybe.

Maybe.

As if he could read Goat’s mind, Homer said, “Don’t be thinking bad thoughts, son.”

Goat squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

The killer beside him chuckled.

They drove.

Then Homer said, “Tell me about yourself, boy. What kind of reporter are you?”

When Goat could trust that his voice wouldn’t squeak, he said, “I … I’m a cameraman.”

“What — you ain’t even a reporter?” Homer’s mouth hardened. “The fuck?”

“No, I’m a reporter, but I mostly do camerawork. And video editing. And social media.”

“Social media? What’s that shit?”

“Twitter, Facebook, stuff like that.”

Homer grunted. “What’s that have to do with news?”

“Everything,” said Goat. He realized that this was a chance to reinforce his usefulness. “The Internet is a lot more important than anything when it comes to getting the news out there. Most people get their news from the Net.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen Yahoo News. But that ain’t that Twitter shit.”

“No, but a lot of people take URLs — Web address links — from sources like Yahoo News and other services, and they post them on Twitter and other social media platforms. Other people repost the links. Sometimes a news story only reaches a lot of people because of posts on social media. Everyone tweets these days. Even the president.”

“‘Tweets.’ Now ain’t that masculine as all shit?” Homer let loose a big horse laugh. “That’s hilarious. Look at me, Homer fucking Gibbon, public enemy number one, tweeting. That’s funny as balls.”

Goat shifted his position, still defensive but easing the stricture in his muscles. “It would get your story out,” he said. “To the biggest number of people. Millions. All over the world.”

Homer shot him a look. “For real?”

“Absolutely.” Goat paused. “That’s how we got this story out. Billy Trout sent me news feeds from town and I posted them all over the Net so they’d go—”

He chopped off that last word, not daring to say it.

But Homer reached over and jabbed him with a finger. “They’d go … what?”

“Um … there’s an, um, expression that, um…”

“Fucking say it, boy.”

Goat took a breath and said it in a rush. “When social media is used to break a story and it spreads really fast, it’s call ‘going viral.’”

It took Homer a moment to process that, and then he began laughing.

He was laughing so hard that he drove right off the road and slammed into a tree.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

When Gerry Dunphries could walk again, Trout took him back to the big classroom and turned him over to Mrs. Madison. The principal wrapped a blanket around Gerry’s shoulders and led him away.

Billy Trout looked at the children. Despite the sound of hammering and people shouting as they worked in teams to fortify the school, some of the kids were actually sleeping. It amazed him. As exhausted as he was, he was absolutely certain that he could not fall asleep. Not now and maybe never again. Too much possibility of things waiting for him in the dark shadows behind closed eyelids.

There was still no word from Goat, and with every passing minute Trout grew more convinced that it somehow meant that everyone in the school had slid from the frying pan directly into the fire.

Just for the hell of it he tried the satellite phone once more.

Nothing.

“Fuck,” he said, then immediately apologized, though none of the kids seemed to have heard or reacted. He spent a few minutes wandering around checking on the kids, tucking blankets more securely around them, studying their faces to fix them in his mind, pulling names out of the air for as many of them as he could. He saw one face, a black-haired chubby little girl with a beautiful face who slept with her arms wrapped around a small pillow, holding it to her chest as if it was a trusted teddy bear. Trout realized that he knew this girl very well but hadn’t seen her in the crowd before. He’d been to her first birthday party, to her christening. To at least five barbecues at her aunt’s house. Her name was Belle, and she was the only niece of Marcia Sloane, the woman who had handled phones and done research for Regional Satellite News. Marcia was a curvy retro-Goth woman, north of forty but always possessed of a timeless sexual appeal that was a legend throughout Stebbins County. Fiercely intelligent, saucy, and the very best of company under any circumstances.

That realization brought with it the memory of the last time he’d seen Marcia. It was yesterday afternoon while Trout was coming back to Stebbins after interviewing Dr. Volker. By then the outbreak had cut all the way across the town. His last image of Marcia was her pale, torn, snarling face as it vanished below the level of his car’s hood while the Explorer ground her into the mud. That had been the start of it for him, the point at which the wild story he’d gotten from Dr. Volker became the irrefutable reality of Billy Trout’s life.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, uncertain whether he was saying it to the girl, for all she’d lost, or to her aunt for what he’d done to her. Or to everyone, for what they were enduring and what lay ahead.

