Fall of Night

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

No one at the bar knew his last name. When asked he said that his name was John. It wasn’t exactly true, but true enough.

John sat at the end of the bar, drinking red wine, making it last, paying for it with money he’d taken from the biker he’d killed. He would have more money when he sold the motorcycle. John was not a biker type. He disliked machines and especially loud ones. Noise irritated him. It was hard enough to listen to all of the voices in his head without those kinds of distractions.

The bar was quiet, especially this early in the day. The bartender, two other early-bird customers, and John. He’d come in as soon as it opened, found his favorite stool, and sat down to watch the news. So many wonderful things were happening in the world.

Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio had all clearly been touched by the hand of God.

He wondered if that meant that it was starting.

The Fall.

The collapse of the false world of idolatry and sin.

It was something for which he’d prayed every day of his adult life.

It was something he always believed would happen one day.

The Fall.

Then the news station interrupted its own broadcast to play another video clip from a reporter named Gregory Weinman. The reporter, who was somewhere in the affected area, had been sending videos all night, and at first the press had dismissed them as elaborate fakes and the worst kind of practical jokes.

As the night burned away and the morning dawned with fear and promise, the reaction to those reports changed. Now they were being trotted out as hard news. News that terrified everyone at the bar.

Except John, who found them so incredibly comforting.

The TV reporter warned that the footage they were about to show was disturbing and contained images not suitable for children. John saw the predatory gleam in the reporter’s eyes. Then the footage began, showing a man that John immediately recognized as the supposedly executed serial killer Homer Gibbon as he went into a 7-Eleven and began attacking people.

It was all very messy and crude. John did not like biting. He always preferred knives.

Knives held within them a purity of purpose. They were instruments of God’s will. John had several of them in special pockets he’d sewn inside his clothes. He was never without his knives.

The video played out and then it cut to the interior of a car as Homer Gibbon spoke about why he was doing what he did.

He spoke about seeing with the Black Eye.

He spoke about hearing the secrets of the Red Mouth.

The Red Mouth.

That was something John understood, though he had never used the exact phrase before. Red Mouth. How perfect. How apt.

He mouthed the words, and they felt like ambrosia on his tongue and lips.

He knew right then that he would forever use those words to describe what he, in his holy purpose, had done so many times and would continue to do if God willed it.

Then Homer said something else that struck to the very core of John’s personal faith.

“In the Bible Jesus talked about how the meek were going to inherit the earth. I forget where he said it, but it was important, and I think this is what he was talking about. The way people are when they wake up after I open the Red Mouths in their flesh…”

“Yes,” said John.

He said it a little too loud, a bit too emphatically, and the two other patrons turned to him.

“What?” asked one of them. “You agree with that bullshit?”

John said nothing.

“I asked you a question,” demanded the man, sliding off his stool. “I have friends in Pennsylvania. I have some family there.”

John considered how to play this. He could construct a response that would dial the man’s outrage down to a simple misunderstanding. He could do that because he’d done that sort of thing many times before, and with sharper people than this. He’d managed conversations with psychiatrists and parole review panels.

And yet …

On the screen Homer Gibbon continued to talk about the meek inheriting the earth, and about how he was helping them have eternal life. About how it was God’s will for a peaceful planet. A world without war, without hate. A world of the silent, mindless, meek. A world of people emptied of everything except the grace of a loving and generous God.

John understood and agreed with everything Homer Gibbon said.

“Yo, asshole,” said the loudmouth, moving down the bar toward John. “I’m talking to—”

His last words were gone, trapped inside the man’s chest, unable to get past the blood that now filled his throat. The man stared in uncomprehending horror at the glittering steel that seemed to have appeared as if by magic in John’s hand.

The other patron and the bartender gaped at what was happening, their incomprehension every bit as great as the dying loudmouth.

“John?” asked the bartender. “What the hell did you just do?”

Explaining would take too much time, and John did not believe either of these men would truly understand.

He killed them both.

They tried to make a fight of it. As if that mattered.

As they lay bleeding, with red mouths opened in their flesh, John watched the face of Homer Gibbon.

This was the face of the chosen of God, the rock upon which a new church was being born in the farmlands of Pennsylvania.

“You are my god,” he told the killer on the TV. “And I will be a saint of your church.”

Smiling, filled with great joy, Saint John wiped his knives clean and stepped out into the morning sunlight, knowing with total certainty that the noisy, cluttered, sinful world was about to fall. It was all going to become quiet.

As God so clearly intended.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

The buses painted a long line of yellow through the gray of the predawn morning. Dez, Trout, and Sam sat in a huddle in the front of the lead bus. They passed a few cars, but they were all driving too fast. Panic speed, thought Trout. A UPS truck lay on its side at a crossroads and several figures were hunkered down around a ragged red thing that twitched even as it was consumed. Off in the distance, on the far side of a massive cornfield, a farmhouse burned, flickering its souls to the winds.

They found an armoured personnel carrier standing alone and empty on the shoulder of the road. Sam and the remaining members of the Boy Scouts got out to check it. Dez went with them and Trout, weak and trembling, stood in the open doorway of the bus. There was no blood on the APC, no scattering of shell casings, nothing to indicate a battle. However, it was completely empty. No crew, no bodies, no traces of how it came to be abandoned there. Boxer, Shortstop, and Gypsy came back with armloads of ammunition and extra guns. Sam tottered back carrying a heavy metal case of fragmentation grenades.

They stripped the APC of everything of use, and all of it done in a hasty silence. Then they piled back into the buses and the convoy began rolling.

The landscape that whipped by seemed murky and deserted to Trout, though his gut told him otherwise. Twice he saw figures in the woods, pale and silent, watching the buses as they passed.

Inside the bus things quieted down. Many of the children were asleep, dragged into troubled dreams by shock and exhaustion. Others sat and watched the forest with the fixity of attention of a bunch of plastic mannequins. Dez followed the line of Trout’s stare and took his hand to give it a gentle squeeze.

Sam sat nearby thumbing bullets into a stack of empty magazines. His eyes were shuttered windows.

Jenny DeGroot came and squatted down in the aisle. She had somehow conjured hot coffee. “It’s instant,” she apologized, handing out steaming Styrofoam cups.

Trout took his with a greedy sigh. “I don’t care if it’s boiled gutter water.”

He burned his tongue on the first sip, didn’t care, blew on the surface and took another sip.

Sam Imura sat with his head cradled between his palms, eyes unfocused as he stared into his own thoughts.

“I was sorry to hear about your friend,” said Trout.

“Moonshiner,” murmured Sam, nodding his thanks.

“What was his real name?” asked Dez.

“Staff Sergeant Bud Hollister. Good ol’ boy from Alabama.”

Dez nodded. “He had biker tats. He used to ride?”

A memory put a faint smile on Sam’s hard mouth. “He rode with the Outlaws before he moved from ’Bama.”

“Rough boys,” said Dez.

“Very. He rolled out with them when he was sixteen lying about being nineteen. He was with them until just before his eighteenth birthday, then got arrested for some petty stuff. Judge offered him a choice of jail or enlistment. Not that he stopped kicking ass and taking names as a soldier. Running joke was that he had Velcro on his stripes because he kept losing them.”

Trout cleared his throat and cut a look at Dez. “Lots of that going around.”

“Bite me,” muttered Dez. “You can live small and boring or you can go and tear a piece off for yourself.”

Sam grinned. “You and Moonshiner would have gotten along fine.”

“He wasn’t half bad-looking.”

“Hey, I’m sitting right here you know,” Trout reminded her.

Dez ignored him. She held out her cup. “To Bud ‘Moonshiner’ Hollister. A true American ass-kicker.”

“And a good man,” added Sam, touching his cup. Trout did the same and they drank in silence for a while.

“After we get to Asheville,” asked Trout, “what will you do? Stay there or go back?”

“Back is a relative term. I’m not part of the regular army, so I don’t have to report back. I’ll stay in touch with Scott Blair and if he needs me to do anything special, something that could help, then I’ll do that.”

“And if there’s nothing you can do?”

Sam shrugged. “My family is in central California. Dad and stepmom. Brother who’s twenty and in the police academy, and a stepbrother who’s eighteen months old. Dad’s a cop, too, but he’s getting up there. Been driving a desk for the last ten years. Mom’s an E.R. nurse. If this thing continues to spread, then I’m going to want to get to them and help keep them safe.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Trout, and Dez nodded. Sam made no comment. The conversation dwindled down to a shared, moody silence.