More deeply saddened than ever, Trout turned and drifted back into the hallway. He caught sight of Dez and called out to her. She turned and began walking toward him. They met at the hall’s midpoint, by a 4H trophy case filled with photos of kids with their awards for best piglet, biggest sow, largest pumpkin. Brightest future.

“Is … is Gerry okay?” she asked tentatively.

“He was in bad shape to begin with, Dez. I don’t think this did him any extra harm.”

“You’re a bad fucking liar, Billy.”

“With the very best intentions.”

Dez considered him for a moment. “Guess you do. And I guess I don’t burn up a lot of calories giving you credit for it.”

They looked at the trophies and listened to the hammering. Echoing down from the second floor they heard Uriah Piper and the teacher, Clark, yelling at each other.

“Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“What happens if we can’t get in touch with Goat?”

“We will.”

“No, what if we can’t. What if something’s happened to him? I mean … if the stuff on those flash drives is that important…”

“I don’t think it matters,” said Trout.

“Why not?”

“When I interviewed Dr. Volker yesterday, he seemed to be pretty sure that Lucifer 113 was unstoppable. If there was a cure, or even notes about a possible treatment on those drives, I’m pretty sure he’d have told me.”

“Then why’d he give them to you at all?”

“So someone would have a record.”

She turned. “A record of what?”

Trout didn’t want to answer the question.

“Of what, Billy?”

He could see the ghost of his own reflection in the glass of the trophy case. “A record of how it all ended.”

“How what all ended?” she demanded, and then she got it. She grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard enough to hurt. “Jesus Christ, are you saying that Volker thought this was going to spread? I mean, really spread? Like a pandemic and shit?”

“That’s what he was afraid of. He thought Homer Gibbon would go right into the ground, buried in a numbered grave behind the prison. Volker planned it that way. The parasites that drive the plague would consume him and then die off for lack of food. It would have ended right there. But when Homer’s aunt claimed his body that changed the dynamic. What should have been some kind of sick punishment for a serial killer became something that kicked open the door to an outbreak.”

Dez’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

They had no names.

Not anymore.

There were names on cards and licenses in wallets and purses, but those things no longer related to the things that moved and milled inside the coffee shop. Even the faces no longer matched the pictures on the cards. On the driver’s licenses and university IDs, none of the faces was missing flesh, none of the smiles showed broken teeth. None of the clothes were torn and splashed with blood. These figures weren’t those people anymore.

The feeding was done, the hungers shifting from the flesh at hand to the potential of fresher meat elsewhere. The parasitic urges that drove them lost interest when it could no longer detect the signs of life. Breath and rushing blood and a beating heart. Genetic manipulation had ensured this, built it into the organic imperatives that drove these things. Just as the brain chemistry and nerve conduction was repatterned to kill and infect, to feast quickly but not completely, to spread the disease.

That was the only goal.

That was everything.

Though the body ached for food. The minimalized brain moaned in desperation for it, even though there was meat right there. But there was not enough intelligence left even for frustration at the collision of immediate need and driving force.

They bumped into each other without rancor or argument. It happened. They lost balance, recovered, moved on, either toward another collision or toward the door. Eventually it was all toward the door. Toward the movement outside. Lights in the rain. The stink of gasoline fumes, and beneath that was the smell of living meat.

One by one they collided with the heavy glass door, rebounded, hit it again until it open, stepping into the teeth of the storm with their own teeth bared. Unaware of the stinging rain or the hands of wind that tried to push them back. They moved toward the parked cars, sniffed the air, found only trace scents — old scents — but nothing alive. They staggered on through the small parking lot, spreading out, some heading toward the line of red taillights, others toward the line of white oncoming lights.

The first of them that stepped onto the highway was a man with a green apron and a matching billed cap. He had no fingers. They’d all been bitten off. Some by Homer Gibbon, though this man had no idea who that was. He had no thought at all, about Homer or anyone, anything, except the hunger. He stepped off the grassy verge and walked directly into the hazy dark gap between two bright headlights of a UPS tractor trailer going seventy miles an hour.

The impact smashed him into the air and hurled him thirty feet away. It exploded him. Parts of him were flung all the way over the truck. One arm struck the window of a blue Subaru hard enough to crack the glass. The rest of him was pulped beneath the semi’s wheels as the UPS truck tried to brake.

There was a moment when the truck seemed to defy gravity, to rise like a balloon as mass and momentum and the storm-slick road conjured bad magic in the night. The semi slewed sideways and the trailer hunched up and over it, snapping cables and tearing metal. The two cars behind it, the CNN van, and the Walmart truck behind it punched one-two-three into the twisting truck and into each other. The storm was too violent for that kind of road speed. Everyone knew it, and everyone drove that fast regardless. The storm and the plague killed them for it.

The air above the eastbound lane was filled with a scream of metal and the popping of safety glass, the hiss of tires that were finding no genuine purchase on the wet roads, and the whump-crunch of vehicle hitting vehicle.

Thirty yards away the same vehicular gavotte was imitated on the westbound lane as three of the infected walked into the traffic. Cars and trucks slammed each other into accordion shapes. Other vehicles tried to swerve but there was nowhere to go in that kind of traffic.

On another night when there was no storm and no major crisis, the roads would have been far less crowded. There would have been no rubberneckers, no press, no emergency vehicles, no troop transports, and no cars filled with family and friends trying to get to their missing loved ones in Stebbins.

Cars spun and danced, lifting from the asphalt as big trucks hit them. Airbags popped like firecrackers. Seat belts restrained and they broke and they cut into flesh. The last of the bloody figures from Starbucks moved onto the highway and were crushed by the colliding cars.

Then the symphony of impacts faded out, replaced by the blare of horns and the rising chorus of screams.

For a short time — a precious short time — the infected were unable to attack, each of them defeated by the metal things they had tried to attack to get at the soft food within. The victims of Homer Gibbon’s attacks were crippled and mangled, every last one of them.

It would be nearly six minutes before the first ambulances arrived, filled with EMTs who would see hurt people in the wreckage. Badly hurt and yet somehow still alive. Still moving. The EMTs would work shoulder to shoulder with ordinary civilians, survivors of the wrecks or people who’d been able to stop their cars and rushed forward to help. The EMTs and the civilians would work like heroes to pull the mangled people from the wrecks. To triage them, to stabilize them. To save them. Driven by professional responsibility, they would do everything they could to preserve the lives of the suffering wounded.

All of this happened less than one mile outside of the Stebbins Q-zone.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Lonnie Silk saw the soldiers up ahead and his heart lifted in his chest.

They wore the same kind of combat hazmat suit he did, but their’s were intact, and they still had weapons. Both of the soldiers had they hoods off, though. Lonnie recognized them. The sergeant, anyway. Rodriguez. Lonnie couldn’t remember his first name. The other guy was a stranger. Some white kid.

It was the best thing he could see.

Someone he knew.

More important, soldiers. People who could help him.

Lonnie raised his hand, took as deep a breath as his aching lungs could manage, and called out to them.

Except that’s not what happened.

It took Lonnie a few seconds to realize that what he thought he did and what he actually did were slanting downhill in different ways.

It wasn’t one hand that he raised. Both hands came up. Not in a signaling gesture. Not a wave at all. His hands came up and reached toward the two soldiers as if, even from this distance, he could touch them.

No.

Not touch.

Grab.

Grab?

Was that right? Lonnie struggled to understand it. His fingers splayed open and then clutched shut as if trying to grab the image out of the air.

Why?

To do what?

He could feel his lungs expand as he drew in the air for his yell, but the ache was gone. There was pain, but it was different. A totally new kind of discomfort that felt oddly distant. It was like feeling someone else’s pain, though that was totally nuts. Impossible.

The most confusing thing for Lonnie was how his words sounded as they issued from his throat.

They weren’t words at all.

He didn’t hear his voice call Rodriguez’s name. He didn’t hear words at all.

The sound was so strange. So weird.

So wrong.

It was a long, sustained sound of complaint. Of need.

Of …

Of.

Oh God.

Of hunger.

He tried to stop that sound from coming out of him. He tried to pull down his reaching hands.

He tried.

Lonnie Silk tried.

The infection within him did not allow his voice or his hands to obey.

The soldiers stood there, looking the wrong way, looking past the sawhorse barrier to the road on the other side of the Q-zone. As if they needed to see that. As if that road was important.