Trout stared out the window as he sipped the last of his coffee, then he frowned. “Hey,” he said, “I thought we were going to North Carolina.”

“We are,” said Dez.

“Then why did we just pass a sign for Fort Necessity? You planning on visit a historic battlefield during a flight to safety? I don’t know, Dez, I doubt the gift shop is open this early.”

“We’re not going to the fort,” said Dez irritably. “We’re going to Sapphire Foods. It’s a mile past the fort on Route 40. I told you about it. The big food distribution warehouse.”

“Ah yes, the one where your ex-boyfriend works. If he’s still an ex-boyfriend.”

“Don’t start, Billy.”

“It’s a good call,” said Sam. “We got less than half the supplies out of the school.”

Trout knew that it was a good idea but he didn’t want to admit it. He fished for an objection. “What if they won’t let us take anything.”

“We’ll ask nicely,” Sam suggested.

“Charlie will give me what I want,” said Dez.

“Charlie? Charlie who? And why would he give you anything? Would that be a matter of him committing a crime?”

“We’re in a state of emergency.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And Charlie likes kids. He always has. He coaches the boxing and wrestling teams at the PAL in—”

“Whoa, wait, are you talking about that Charlie?”

Dez colored and said nothing.

“Are you freaking serious, Desdemona Fox? Him?”

“Who?” asked Sam, but he was ignored.

“He’s a scumbag, a thug, and very likely an actual criminal,” said Trout.

“He’s not that bad.”

“Your nose grew six inches when you said that.” Trout shook his head in genuine disbelief. “I know you’ve dated some lowlifes over the years, Dez, but how drunk were you when you thought dating Charlie Pink-eye was a good idea?”

“He doesn’t like to be called that.”

“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like. Charlie’s a psychopath. So’s his brother and so’s his dad. Didn’t his old man kill Charlie’s mother?”

“It was never proved. Might have been suicide. But what does that matter, Billy? We’re not going there so I can give him a blow job. We need supplies and I know that if I explain the situation, he’ll help us. And if we need to, he’ll let us stay there.”

Trout began to fire back a crushing reply, but the driver called out, “We’re coming up on it.”

The bus rounded a curve in the road and there it was. A tall double fence encircled a plot of land that had to be a mile per side. The heavy-gauge rolling gate was peeled back on its hinges, the pipe frame twisted into a useless curl. The vehicle that had hit it, a Staples delivery truck, was still wrapped inside the gate like a spider caught in a web. The driver’s door was open and splashed with black blood.

“No … no … no…” said Dez under her breath.

In the middle of the property was a massive one-story building made from dull gray stone blocks. As Dez had said there were no windows at all, but along one side there were bays for fifty trucks. A dozen trucks were backed into bays. There were a dozen cars parked haphazardly in the lot, some crumpled together. One sat there burning in the dying drizzle.

“Oh … shit…” breathed Trout.

There were zombies everywhere.

Dozens of them.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

Alex Jay Berman stood on the balcony of his high-rise apartment and watched Pittsburgh burn. His wife held his hand and her grip was like a vise. So tight that he knew she would never let go.

Never.

Screams rose up from below, and Alex bent forward to look down. Twenty-three stories below, moving through patches of sunlight and shadow, the crowds surged. From up here it was impossible to tell who was infected and who was not.

Or at least not yet.

Everyone was in motion.

Cars and trucks moved through the crowds and from up here they looked like leaves buffeted along atop a moving stream. Alex wondered how many of those people the vehicles rolled over. Up hear you couldn’t hear the sound of breaking bones.

Only the screams.

And the gunfire.

And the explosions.

Those were continual.

The rains had dwindled to nothing and then faded as the sun burned through the clouds. The sky above was pretty and blue. A bright blue. Like the summer skies of his boyhood. Pretty. Birds fly up there, far above the sounds of dying from below.

Behind him, on the other side of the closed French doors, fists beat on the glass. Small sounds made by small fists.

Alex did not turn to look. He had done many things in his life, some brave, some crazy, but he was absolutely sure it would take a greater insanity and far more courage than he possessed to turn and look through that glass. He could not do that.

His wife sobbed.

Once, a deep sound that was filled with everything either of them ever needed to say.

Except for one more thing.

Alex turned to his wife and smiled at her.

“I love you,” he said. “And I always will.”

Her tears glittered like jewels in the sunlight.

Still holding hands they stepped off the balcony ledge.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE

“What do we do?” asked the driver of the bus.

The lead bus idled in the short curving driveway, the others were still around the bend. So far the infected in the parking lot had not reacted to the bus. They were all close to the building, which was hundreds of yards away.

“We have three choices,” Sam said quickly when Dez joined them. “First choice is we bug out now and take our chances with the supplies we have. It’s less than a day to Asheville.”

“Sure,” said Dez bitterly, “if the roads are clear. If people are going apeshit — and you know damn well they are — then those roads could be jammed and those buses can’t exactly go off-road. It could take a day or it could take a week. And we don’t have a week’s worth of food and water. Nothing close to it. Most of that stuff got left behind at the school.”

“Okay … second choice is my team draws the dead off to one side, away from the building while you park the buses and off-load everyone through the loading bays. Then we make this home base.”

“Good call,” said Trout. “Right, Dez? You said this place has plenty of food and water and their own generators.”

Dez chewed her lip as she considered it. “There’s probably enough fuel in the generators for maybe a week. Ten days at the outside. After that the lights and heat and everything else shuts down. There are also no windows. Good for security, but once the lights are out it’s a big, black box. And there are two bathrooms but no showers. If it was a week, maybe, but since we don’t know how long … and since we have no way of telling how many of those things are going come sniffing around, we could be well and truly fucked if we get trapped in there.”

“Agreed.” Sam sighed and nodded. “Then that leaves the third choice. Plan A, I guess. We load as much as we can and we get back on the road.”

They watched the zombies in the parking lot.

“Can we actually do that with them hanging around?” asked Trout.

“No. We’d need to take them out. I count — what? Thirty, thirty-two? They’re spaced out … we can take them down.”

“And how many more will come looking to see what all the shooting’s about?”

Sam nodded. “Which means we need to work mighty damn fast.”

“Hey,” said Trout, snapping his fingers. “You black ops guys do assassinations and stuff, right? Don’t you have silencers?

“First,” said Dez impatiently, “they’re called sound suppressors.”

“And second,” said Sam, “we didn’t bring them because this wasn’t that kind of job.”

“Oh.” Trout felt foolish, but then something else occurred to him. “Don’t we have to check the building first before we go in? Who’s going to do that while you clear out the yard?”

“My team gets to do both,” said Sam wearily. Then he brightened. “And I think I know a way to speed the process.”

He outlined it to Dez, who approved. Then Sam touched his earbud and explained the situation and the plan to his remaining team members. Trout couldn’t hear their replies, but he doubted they were any happier about this than he was.

But it all began happening very fast.

Dez told the driver of the first bus to go into the lot. The other buses followed. Sam jumped out and began walking alongside the bus, which proceeded at a pace slow enough to keep pace with him. Boxer, Shortstop, and Gypsy did the same.

The plan was simple. The buses would enter, cut right, and follow the inside of the fence all the way around the building, staying so close that none of the infected could get between the fence and the buses. The engine sound drew the infected like a bright light draws moths, and soon the dead were shambling across the lot toward the lead bus. Sam and the Boy Scouts walked without haste toward them and as each zombie came within twenty feet, one of the soldiers put it down with a single shot to the head. It quickly became a rhythm. Easy and mechanical. Though to Trout, watching from the lead bus, there was a different kind of horror to this. The zombies closed in, they were shot, the convoy inched along, over and over again. Aboard the buses, people started cheering with each kill. As if this was a game and the number counter jumped up with each death. As if the infected were no more real than animated monsters in a video game. As if each of those infected had not been a person hours ago.

It shocked and repulsed Trout.

Lucifer 113 had stolen the life from these people. And this … the necessary killing took away their posthumous sham of being alive. But the reaction of the people on the bus, the cheers like spectators at the Roman circus, seemed to strip away the humanity of each infected. It reduced them to things rather than people.