Idiots.

Fucking dumbass idiots.

Lonnie screamed at Rodriguez.

But the scream was another moan.

Deep and plaintive and filled with a different kind of pain than Lonnie felt. Not the pain of bites and torn flesh and damaged muscle. This was the ache of pure hunger.

The winds and rain tried to tear the moan out of the air, and for a moment Lonnie thought that the soldiers wouldn’t hear it.

Then the white kid turned.

Turned, stared, let his mouth drop open, and then he screamed.

“Tito! Jesus Christ — Tito!”

Tito Rodriguez, that was his name. He spun around, bringing his gun up. He stared, too. He screamed, too.

They both fired.

Lonnie Silk heard the first bullets burn through the air around him and then vanish into the storm. Then he felt his body — what had once been his body — shudder and tremble as something hit him in the chest, the stomach. The thigh.

There was pain, but only of a kind. So far away, so small, so …

Meaningless.

His mouth opened and the moan was louder now, rising above the howl of the storm.

Rodriguez and the white kid kept firing.

No! cried Lonnie in a voice that had absolutely no volume. His cries were unwanted in that stolen throat. No one heard them at all. Not the soldiers, not the infection, not the storm.

But it was all Lonnie had. He had no control over his body as it lumbered through the mud and into the hail of bullets. The two soldiers were fucking idiots. They fired wildly, forgetting all of their training, all of the captain’s warnings. They tried to bully him down with round after round to his body. Wasting ammunition. Wasting seconds as Lonnie closed from fifteen feet to ten to five to …

Suddenly Lonnie’s left eye went dark and as an aftereffect he felt the thudding impact of the bullet that hit him.

He thought that would be it. A headshot. That’s what the captain told them all. Hit the infected in the head and they go down.

Aim for the head.

Don’t you get it, you stupid fucks, he tried to scream. I’m one of them. I’m infected! I’m …

Aim for the fucking head.

Please … oh, God, please, aim for the head. The head. Shoot the head. Shoot me in my head.

Except that one of these assholes had aimed for his head. Had hit his head. Had blown out one of his goddamn eyes.

And yet Lonnie watched his hands grab at the white kid. Saw the kid’s face come suddenly very close as the hands pulled and his own broken, bleeding head lunged forward.

Felt the tough, rubbery resistance of skin beneath his …

His teeth.

Jesus Christ.

Skin between his teeth.

Lonnie felt the skin compress. Become taut.

Collapse.

Tear.

Rupture.

And then the blood.

The liquid heat of blood against his lips, on his cheeks.

In his mouth.

Please, God, just fucking kill me!

And then he felt another impact. This time over his right eye. He felt it for all of one moment, and then a vast, featureless black mouth opened in the world and Lonnie Silk fell into it. As he vanished into the darkness, he thought he heard Tito Rodriguez calling his name. But soon it wasn’t his name anymore. And the darkness was everything.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Dr. Dick Price was the director of research applications for a facility buried deep in a billion-dollar laboratory. The lab was located in a place Price personally felt was the most aptly named spot on earth: Death Valley. There was no way to get to his lab except by helicopter, and when the birds were out of the coop he and his staff felt like they’d been abandoned on the dark side of the moon.

Team members had to go through ten kinds of security screening including incredibly thorough background checks and psychological evaluations that felt like personality rape. The few who passed those tests then had to put their names to a stack of waivers and nondisclosure agreements, and one frightening document which, for all intents and purposes, signed away their constitutional rights.

Once someone arrived at Z-point, as it was familiarly known, the government owned them. Body and, as Price saw it, soul.

Everyone on the science team knew that the place was illegal as hell. Even the support staff — cooks, guards, cleaners, and janitors — suspected as much. A word to a journalist could bring the place down and likely have several members of Congress and the Department of Defense thrown into jail, but the wording of those documents would land the whistle-blower in an adjoining cell.

It was criminal but necessary. At least as far as Price and his masters at the DOD were concerned. The international agreements and bans on certain kinds of biological warfare were nice in their way, but Price didn’t believe for a moment that any of the signatory nations was truly abiding by those rules. It didn’t make a lot of sense to do so, not as he saw it. There were terrorist groups who knew how to grow viruses, and plenty of nations — North Korea, Iran, and China sprang to mind — that were definitely cultivating the next generation of weaponized pathogens. The CIA had proof, but politics and the subtle chess game of brinksmanship kept that information below the surface. It was leverage in all kinds of discussions, and as long as the bad guys screwed around with their bugs and bombs, the State Department and the CIA had some dials they could turn. Blackmail was far more important and useful than public disclosure.

On the other hand, knowing that your enemy was designing microscopic monsters was in itself a tacit mandate to do the same. Maybe not for attack — not even Price thought that America was crazy enough to release the kind of bioweapon that teams like Z-point developed — but in order to build a good shield you have to be able to study the sword it needs to stop. That’s what the people at Z-point did. They made monsters in order to study them and — ideally — craft response protocols, sera, antitoxins, and other prophylactic measures.

For these reasons and others, Dick Price believed that he was prepared for the conversation he was about to have with the president of the United States. He’d had two similar conversations with a previous president during a bioweapon attack at the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia more than a dozen years ago and then when a group of domestic terrorists created weaponized and communicable versions of genetic diseases including Tay-Sachs and sickle cell. Those had been difficult conversations, especially the first one, since the sitting president of any given administration is never advised about the existence of Zabriske Point or similar stations until he needed to know. Plausible deniability was such a useful thing.

“We’re just about ready,” said his aide.

Price sat at his desk with a large laptop open and the encryption conference software up and running.

He adjusted his tie, sipped some water, took a calming breath, and nodded to the aide.

The screen display changed from a placeholder of the presidential seal to the face of the commander in chief. Two people sat on either side of the president — Scott Blair, the national security advisor, and a young and very intense-looking black woman Price knew by reputation only, Dr. Monica McReady, a rising superstar in the epidemiology world. A woman, he reminded himself, who had been mentioned several times as perhaps a better fit for the directorship of Z-point than he was.

Shit, he thought. That’s just swell.

He could feel sweat begin to form along his spine.

“Dr. Price?” said the president.

“Yes, Mr. President. Despite the circumstances it is a pleasure to meet you, even virtually.”

The president gave a tiny nod. There was a brief round of introductions, but it was done fast and without the usual courtesies.

“Have you been brought up to speed on the situation developing in western Pennsylvania?”

“I have, Mr. President.”

“Am I to understand that you are familiar with Lucifer 113?” There was both frost and anger in the president’s tone.

“Yes, sir. Very familiar.”

“In what way are you familiar?”

Price paused. “Well, Mr. President, as you know we—”

“No, Dr. Price, I don’t know. Until twenty minutes ago I had never heard your name or the name of your facility. While I am aware of the requirements of security and confidentiality, I am distressed to learn that we are continuing work on a bioweapon of such devastating potential that one of my predecessors felt compelled to use an executive order to terminate all work on it. Are you aware of that order, Dr. Price?”

Price said nothing, and against his will his eyes flicked toward the national security advisor.

“Mr. President, I…” began Price, but his words faltered.

The president shook his head. “When this matter is resolved,” he said coldly, “there will be a full investigation. Make no mistake. However I think it’s fair to say that heads will roll at a higher pay grade than yours.”

Blair looked at the fingers of his folded hands and Price saw something flicker on his face. Was it irritation? Was it cynical humor? Whatever it was flicked on and off his mouth in a microsecond and the president did not see it.

Price said, “I … um … I mean, thank you.”

“But hear me on this, Doctor,” interrupted the president, “a new executive order is forthcoming and that will be enforced. Failure to comply will be met with the harshest possible penalties.”

“I understand, sir.”

The president studied him for a long two-count. “Do you, Dr. Price?”

“I believe I do, Mr. President.”

“Then let’s get down to it. Samples of the pathogen are being sent to you by military courier. Even though you already have the original pathogen there, we now know that Dr. Herman Volker used a modified version. Volker said as much to his CIA handler when he called to alert us about what he’d done.”

“What about Dr. Volker? If the release of Lucifer was an accident, then surely he’d be eager to help us—”

“Herman Volker is dead,” the president said flatly.

“What?” gasped Price. “Was he infected?”

“He hung himself.”

“Oh no. That’s horrible.”

“Dr. Price, let’s not waste time weeping over a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of American citizens.”