Somehow this indifference, or detachment or madness or whatever it was, frightened Trout every bit as much as the plague itself. As each cheer went up, louder than the first, Trout thought he could glimpse a future where the survivors of this placed no value whatsoever on human life.

He knew that this was shock, that this was a shared traumatic stress reaction. He knew that. But he feared it, too.

It took over an hour to clear the parking lot.

It seemed like a year to Trout.

When it was over, Shortstop peeled off and headed to the open gate to stand guard.

At Dez’s direction the entire convoy of buses circled the huge building. Dez and Sam pressed their faces against the windows so they could examine the building. Along one section of wall were slots for employee cars. First in the line was a mint-condition 1967 fire-engine red Pontiac Le Mans convertible. Trout knew that car all too well. It belonged to Charlie Matthias.

The other cars and pickup trucks were unknown to him.

“Looks intact,” she said after they finished appraising the building. Then she reached out and tapped the bus driver on the shoulder. “Think you can back this into one of those bays?”

“Drove a tractor my whole life,” said the man. “I can park this in a phone booth.”

He was as good as his word, turning in a good angle, spinning the wheel before shifting, watching the mirrors, and sliding down the slope to a gentle stop against the heavy rubber fender covering the base of the load bay. Dez went back to make sure the door would open, and found there was a half-inch of clearance. She closed the door, though, and made sure it was locked, then hurried back to rejoin Trout. The other buses began imitating the process of backing into the bays. Most were able to manage it, but after a couple of them failed to do it, the driver of Dez’s bus went trotting out to help them.

Dez exited the bus and waited on the deserted loading bay until Sam, Boxer, and Gypsy joined her. Trout lingered in the open doorway, feeling enormously useless.

Dez had six extra magazines for her Glock, and thanks to the APC they’d looted, she had a second nine millimeter tucked into the back of her belt. Sam had switched from his sniper rifle to a more practical M4, and he had magazines tucked into every pouch and pocket. Six grenades were clipped to his harness.

“What’s the call, boss?” asked Gypsy.

Sam nodded to the service door at the far end of the bay. “We knock and let Dez negotiate with her friend, Charlie Matthias, if he’s still alive. She believes he’ll allow us to stock up, given the situation.”

“And if he doesn’t?” asked Gypsy.

Dez shrugged. “I like the guy,” she said, “but I’m not married to him. One way or another we’re rolling out of here with food and water. Not really interested in taking fuck you for an answer.”

Boxer held out his fist and took the bump.

“Gypsy,” said Sam, “watch our backs.”

They moved away from the buses, running lightly, weapons up and out. Trout noticed how smoothly Dez fit in with the Boy Scouts. Like she belonged more to their world than to any other. In a moment of irrational jealousy he wondered what would happen if Sam Imura and Dez had to work together for any length of time. Trout did not like his chances in a competition with that man. Not in combat and not in romance. Sam was everything Dez liked. He was strong, confident, capable, and decent.

“Fuck,” Trout murmured. Then he added, “Billy Trout you are a total damn fool.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO

Jake DeGroot drove through hell.

That was the only way he could describe what he was seeing.

The whole town of Stebbins was in ruins. There was death everywhere, but not enough of it was lying down. People — as torn and vacant as the three girls that had attacked Burl and the others — wandered through the streets. Many of them turned toward the sound of the front-end loader. Some even ran at it and tried to attack it.

At first Jake tried to avoid them, but the machine wasn’t fast or nimble enough to zigzag through the crowd.

He understood more about what they were now. On the slow ride here he’d put on headphones and turned the radio all the way up and listened to someone from the government say crazy things about a plague.

A plague.

A disease that made people murder each other.

It sounded plausible, though Jake knew it was much worse than that.

Even so, he didn’t want to hurt anyone. Not unless he had to. Not unless there was no other choice.

He ran out of choices on the way to the Stebbins Little School. By the time Big Bird was rolling down the road that lead to the front gate, the way was clogged by victims of the plague.

Unable to go around them or evade them, he took a breath, cursed God, and drove over them. The only mercy he received was that the engine noise was so loud he couldn’t hear the crunching of bones.

So many bones.

He turned away from the biggest mass of them and plowed right through an open stretch of fence, rolled across the parking lot past empty school buses, looking for some sign, some proof that Jenny and the others were still safe inside the school.

Then he rolled to a stop, idling, staring.

At two things.

The first was the open doorway of the school. The infected wandered in and out, and Jake recognized some of the teachers among them. It came close to breaking his heart.

Then he saw the second thing. Words written in brown spray paint on the red bricks of the school wall.

It was a message about who had been here at the school, about how they’d left, and about where they were going. As he read it the infected began climbing onto his machine.

With a growl, Jake put the loader in gear, turned, and with some of the dead still clinging on, headed for the road that led out of town.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE

They were twenty feet from the service door when Sam froze, one fist raised. Then he waved the others up so they could see what he was looking at. The door to the building was not, as they first supposed, shut. It was slightly ajar, about a half inch from a tight fit. That wasn’t what jolted Sam, though. There was a partial handprint on the frame, just the palm and a thumb, the rest hidden by the door.

The handprint still glistened with red blood.

“Shit,” whispered Dez. “Can God give us one fucking break?”

Gypsy and Boxer shifted to take clear lines-of-sight once the door was opened. “Dez,” said Sam, “you open the door. I go in first, then my team, then you. Keep all lines clear. Nobody fires until and unless I do.”

He shifted to allow Dez to grip the door handle.

Sam finger-counted down from three, and she pulled the door open quickly, blocked it with her leg and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

Sam went in first, moving silently on cat-feet. The others followed, moving smoothly, weapons moving from corner to corner, covering everything. Dez went in last, and stepping inside wasn’t like stepping into a warehouse.

It was like stepping into an abattoir.

The place was massive, with hundreds of tall rows of steel shelves that stretched off into darkness. Most of the lights were out except for small emergency lights bolted every dozen yards. There was not enough light to see into the building. But there was enough illumination so that Dez could see that the walls to either side of the door and floor in front of her were splashed with blood.

There were bodies everywhere. A dozen at least, and they lay in disjointed tangles, with arms and legs missing, heads crushed, necks chopped through. Trails of blood — shoes and bare feet — led off into the main warehouse and vanished down shadowy rows.

Only one figure still stood.

He was massive, with chest and shoulders so heavily packed with corded muscle that it made him look like a great, pale ape. His skin was the color of milk and there were dreadful scars covering his arms and face. Old scars, barely visible through the blood — both red and black — that covered him from scalp to boots.

He glared at them with mad eyes. One bright blue, the other as red as a subway rat.

He held a crowbar in one fist and a meat cleaver in the other, and he stood there, panting, wild and thoroughly savage.

Sam, Boxer, and Gypsy immediately pointed their guns at him.

Dez pushed her way past the soldiers.

“Charlie?” she said softly.

The wild eyes flared and for a moment it seemed as if this monstrous man would attack.

“Don’t,” murmured Sam Imura. He said it very quietly.

Charlie’s eyes flicked to him for a moment and the thick lips curled back from uneven teeth. Maybe it was a sneer, maybe it was a smile. In either case it was unpleasant and feral.

“Charlie…” Dez repeated. She lowered her gun, holding it in one hand and reaching out toward him with the other.

The mad eyes blinked.

And blinked again, and each time there was a fraction less of the frenzied look and a fraction more of sanity. Of realization of self.

Of recognition.

“D-Dez…?”

“It’s me, Charlie,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“Okay?” echoed Charlie Matthias as if that was the strangest word he’d ever heard. “Okay? Jesus Christ, Dez, what’s happening to the world? Nothing’s okay.”

He let out a breath and lowered the weapons.

Sam and his team held their ground, though.

“What happened here, Charlie? Who are these people?”

The bodies on the floor were so badly mangled that it was impossible to tell who or what they had been.

“They’re … they’re my boys.”

Dez frowned. “Your—?”

“My crew. The guys I fucking run with.” He looked around in confusion. “Rico, and Tyrone. Tony Dale and Fez Zimmio. Christ, Dez, what the fuck’s going on? We were playing cards and Rico went outside to take a piss. Then he comes in all crazy and fucked up. Comes back with a whole shitload of people I don’t know and suddenly everything went to shit. Rico … bit Fez. Bit his throat right the fuck out. Christ, Dez, he started eating him. How’s that not fucked up?”