Price straightened and cleared his face of expression. “Of course not, sir. It’s just that he could have helped us. Remodeling a weaponized pathogen is tricky work, and even though it can result in something as apparently unstoppable as Lucifer, there are often chinks in the armor, so to speak.”

“What kind of chinks?”

“Intentional vulnerabilities left by the designers so that they are not as vulnerable to the pathogen as, say, their enemies. Or, in some cases, design flaws that can be exploited to create a counteragent or some prophylactic measure.”

The president brightened. “Are you sure?”

“Sure? No, sir.”

“What will make you sure?”

Price considered. “One of two things offer the best chance of that. The first will be an examination of the Lucifer 113 samples being sent to us. We’ll learn a lot by comparing it to the most recent version of Lucifer that we have.”

“That’s going to take time, though,” suggested the president.

“We can work pretty fast when—”

“Skip the sales pitch. What’s the other chance?”

“Looking at Volker’s research notes. Do we know where they are?”

“There are no records in his office at the prison where he worked. The hard drives have been completely wiped and degaussed.”

“Everything?” asked Price, aghast that any scientist would do that to his own work. “He kept no backups?”

“He did,” said the president. “All of his research was copied to a set of flash drives.”

“That’s terrif—”

“Which we do not have.”

Price had to bite back a curse. “Is anything being done to obtain those drives?”

“Of course,” said the president. “However, since we have no guarantee of that happening right away, we need to move forward with what we have. Is there anything you can tell me about Lucifer based on what you’ve so far been told about the current crisis?”

Price nodded. “I believe so, sir. I reviewed some field reports from a doctor attached to the National Guard. If the reports are accurate then there are marked differences between the current strain and the samples we were initially given here.”

“What differences?”

“Well, the rate of infection appears to have been greatly accelerated. Possibly by a factor of ten. The original Lucifer samples we have been working with here have a much longer gestation period. This was a problem the Soviets recognized that essentially limited practical application of the weapon because there was too great a lag time between introduction and a full-blown outbreak. Now that appears to occur in minutes. That’s rather exciting.”

“Doctor,” warned the president, his voice low and slow, “be very careful in your choice of words.”

“I–I’m sorry,” stammered Price. “I meant from a scientific perspective.”

“I know what you meant.”

The president’s eyes were hostile. So, Price noted, were those of Dr. McReady. Price composed his own features to show contrition.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “My apologies.”

McReady bent close and whispered something to the president, who looked unhappy, but he nodded.

“Doctor,” said the president to Price, “how active has your research been on the Lucifer pathogen?”

You bitch, thought Price. Aloud he said, “We, um, have continued to study it in order to prepare a response protocol in the event of the weapon being deployed as, um, it currently has been…”

“What is the status on that research?”

Price licked his lips. “We have developed several advanced strains of the pathogen.”

“And where are you with response protocols?”

Again Price tried not to look at Scott Blair. “We’ve made some progress.” He leaned slightly on the word “some.”

“Describe that progress, Doctor,” ordered the president.

“Sir, before I do, I need to explain what Lucifer is. It’s more than just a weaponized disease. Lucifer was built using select combinations of disease pathogens and parasites. Those parasites have undergone extensive transgenic modification. Toxoplasma gondii is a key element, as is the larva of the green jewel wasp. The toxoplasma is a key element in artificially induced schizophrenia, a disease that heightens fear and increased psychological distress. This is the keystone of the uncontrollable aggression of the infected. Their brains have — to put it in layman’s terms — been rewired to react as if they are constantly under attack. This triggers our most basic survival instincts, feeding each infected a modified cocktail of adrenaline, dopamine, and other elements. At the same time, the genetically modified lancet flukes Dicrocoelium dendriticum and Euhaplorchis californiensis combine to regulate that aggressive response behavior into a predictable pattern. Specifically a pattern that includes seeking uninfected prey, attacking it, and infecting it. Remember, sir, this was developed by Soviet scientists during the Cold War as a self-cleaning weapon. Once introduced to, say, a base or station, the disease would spread like wildfire and ultimately there would be no uninfected survivors. The infected would be unable to manage any organized defense, even to the point of being unable to aim and fire a gun. An armed infiltration team could then enter the base and eliminate the infected and thereafter secure any physical assets like computers, equipment, and so on.”

The president nodded. “If there’s more, Doctor, let’s hear it.”