Charlie’s voice was rising to a dangerous hysterical note, and as he ranted he began waving around his weapons. Sam shifted to stand between Dez and the big man.

“Mr. Matthias, I am going to need you to calm down. Put down your weapons and put your hands on your head. Do it now.”

Charlie stared at him with total incomprehension.

“Who the fuck are you? What’s happening? Somebody better fucking tell me what’s going on.”

“Charlie—Charlie!” yelled Dez and her voice was so loud and sharp that Charlie flinched as if he’d been slapped. “Haven’t you listened to the news? Don’t you understand what’s happening? It’s a plague. It’s spreading out of control and it makes people want to kill each other.”

“W-what?”

“Stebbins County is gone. Everyone’s dead. Everyone, Charlie, except a bunch of kids and some other folks, some adults. We have twelve school buses outside and we’re trying to get out of here. We’re heading down south, but we need supplies. I came here because I knew you’d help us. I knew I could count on you, Charlie.”

With each sentence she changed her voice from sharpness to soft appeal. It worked on Charlie, drawing him back from the edge.

“Is this real? Are you bullshitting me, Dez?”

“It’s real. We’re in trouble and we need your help.”

He looked down at the weapons he held, considered them for a moment, then let them fall. The clangs they made echoed through the building.

“Boxer, Gypsy,” said Sam, “do a sweep. Stay together and make it fast.”

They moved off, each of them throwing Charlie ugly looks.

“Mr. Matthias,” said Sam, “were you bitten?”

“Huh? Me? No. Not that they didn’t try. Christ, Fez chewed on my boot trying to bite my ankle, and that was after I busted his knees and broke his damn back. How’s that make sense?”

Dez quickly explained the situation, compressing it into a few terse lines. Lucifer, Homer Gibbon, the outbreak, the parasites. When she got to that last part, Charlie bolted and ran for the men’s room. They followed and stood in the doorway while Charlie stripped out of his bloody clothes and scrubbed his skin with hot water and soap, and then rubbed himself down with nearly a full bottle of Purell. Charlie was almost an albino, but he had some splotches of color. He rinsed his jeans and put them back on. The shirt was a total loss.

“Clock’s ticking,” said Sam. “We need to—”

And then Shortstop cut in via the team microphone. Sam held up a hand and used the other to touch his earbud.

“What’ve you got?”

“We got incoming, boss.”

“How many?”

“Too many.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR

Albert Godown tied his running shoes, stood, and stretched slowly, feeling the muscles come undone, the cramps from the long flight gradually releasing their hold on him. His wife, Mary, was by the park, holding a deep lunge. She coughed a few times, but she controlled her reaction to it, keeping it small.

“You okay?” he asked.

Mary nodded, then shrugged. “It’s good.”

He waited for more, but that was all she said. So he nudged it a bit. “You still sick to your stomach?”

“Not really.”

Albert walked over to her. “C’mon,” he said, “you were sick as a dog last night.”

“Just airsickness. It was like a rodeo up there.”

“Are you sure? They’re still talking about some kind of flu on the news.”

She shook her head. “It’s better than it was. Might have been allergies. Did you smell the air on the plane? Until they closed the doors it smelled like we were parked right next to an open sewer. Burned my eyes.”

He nodded, though it hadn’t bothered him as much. “It was worse by that hotel.”

Because of the first wave of Superstorm Zelda, the flights the day before had been canceled and the airline had put them up at a hotel near the Pittsburgh airport. The kind of hotel you only ever stay in if your flight is canceled and it’s that or sleep in the terminal. They’d worked out in the little gym and when the rain let up for an hour they jogged around the property for an estimated five miles. That, at least, had been the plan, but halfway through it the humidity turned the air into a cold soup more conducive to swimming than running, so they bagged it and went inside. That humid air stank, too, and that’s when Mary’s cough started. A tickle, at first, and then worse as the evening went on. It came and went, and didn’t really settle down until this morning, when they got a 6:45 flight out of there. They changed planes in Chicago after a three-hour layover, and Mary’s cough sparked up again, but settled down once they were on the plane. Now it was back to being an infrequent thing. Still there, though, and he thought she should have it checked out. He told her so.

“It’s just allergies,” she said. “Or whatever. I bet if we get a good run now it’ll just go away. It’s so nice and dry here.” To prove her point she took a deep breath and let it out. “See? No cough.”

He shrugged and they set off.

They each wore headphones. Mary had her iPod set to one of her playlists. Albert could never imagine jogging to classical music. It seemed so counterintuitive to cardio. He usually listened to classic rock or, as with today’s run, the BBC news station. Better and less biased coverage than any of the domestic stations.

But before they’d gone half a mile he began frowning, and soon his run slowed to a walk and then he stopped, touching an earbud to make sure he could hear everything. Mary ran on for half a block before she realized she was alone, then she circled back.

“What is it?”

He pulled one earbud and gave it to her. They listened together as the BBC reporter talked about an outbreak of a disease that was so dangerous that the military was using force to stop those infected from leaving the quarantine zone. Albert saw Mary mouth the word “military.”

The reporter said that the quarantine zone included large parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio.

They stared at each other, stunned by this. Not believing it. Unable to not believe it.

They looked around them. The California sun was still shining. Birds coasted on the thermals high above them. Children played in front yards.

The reporter said that the estimated death toll might reach half a million.

Mary said, “What?”

All Albert could do was shake his head.

This happened while they slept in an airport hotel. While they were in the air. But it must have started while they were still in Pittsburgh. It had to have been mere miles from them.

How did they not know about it?

How could something this big have spread so fast?

Mary coughed again and wiped at her mouth.

Albert didn’t much notice it this time. His mind was reeling.

Then Mary coughed again. Much harder. Much louder. It doubled her over, and Albert lunged to catch her.

“Jesus Christ,” he cried as she sagged against him. “Are you all right?”

She wiped her mouth with the back of one trembling hand.

And the moment froze for both of them as they stared with abject horror at the wetness smeared across her hand.

It was not the colorless wetness of spit.

Nor was it blood.

It was black.

And in the black wetness, small white shapes wriggled.

Mary screamed.

Albert screamed, too.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE

They hurried outside and stood on the dock, watching with sagging hearts and growing horror at the roads beyond the fence. Dez felt like she was caught in an endless loop. This was the schoolyard all over again except there was a forty-foot-wide gap in the fence.

Sam turned to his team. “We need to secure that fence right now.”

Charlie stared at the approaching wall of the dead. “Hope you don’t expect me to—”

“No,” said Sam tightly, “you can go back inside and help Dez find what she needs. Do it fast and do it now.”

Charlie cut a look at Dez and straightened as if realizing how bad his remark sounded. “Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’d hold the line but I don’t got a gun.”

Sam’s eyes were cold. “You won’t need one to carry boxes. We’ll hold the line.”

With that he turned away and began running toward the open gate with Boxer and Gypsy at his heels. Dez lingered for a moment, then spun and raced for the building, shouting for all the adults to gather on the dock.

Charlie’s pale face had turned beet red. He caught Trout smiling.

“The fuck you grinning at?”

“Nothing at all,” said Trout. He began limping toward the loading bay, determined to be of some use, however small.

Charlie shoved him roughly aside and jogged heavily after Dez.

He didn’t see Trout shoot him the finger.

Trout just reached the loading bay when the gunfire began. He looked back and saw that the road was crowded with the dead.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX

The cadets came in from a long run, all of them panting and sweating, some of them laughing, a few too exhausted for trash talk and chatter. One young man trailed the group, walking slowly while stretching his arms. He had been among the first group to complete the ten-kilometer run through the hills, but he’d stopped for a long yoga cooldown. The other cadets nodded to him as they passed. Although he was a quiet and introspective man, he was well-liked and respected.

The day was beautiful and even when the last stragglers had gone inside, he lingered to consider the fleet of white clouds sailing high above the mountains toward the eastern horizon. The birds of autumn sang in the trees and the gentle breeze carried the scent of dogwood and California lilies.

The young man smiled at the day. As he mounted the steps to the front door he thought of his little brother, who was a year and a half old. Maybe he’d take him for a bike ride to a hummingbird garden. The kid would like that.

His fingers were inches from the door when it suddenly swung outward so fast it nearly smashed his hand. The young cadet jerked his hand back as his friend Jerry Buckley came bursting out of the building. The men collided, but the young cadet was always fast on his feet and he grabbed his friend and spun him, keeping them both from falling.

“Damn, Jer!” he barked. “What the hell—?”

Jerry grabbed the front of his sweatshirt with both hands. “Christ, Tom, I got to get home. It’s all going to shit.”

“What is?”

“That thing back east. That plague. Holy shit, man, they’re saying that they lost control of it. It’s showing up everywhere.”

Jerry tried to pull away, but the young cadet, Tom, held him, kept him right there. “Who said this? The news?”

“No,” said Jerry, “they made an announcement as soon as we got in from the run. Everyone’s getting changed and getting their shit. They’re sending us all home. You should get your gear and get to your folks’ place, man. This is all falling apart.”

“Slow down, Jer,” said the young cadet, “that’s the other side of the country.”

But Jerry was already shaking his head. “No, aren’t you hearing me? It’s everywhere.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s in L.A.!” yelled Jerry, pulling away. “At the airport. Jesus, Tom, it’s already here.”

As if to punctuate his words, the air above them was torn by the grinding of helicopter rotors and they looked up to see a wave of Apaches heading south. Four big Chinooks followed behind them. Higher still, the contrails of jet fighters gouged white scars in the beautiful morning.

Tom stared at them and inside his chest, in the core of his heart, ice began to form.

“God almighty…” he breathed.

Jerry began backing away. “This shit is really going south, man,” he said. “Get to your folks’ place. They live in that gated place a couple hours from here, right?”

Tom nodded. “Sunset Hollow, up north…”

“Well, tell everyone there to close the damn gates,” said Jerry. He took an abrupt step forward and took Tom’s hand. “Listen, brother, you take care of yourself, you hear? From what they’re saying this is going to get really bad. You do what you have to do to keep your family safe. You hear me? You do what you have to do.”

Then Jerry pulled Tom into a fierce, brief hug. He pushed him back, spun, and ran for his parked car. Soon other cadets were pushing their way out of the building, running, running.

Then Tom was running, too. Into the building, down to his locker where his clothes and weapons and keys were. Then back out of the building, catching only seconds of the TV broadcast in the muster room.

“… I can see the city. Oh my God … Pittsburgh is burning…”

He had no memory of reaching his car, of starting it or driving it. But the radio … that he remembered.

“… LAX is under siege. SWAT and TSA agents have been overrun…”

Every account was hysterical.

Every account was worse.

Another wave of helicopters thundered overhead.

As he drove, Tom tried to call his parents.

No one answered the phone.

Not the house phone, not their cells.

“Please,” he begged as he slammed the pedal all the way down, pounding the horn, tearing along the shoulder of the road, running red lights, spinning the wheel to avoid collisions with a handbreadth to spare, forcing other drivers to careen into each other to avoid him.

“Please.”

Tom was not a deeply religious man.

Not until then.

All the way from the police academy to the gates of Sunset Hollow he prayed with his whole heart and every shred of need, begging whatever powers there were to take this back, to make it not real.

Los Angeles was three hundred miles away from where his parents lived in their quiet home behind high walls in Mariposa County.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN

They worked in frenzied silence.

The bodies of the infected Charlie had killed had been dragged into a corner and covered with a tarp. Big rolls of plastic had been spread over the bloodstains so that nobody tracked black blood onto the buses.

Charlie went up and down the aisles with Dez, with Trout limping along behind. It irritated him that Charlie was suddenly so helpful and conciliatory. Trout knew that the big man was trying to make up for his moment of weakness outside, and maybe for being crazed out of his mind when they arrived. Trout could easily forgive Charlie for that part of it — under the circumstances anyone who had the good sense to go completely mad was doing themselves a favor. What Trout didn’t like was Charlie being Mr. Friendly.

He knew about the man, and about the whole Matthias family. Some folks liked them because they were funny and, in their own strange way, charismatic. A lot of people feared the Matthias clan because they were every bit as dangerous and unpredictable as they appeared. Trout detested them and always had. He’d done too many news stories in which one or another of that family were suspected of a crime, and those crimes ranged from domestic violence to grand larceny to murder. Lots of arrests but never a single conviction.

And yet Dez not only liked Charlie, she used to date him — if one can actually date a simian subhuman. Other, less polite, words occurred to Trout than “date.”

Even with that, Trout had to admit — however grudgingly — that Charlie was a big help. His knowledge of the warehouse and its contents shortened the process tremendously.

Then Jenny DeGroot came running to find them.

“Dez!” she cried as she tore along one of the rows.

“What’s wrong?” asked Dez, hurrying to meet her.

“That soldier, Captain Imura … he’s in trouble. You’d better come quick.”

Dez blew past Trout and raced for the door. Charlie was right with her.

By the time Trout managed to hobble to the loading bay the sun was above the horizon and the long night was over.

But the nightmare was not.

The dead were inside the parking lot.

And there were so many of them.

Far too many.

Boxer, Shortstop, Gypsy, and Sam were walking backward, firing as they retreated. They killed a lot of the dead, but it wasn’t even making a dent in the seething mass of infected.

“Oh my God,” whispered Jenny, her hand covering her mouth, “where are they all coming from?”

Trout shook his head.

Jenny asked another, even more destructive question. “How bad is this?”

Trout whirled. “Jenny, get everyone on the bus. Tell them to drop whatever they’re carrying and get on the damn buses. We need to get out of here right now.”

Then he was yelling and grabbing teachers and parents who were standing and watching with slack jaws and horror in their eyes. He shoved them toward the buses.

“Get the engines started,” he bellowed. “Pull out of the bays and get into a line. Check all the windows. Come on—move!”

The gunfire was louder but more sparse, and when he turned he saw that the soldiers were no longer backing away. They were running. It was a full rout. Sections of the fence were bowing inward, but that mattered less than the steady stream of zombies who crowded in through the big open gateway. Trout’s orderly mind kept wanting to quantify them, to put a number to the horde.

A thousand?

No, that was too small a number.

Two or three thousand at the very least.

Coming from where?

He tried to remember how many towns were nearby. There were a number of them, but not enough to account for these numbers.

Then Trout remembered the highway. All those cars, all those travelers.

Had something happened to block the highway?

And had the lines of stopped cars become a feeding frenzy?

He didn’t know and probably never would, but it was the only thing that could account for there being so many people here. So many dead people.

Not all of them were slow. Some of them ran like sprinters, cutting ahead of the slower zombies, racing to try and tackle the soldiers. They ran so fast that it sometimes took two or three shots to bring them down. That gave the slower ones more time to stagger forward, and it wasted bullets.

We’re all going to die, thought Billy Trout.

The last of the adults were piling onto the buses.

“Dez!” screamed Trout. “Come on!”

Dez Fox stood halfway between the loading docks and the front rank of the living dead, firing her Glock, dropping empty magazines, swapping in new ones, firing, reloading, firing. All the time she did this she screamed. Rage and terror.

Charlie Matthias had a length of black pipe in his hands. Eight feet long and bent in two places. He’d run up to a gap between Sam Imura and Gypsy and swing the pipe with incredible power and ferocity. Infected were hurled aside like broken dolls. He hit and hit and hit, the massive muscles flexing under his milky skin.

He, too, screamed.

The bus engines roared to life and the first of the convoy pulled out of the bay. The others woke up with terrible slowness and crept into line. All too slow, thought Trout. Too slow.

He thought, in all the confusion, that he heard another engine roar over to his right. A different engine, but it vanished again. A hallucination, thought Trout, and he wasn’t surprised that his mind was fracturing.

He hobbled forward to where Dez was reloading.

“Get into the bus,” he shouted.

She ignored him and slapped the new magazine into place, raised her weapon, but didn’t pull the trigger. Instead her eyes went as wide as saucers and she said, “What the fuck…?”

Trout heard that strange engine roar again and as he turned he saw something moving beyond the throng of dead at the gate. It was big and yellow and for a moment he thought it was another bus. Had they lost one on the way here? Had someone else come up with the same plan?

But then the front of the vehicle seemed to lift.

No, it did lift.

With a sharp whine of hydraulics it raised up as the machine smashed into the packed dead. The impact sent bodies flying, but some seemed to hang in the air. Then Trout realized they weren’t hanging, they were clinging to something. To the part of the machine that had raised up. His mind fought to make sense of it.