“The central element of the entire Lucifer program was the transgenically rebuilt green jewel wasp, a parasite that normally targets cockroaches. The wasp’s venom blocks the neurotransmitter octopamine in the target, and from that point on, all movements of the host are controlled by the imperative biological needs of the wasp. Those needs are, of course, reproduction. With the combination of the toxoplasma, the wasp, and the flukes, the host has essentially become an organic robot whose sole operational software requires that it attack, bite, feed, and then seek other prey.”

The president looked sick, but his mouth was a hard, flat line. “About the feeding,” he said, his voice thicker than it had been, “field reports indicate that the infected stop feeding on their victims after a while. Why don’t they consume the entire body?”

“They can’t and won’t,” said Price. “That’s a design requirement. If the infected lingered to consume their victims, there would be no new vectors, and it would stall the overall rate of infection. Mind you, they do need to feed, but only for the raw protein to feed the parasites as they spread throughout the bloodstream and infuse the mucus membranes. The hyperaccelerated life cycle of the parasites expends a great deal of energy. They need fresh protein to make more larva so that every single drop of saliva is crammed with millions of eggs ready to hatch. But of equal importance to the infected is the need to spread the disease. That far outweighs their need to continue feeding.”

McReady spoke aloud for the first time. “If I may, Mr. President? Dr. Price,” she said, “what triggers the host to stop feeding on their victims? What’s the biological off switch? We’re hoping that there may be something there we can use as a prophylactic measure.”

Price shook his head in grudging approval of the question. “It’s partly a reaction to nerve conduction but it’s mostly triggered by blood pressure. The normal intensity of blood pressure sparks aggression and appetite, but as it diminishes through injury and subsequent blood loss, it sends a signal to the parasite that the target is no longer a viable food source. That’s the off switch, Dr. McReady, and God only knows how long it took the Soviet’s to crack that, especially with the crudity of genetics during the Cold War.”

“Doctor, when you’re done congratulating madmen,” the president said drily, “perhaps you can tell us about what your team has developed as a countermeasure. Can we kill the parasites?”

Price cleared his throat. “We, um, were never able to actually kill the parasites, Mr. President. Not the way you mean, not with a vaccine or anything of that nature. Not in an active vector. By the time the victim has become a host the parasites have spread throughout his body; however, this corresponds to a dramatic drop in circulation. The host is very nearly dead in clinical terms, with minimal brain function, respiration, circulation, and nerve conduction in play — just enough to allow it to continue acting as an aggressive vector. The Soviets did their work very well, however, and they designed it so that there was not enough circulation in play to transmit any kind of parasite-specific toxin throughout the host. Only destruction of the host stops it, and by that I mean either isolation long enough for the larvae to die off — say five, six weeks — or, more practically, incineration of all infected tissues.”

The president closed his eyes for a moment. “Dear God,” he murmured.

However, McReady said, “Wait a minute, Doctor,” she snapped. “You said that you were working on a countermeasure. Short of headshots, did you actually come up with anything?”

“We … um…” hedged Price. Then he took a breath and said it. “We found that the only possible or practical response was along the lines of fighting fire with fire.”

“Which means what?” growled the president.

“We created a different parasite,” he said. “One that is genetically designed to attack and consume the larva of the green jewel wasp. We’re in the earliest stages of testing it. But … I think it might work.”

The president suddenly looked at something off screen and Price heard someone that he couldn’t see say something. Price couldn’t hear most of the words, but he saw the way in which those words affected the president. Anger and concern were replaced by shock and then a twisted mask of what appeared to Price to be absolute horror. The same horror was mirrored on the faces of Blair and McReady.

“Oh my God…” breathed McReady as she covered her mouth with her hands.

Panic flared in the eyes of Scott Blair.

The two words Price did hear hit him like punches to the face.

“… quarantine failed…”

If he heard more, his mind was momentarily unable to process it.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Dez and Billy sat on opposite sides of a teacher’s desk in an empty room. Dez had swept all of the items from the desk and had covered it with rifles, handguns, and boxes of shells.

“This is what we have,” she said. “Not counting the pieces I gave to Piper and a few of the others. Three rifles with fifty rounds each. Two shotguns, but only forty-four shells left. Three Glocks and nine magazines, all full, and this piece of shit thirty-eight.” She nudged a Ruger LCR revolver. “I don’t know why I even brought it. But there’s a box of hollow-points for it, so it’s not entirely like giving a blow job.”