Then the machine turned and he understood.

It was a massive piece of construction equipment. Bright yellow, washed clean by the rains, and wearing a writhing coat of moaning infected, it was a front-end loader.

Monstrous and bulky, improbably heavy, riding on eight huge wheels, the machine crashed into the dead, rolled over them, ground them into bloody paste. The bucket rose and Trout could see that it was completely filled with struggling dead. The driver tilted the bucket to let them fall then brought the steel bucket down on top of them.

The dead in the parking lot seemed to be caught in a moment of indecision. Fresh meat was in front of them, but their instinct to pursue noise and movement compelled them to react to the machine. Some of them left the chase and began shuffling toward the loader; the rest turned stiffly back and continued to chase Sam and his team.

In that instant of indecision, though, Sam turned and ran, yelling to the others to move, to abandon the fight. Some of the faster zombies tore through the crowds in close pursuit. Dez moved up to offer covering fire, and Charlie Matthias shifted into the path of two running infected. He swung his pipe at the knees of the first one, sending it crashing to the ground. The second tripped over it and fell, and before it could climb back to its feet Charlie smashed its skull.

Then five more of the fast ones broke from the pack and ran straight at Charlie. They were between Dez and him; he was in her direct line of fire.

Charlie flung his pipe at the leading zombie, pivoted like a dancer and sprinted for the line of parked cars. Trout lost sight of him, and a moment later he saw Dez turn away. Charlie had either made it to safety or not.

The big front-end loader was still by the gate. The entire cab was covered in zombies like bees on a honeycomb, but the driver kept rolling forward, kept raising and lowering the heavy bucket. The movements were so erratic, though, that Trout couldn’t tell if he could ever see out of the control cab.

Dez fired at the front rank of zombies as the soldiers reached her. Then the others turned and suddenly they had a shooting line. They fired as they walked backward. The dead kept coming, and the gap between the soldiers and the infected was rapidly closing. Fifty feet.

Forty.

Thirty.

Trout could see from the looks on their faces that they knew they weren’t going to make it.

That’s when the first of the buses came hurtling past the line of shooters and plowed into the dead.

It was a wonderful, heroic, desperate move.

And it was absolutely the wrong thing to do.

School buses are tough, but they are not built for head-on collisions with masses of people. The bus struck the wall of zombies and slammed to a stop. Everyone inside was thrown forward. The driver’s airbag burst out and slammed the driver backward. The windshield cracked in a thousand places.

“Shit!” yelled Trout and he began running toward the bus.

Running hurt.

Every step was screaming agony.

He took that pain and ate it. He fed on it. He devoured it whole and used its fiery heat to drive his legs and propel him off the dock and around the back of the bus to come up on the side farthest from the zombies. He jerked the door open and saw that the driver — the farmer who’d driven tractors all his life — was out cold. The airbag, designed to deflate after impact, was sagging. Trout grabbed the driver, hauled him out of the seat, shot the handle to close the door, and slid behind the wheel. Kids and adults were both screaming. Zombies were pounding on the cracked windshield. It was not going to last. He backed the bus up to get a better angle to go around the swarm.

There was a series of loud thumps on the side and then on top of the bus, and to his horror Trout realized that bodies were scaling the side of the bus. He started accelerating and was about to jam on the brakes to try and jolt the dead off the roof when he heard a fresh barrage of shots.

From above.

He looked to where Dez and the solders had been but they were gone. Then he understood. When the bus crashed, Dez and Sam and the Boy Scouts had clambered atop the bus, out of reach of the dead.

Could the dead climb, too? He had no idea.

He began moving forward again, but the dead were closing in and forming an impenetrable wall. With every few feet he had to slow down or risk another collision. The windows would never withstand another hit.

Then there was that engine roar again and the front-end loader came smashing through the wall of dead. The digging teeth of the big bucket crunched into the backs of the zombies, shattering spines, snapping their bodies backward. The dead still swarmed over the cab, but one by one they pitched off. Almost as an after echo Trout heard gunshots from above. Dez and the others were clearing the dead off the cab so that the driver could see what he was doing.

Trout felt movement beside him and Jenny DeGroot was there, staring out the window in astonishment, pointing at the driver.

“Uncle Jake?” she gasped.

Trout understood. The big, burly man in the loader’s cab was Jake DeGroot. He wore a fierce, strange grin as he worked the levers that brought the bucket up and down, up and down. From above Trout heard Dez screaming two words.

“Turn around! Turn around!”

Jake either heard it despite the din of gunfire, moans, and engine roars, or he simply grasped the need of the moment. He began backing and filling, backing and filling, making a big, bloody, bone-breaking, meat-burst turn amid and atop the milling dead. They were legion, but the diesel monster with the hydraulic bucket was unstoppable. It completed its turn and began rolling toward the front gate, crushing everything in its path. As more of the dead swarmed up onto the cab, Dez and the soldiers shot them down.

The gunfire from above was continuous.

The front-end loader roared out with a voice like a dragon; Jake lowered the bucket so that it scraped along the surface of the ground as the tons of unfeeling yellow-painted steel, splashed now with red and black, hit the wall of unfeeling flesh and bone. The front-end loader paused but for a moment as it pushed through tons of slack meat, then the bodies fell to either side, creating a chute through which twelve yellow buses passed.

When the loader reached the road it turned right, and Trout followed.

Trout caught a flash of red off to the far side of the lot and saw Charlie Matthias’s red Le Mans go rocketing out of the gate, turn left and head west. Within seconds the vehicle was dwindling into the distance.

In rumbling convoy, they left the warehouse behind. The dead followed in their hundreds, but even at the slow speed of the loader, the shambling mass of infected fell farther and farther behind.

Soon they were not following at all.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT

Scott Blair and the president stood side by side in front of the big screen. There were now dozens of smaller windows open to show live streams of ongoing battles, of troops moving into position, of swarms of the dead moving through towns and cities, of the mass exodus of whole populations trying to flee the outbreak.

The reports were coming in from all over.

The latest incidents were in Oregon and New Hampshire. Anywhere a car could drive or a plane could fly.

Which was everywhere.

There was even an unconfirmed report of an attack in Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. A Delta flight from Pittsburgh touched down there. The news reports were erratic, wild. And probably true. England, Italy, Germany, and Russia had fighter-bombers on deck, waiting for go orders to make preemptive strikes.

Blair had no doubts that those orders would be given.

Just as new stories went viral on the Internet, infecting the world at the speed of social networking, so now could a biological threat spread globally at the speed of modern travel. Planes, trains, and automobiles.

And wind.

The devil was in the wind now, and the earth itself was exhaling the parasites into the global weather pattern.

Soon Lucifer would be everywhere.

An aide came hurrying over and handed the president a paper, which he read, sighed, and handed to Blair. It was from Dr. Price. The Reaper counterparasite was in full development now. The first batches were being loaded into rockets for deployment over Pittsburgh.

“We’re going to use a monster to fight a monster,” said the president. “How wrong does that sound to you, Scott?”

“We have to try something. We have to try everything.”

“Yes, I suppose we do.”

One of the small windows showed an aerial surveillance feed of a line of yellow buses rolling through the forested hills of West Virginia. The president touched the image, brushing the vehicles with the tips of his fingers.

“All those children,” he said. “The children of Stebbins and the children everywhere…”

“Sir?”

“They will never forgive us for this,” said the president.

Blair’s mouth was a tight and bitter line. “Maybe they shouldn’t.”

The door burst open and Sylvia Ruddy came running in, her face flushed, eyes wide with a fierce excitement.

“Mr. President! Oh my God, Mr. President!”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE

All of Z-point had become a hive, filled with techs and aides and support staff who ran everywhere in a mad scramble to prepare all samples of Reaper, and to kick the manufacturing process into high gear.

Dick Price was the only person who stood still and silent.

There was a big glass window separating him from the main production floor of the station. Everyone on the far side of that three-inch-thick glass wore hazmat suits. He was in his immaculate white lab coat. To his right was a bank of security monitors and three of them showed exterior views of the helipad carved high onto a mountain far away from any possibility of civilian ground or air traffic. A powerful Chinook was lifting ponderously from the pad. In the air beyond it were three more. Waiting to land. Waiting to off-load viable organic vectors.

A nice name for people who had been transformed by Lucifer into something else.

The military kept bringing more of them here to Z-point in the hopes that among the samples would be evidence of mutation or variation. Within mutation lay potential. Mutation suggested that Volker’s monster was not unchangeable. Anything that could, in time, be changed could, in time, be understood and defeated.

In time.

Price felt icy lines of sweat trickle down his spine.

Three of the monitors had been switched to live news feeds.

Pittsburgh was in flames.

The whole city. Burning.

There were outbreaks in Philadelphia, New York, D.C., Atlanta. A dozen other cities. And now there were reports in Paris, London, and Madrid.

The experts the press trotted out decried these reports on the grounds that no disease could spread that fast. And that was true enough if this was the beginning of the twentieth century instead of well into the twenty-first. Any disease could spread at the speed of transportation.

A lot of planes flew out of Pittsburgh in the hours after the fuel-air bombs shot the parasites into the atmosphere and transformed Lucifer from a serum-transfer pathogen to an airborne pathogen.

A whole lot of planes.

Beyond the glass wall his people worked like crazed ants to produce and pack the Reaper mutagen.

Price was too numb to pray that Reaper would work.

The tests on the Volker infected were ongoing, but it would be months before any reliable conclusions could be drawn. He’d told the president that. He’d told the generals that.

It might work was a million miles away from it will work.

It was even farther from we should try it.

If only they had Volker’s notes …

He prayed to a God he’d long ago ceased to believe in. He prayed with every fiber of his being that there was still time to find that research and to study it for a doorway out of this hell.

On the monitor the second Chinook was now landing on the pad and the first was already dwindling in the distance.

His cell rang and it jolted Price out of his horrified daze. He fished it out of his pocket and saw that the scramble alert was active. He punched that button and held the phone to his ear.

“Th-this is Price.”

“We have it,” said a breathless Scott Blair.

“What?”

“The reporter who had them gave them to his cameraman and he sent it all via DropBox to his email accounts. The cybercrimes team cracked it and downloaded everything. I’m sending it to you now.”

Price closed his eyes and swayed. He murmured three words he would have mocked anyone else for saying.

“Thank you, God…”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY

When they were sure it was safe, the convoy stopped in the middle of the road.

Trout nearly collapsed over the wheel. Strange, bad lights were bursting all around him and he saw darkness trying to close in around the edges of his vision. He took several long breaths and gradually — gradually — reclaimed himself.

Jenny jerked the door open and went running toward the front-end loader. Big Jake DeGroot climbed down, snatched her up and swung her around. She was like a toy in his massive arms. Their simple joy seemed to put a tiny swatch of color into the day.

Behind him, children were snuffling and crying. With fear and perhaps with relief.

Thumps atop the bus told Trout that Dez and the soldiers were climbing down. He hauled himself out of the seat and staggered outside to find Dez.

She was the first to come down and she ran to him and wrapped her strong arms around him. She was stained with gunpowder residue and sweat, and Trout could not help kissing her lips and her face over and over again. Then he held her as Gypsy and Boxer climbed down.

Trout looked up, waiting for Shortstop and Sam.

Waiting.

“No,” said Dez, and there were tears in her eyes. Gypsy leaned her head on Boxer’s shoulders and they sobbed quietly together.

He stared at her without understanding what she meant.

“What — wait, Dez, where are they? What happened?”

“Didn’t you see? Back at the loading bay?”

“See what?”

“They died, Billy,” she said wretchedly. “Both of them. We climbed up onto the bus, but they didn’t have time. Those bastards were all over us. God, Billy. I tried to pull Sam up. I tried…”

She sobbed brokenly and beat on his chest. It hurt, but he did not care.

Sam Imura?

Gone?

Trout didn’t know how to process that. Imura was so tough, so capable. Trout was sure that he was the leading man in this drama, the hero that would save everyone.

Gone. Off screen.

Simply edited out of the story.

Shortstop, too, and Trout realized that he didn’t even know the man’s name. But Sam … even though the soldier had only been with them for a few hours, he’d become a friend. They trusted him. They knew him.

Now he was gone, and Sam was gone.

The heroes of the story were gone and Trout had not even seen it. Somehow that was worse than if he’d witnessed it. These men was simply gone from the world. Dragged down. Consumed.

No … worse …

Even now the thing that had been Sam Imura would have risen. What was left of him would have risen and maybe it had been part of that horde of things that had pursued the convoy.

It was too horrible to imagine.

It was all too horrible.

Who would be the heroes now?

He held on to Dez, who was frayed and worn and nearly spent.

Who was going to ride to the rescue now?

While the sun burned through the last of the clouds and painted the landscape with yellow light, Dez and Billy clung to each other and wept.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE

Dick Price and his senior staff sat in a silent line, each of them bent forward, their faces washed to a pale blue by the lights of computer monitors. On each computer pages of data flashed by. Research notes. Developmental procedure records. Laboratory tests on animals. Formulae. Data on the transgenesis of a dozen parasites. Dosage tables. Biological warfare applications. Modifications for use on death row prisoners. A complete medical history of condemned serial murderer Homer Gibbon.

It was all there.

All of it.

One hundred and ninety-two thousand pages of information.

Some of it was in Russian. Some in Lithuanian. Some in Polish. Some in Latin.

Some in English.

Some written in the hieroglyphics of molecular chemistry.

Parts of the data were old, scans of handwritten documents dating back to the early 1970s. Other parts were very recent, as new as five days ago, which meant that it was one day before Homer Gibbon had been given Lucifer 113 instead of the drugs meant to kill him during the court-mandated lethal injection.

Two days before Homer Gibbon woke up in the mortician’s suite at Hartnup’s Transition Estate.

Three days before the army dropped their fuel-air bombs.

Four days before Pittsburgh was overrun and subsequently burned.

Five days before the mass outbreaks that turned Manhattan into a war zone. Before Paris was carpet-bombed by the French Air Force. Before the prime minister of Great Britain ordered all of the bridges spanning the Thames to be blown.

Five days before the Air Force began exploding missiles packed with payloads of raw Reaper over Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, and a dozen other cities. Each bomb was precisely timed to detonate in the path of prevailing winds that would carry it over large portions of the most densely populated areas.

That was today. The Reaper mutagen was in the wind now and soon they’d all know if it would slow Lucifer’s spread. Or, if God had any mercy left for His children, stop it.

Price’s team had worked without sleep for days. Reading Volker’s information, making sense of what was clearly the work of a man who was both brilliant and insane.

An actual mad scientist.

Price had tried to laugh at that, to find one moment of comic relief in which the irony would vent some of the crushing tension. But he couldn’t. When he’d tried to laugh he cried instead.

Scott Blair kept calling. Over and over and over again, demanding answers.

Demanding hope.

Price’s cell rang again and Price snatched it up with a snarl and very nearly smashed it on the floor. Instead he pushed the green button with a trembling thumb.

“P-Price…”

There was no immediate reply.

“Hello?”

The only thing he heard from the other end of the all was the sound of someone quietly weeping.

“Mr. Blair?” said Price gently. “Scott…?”

He heard a sniff and then Scott Blair’s voice. “Price … Jesus Christ, what have you done?”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Before Blair could answer someone screamed. Price and everyone turned away from their line of computers and saw one of the techs — a woman whose name Price couldn’t remember in that moment — standing before the bank of TV monitors on the far wall. She wrapped her arms over her head and sank slowly to her knees. She kept screaming.

Each of the monitors was set to local news in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Newark, Omaha, Chicago, and Miami. The cities with the largest populations where there were outbreaks. The cities most heavily hit by Lucifer. The cities over which Reaper missiles had been detonated a handful of hours ago.

Until now there had been a pattern to the outbreaks. A predictable speed.

Until now there had been a splinter of hope buried in Dick Price’s soul.

Until now.

In those areas where Reaper was interacting with Lucifer, the rate of infection had shot up. The degree of murderous ferocity had doubled. Tripled. The reporters on the ground were letting the pictures tell the story that they were no longer able — or perhaps willing — to report.

The cycle of bite to infection to death to reanimation was now so much faster.

Too fast.

Way too fast.

The infection was out of all control.

Out of any possibility of control.