Trout smiled thinly. “Didn’t Sirhan Sirhan kill Bobby Kennedy with a twenty-two?”

“What’s your point?”

“Thirty-eight’s a bigger gun.”

“It’s not the caliber that matters, Billy. It has a five-round cylinder.” She patted the Glock 22 Gen4 holstered at her hip. “Extended magazine with seventeen rounds. Which would you rather have if the shit comes down again?”

“I can’t hit a barn with a baseball, Dez, so I’m not sure it would matter.”

Dez leaned across the desk and pushed one of the shotguns toward him. “It’s Korean, but don’t hold that against it. Daewoo USAS-12. Gas operated with selective fire. Very nice in close-combat situations, which is pretty much the definition of life as we know it. I have a ten-round detachable box magazine or a twenty-round drum magazine, take your pick. Fires twelve-gauge.”

He hefted it and winced. “Shit, this thing is heavy.”

“Thirteen pounds fully loaded,” she said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

“I have a bad back.”

“Really? I thought maybe you had menstrual cramps.”

“Dez…”

She grinned at him, and it was the first time he’d seen an unguarded smile on her face in a long time. “I’m just messing with you.”

He grinned back.

Dez picked up a pistol that didn’t look like it could fire anything. There was no barrel.

“What’s that, a Taser?”

“Close. Nova SP-5. Five-shot stun gun.”

“Bulky.”

“Yeah,” she agreed and she affixed the holster to her belt.

“What’s the point? I thought only headshots bring them down.”

Dez snorted. “How many human assholes have we dealt with so far?” she asked. “Much as I’d love to pop a cap in some of them — and the name General Zetter comes to mind — I don’t think that would go over well.”

“And you think Tasing him would?”

“They don’t execute you for making a dickhead general piss his pants.”

Outside the storm battered at the building. Dez walked over to one of the windows and looked down at the parking lot. On one side of the lot the National Guard had set up their camp, and there were all kinds of vehicles and portable structures down there, all of it turned gray by the rain. However, at the other end of the lot were big yellow school buses. Lots of them. Some from Stebbins and at least twice as many from surrounding regions. Buses that had brought the kids here to the emergency shelter.

Trout joined her and looked out.

Some of the buses had burned. Others were wrecks, torn apart by gunfire. The dead had attacked while the kids were being off-loaded. Thousands had died, but there were fewer than a hundred bodies. The rest had walked off. Trout wondered how many of them had been killed along with JT.

“They could clean out those buses,” said Dez. “They could hose them out and put some heavy-grade clear plastic over the windows.”

“To what end?”

“To get us out of here. There are places they can take us. Places where they could quarantine us but where’d we all get better food and medical attention.”

“Maybe they will,” he said. “Maybe in the morning.”

She just shook her head. He studied her profile, and then he saw her sudden frown. He followed her gaze and saw that something was happening down there. People were suddenly running everywhere, soldiers scrambled to climb into troop transports, and beyond the fence the big vanes of a dozen helicopters were beginning to turn.

“What is it? Are they coming for us?”

“No,” said Dez, “I think … this is something else.”

As they watched, the soldiers dragged boxes toward the armored personnel carriers.

“It looks like they’re leaving,” said Trout. “Why do you think? Because of the storm?”

Dez shook her head.

“Maybe,” Trout began, “maybe it’s over. Maybe they’ve stopped this thing and they’re standing down.”

Dez turned to him and gave him a brief, harsh look. “Does it look like anything’s over, Billy? Is that what it looks like to you?”

Trout hesitated before answering. His statement had been on the stupid side of hopeful and they both knew it. The troops below did not move like people whose long, dark night was over. There was none of the postcrisis malaise in anything they did. There was none of the laughter that comes at the end of great tension. Every movement down there was fast, but not everyone moved with the smooth and practiced ease of professional soldiers.

“They’re definitely leaving.”

“Yeah,” agreed Dez. “And in a big damn hurry.”

Trout saw people collide into each other. He saw them drop things. He saw people running for transports only half-dressed. There was only one word that appropriately described what he and Dez were seeing.

Panic.