Reaper, inadequately tested, not at all ready for deployment, had been used by the military in a desperate gamble to introduce mutation to a perfect weapon. If something was perfect then any change would, by definition, create flaws in that perfection. That was the logic, and it was as flawed as the science.

Dick Price stared at the screen and now he understood the last secret in Volker’s science. The most important secret.

Lucifer, for all its power and aggression, had not been perfect.

Better than all generations before it, but far from perfect.

Until now.

Until something allowed — even encouraged it — to mutate further. That one step further until it was, without doubt, perfect.

Until Reaper.

The phone fell from Price’s fingers and shattered on the floor.

The woman kept screaming.

Everyone else began screaming.

It seemed like the only possible response. The only appropriate response. So Dick Price screamed, too.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

The traffic on the highway started off as bad, became worse, became impossible. Dez and Trout crouched in the exit well and studied the road through the big windshield. Jake DeGroot was behind the wheel of the first bus, and Dez touched his arm and pointed to a small side road blocked by a chain and a sign saying that it was reserved for forestry service vehicles only.

“There,” she said. “Let’s get out of this shit. Pull off.”

“What about the chain?” asked Trout.

“Fuck the chain,” she said. “Jake, get us out of this shit and I’ll deal with the chain.”

Jake edged the bus that way, but the traffic was jammed tight and moved forward an inch at a time. He hit the horn, got nothing, then jammed his hand down on it in a continuous blare. Still got nothing.

Jake shook his head. “It’s too tight, there’s not enough room.”

Dez snarled and jerked the handle that worked the door, snatched up a combat shotgun and jumped out.

There was a big Tundra to the right of the bus, blocking their way. Dez used her scuffed knuckles to rap on the driver’s window.

“Hey, buddy, how about pull off so we can get through?”

The driver, a big man with a John Deere cap, refused to even look at her. He had snow-white hair and a mean-looking face. The man riding shotgun was equally muscular and twice as ugly. He felt for the pistol in his pocket.

Dez tapped again, much harder. “Yo! Dickhead, you deaf or something?”

The driver raised one hand, forefinger extended and still didn’t look at her.

“Dez,” called Trout as he stepped down from the bus, “be careful.”

Dez ignored him. With a grunt of angry effort, she slammed the shotgun’s stock into the driver’s window. It imploded, showering the driver and the man in the passenger seat with safety glass.

That did it.

Both doors opened and the two men got out.

“The fuck you think you’re doing, you cu—”

That was as far as he got before Dez Fox hit him across the face with the rifle stock. The blow ripped a bloody gash in the man’s jaw and whipped his head around so hard that he spun into the side of the Tundra. His forehead hit the open doorframe and he dropped right onto his kneecaps.

The other man came running around the car, fists raised to smash Dez.

Billy Trout shoved the barrel of his borrowed pistol into the man’s ear.

“Touch her and I’ll blow your fucking head off,” he said.

He heard himself speak the words, felt his mouth say them, and he did not recognize the voice. It was him and it wasn’t. There was such cold honesty there and in that moment he knew that he would, if he had to, shoot this man.

It sickened him to realize that he’d come to this point.

But it made him feel stronger, too.

For maybe the first time since this thing started.

His arm was out straight, the gun in his fist, and it was rock steady.

Dez turned and saw the gun and then looked at him. Into his eyes. A tiny smile flickered across her lips. There and gone.

To the passenger, Dez said, “You’re going to help your butt-buddy into your car, and then you’re going to pull off and let us pass. That’s not a request. We got a couple hundred kids in those buses.”

The man with the gun to his head looked terrified. He licked his lips. “We have to get out, too. I got a kid at home. Barney has three kids. We’re just trying to get home.”

Dez’s eyes stayed hard. “All you had to do was pull over and let us pass. The fuck’s wrong with you?”

“God … don’t touch me,” begged the man, shrinking back from her. “Please. Don’t touch me.”

That’s when Trout noticed that no one else had gotten out of their cars. With all of the traffic stalled for so long, somebody should have gotten out. There were always people who viewed traffic jams like this as impromptu tailgate parties. But everywhere he looked, everywhere Dez looked, the people were hunched inside their cars, the windows up, eyes wide with fear, faces locked into expressions of desperation. Trout almost laughed at the absurdity of it. These people were fleeing in slow motion. Unwilling to get out of their cars, they sat there, waiting for the traffic to move, maybe praying for it to inch forward, and every single one of them terrified at the thought of contact with the people around them. Who was infected? Was the thing on the radio here?

Slow motion panic.

It was a brand-new concept, and it kept turning over and over in Trout’s mind until he couldn’t help but laugh.

Dez shot him an angry, worried look. So did the frightened passenger, and the people in the closest cars.

The only sound on the whole road was the sound of that laugh.

And, without support to prop it up, Trout’s laughter slowly collapsed. Almost into sobs, but he coughed his throat clear and stepped back until he sat down hard on the entrance step of the bus, the pistol hanging limply from his hand.

“Billy?” ventured Dez. “You okay?”

He wanted to explain it to her, to see if she’d laugh, too; but he didn’t. It would be too much like telling a dirty joke in church.

“Don’t hurt him” was all he said.

The passenger looked from Trout to Dez.

“Move the car,” said Dez quietly.

The man nodded. He picked up his friend and helped him around to the passenger side, belted him in, closed the door, and came around to the driver’s side. While he was doing all of that, Dez leaned in and used her palm to brush the glass off the seat. She stepped back to the let the man slide in behind the wheel.

“I’ll lose my place in line,” he said.

Dez shook her head. “No, you won’t.”

She backed away from the car and turned in a slow circle to look through windshields at the other drivers. The shotgun was in her hands, barrel sweeping along at the level of headlights and grills.

“We’re getting off this road,” she said, pitching her voice very loud. “This car is going to pull off to let the buses out. Anyone else in the way needs to do the same. Once we’re out of here, you can all fill in, but the cars that move get their places back.”

Trout thought it was one of the most surreal things he’d ever heard. It was like Dez was announcing the rules before a school-yard game of dodgeball. It was all done in an otherwise absolute silence.

Dez seemed also to realize how absurd it was and Trout saw different expressions war on her face. Dez took a breath and in her best cop voice, her voice of officialdom and authority, said, “This thing isn’t here. No one in these cars is infected. If they were we’d know it already. You’re safe. Your families are safe. Stay in your cars and when the road clears out keep heading south. There’s a big safety camp in Asheville, North Carolina. Head there. You hear me? Head there.”

No one said a thing. The windows stayed up. Hands gripped steering wheels. Eyes were fixed on her.

“You’ll be okay,” shouted Dez. “Everyone will be okay.”

Nothing. Not a word, not a toot of a horn, not even a nod from the watching people.

In a quiet voice, Trout said, “Come on, Dez. You did what you could.”

Behind her the Tundra revved its engines and began a turn between the tightly packed cars. At first it looked impossible in the nearly bumper-to-bumper crush. Then the car in front of it rolled forward a couple of feet; and the car behind it did the same. Even with that it was still tight, but the Tundra began the turn. Dez walked past it to the forest service road. She swung the shotgun up, aimed it at the lock and blew it to shiny metal splinters. The chain fell away and the sound of the blast echoed along the road.

Trout watched people flinch, but otherwise they sat in their eerie, watchful stillness.

The shoulder was blocked with cars, too, but with Dez calling directions and banging on hoods with the shotgun, the cars shifted by slow, painful inches forward and at angles until after ten excruciating minutes there was a lane just big enough for the bus. She waved to Jake, who put it in gear and crept with infinite slowness around the wall of cars on his right. At one point his bumper scraped the trunk of a VW, but if the driver of the car cared about it, he kept it to himself.

“Come on, come on,” Dez said between her teeth as she walked backward, guiding Jake’s turn. Trout had gotten out of the bus to watch the other side.

The stillness of everything else except the big yellow bus continued to gnaw at his nerves. As the first bus finally cleared the road and rambled through onto the access lane, he realized what it was. Nothing about this fit into any workable scenario for a world he understood. This slow-motion panic, the absolute fear of human contact, the weight of the disaster that pressed down on them, the terror of what might be behind them — all of that was new. Sure, there were corollaries to different elements of it, but as a whole this was a new thing. A new pattern. And he greatly feared that it was part of a new world.

Or, perhaps, a new world order.

A new age of the world. He was sure it was something like that, though his mind rebelled at a specific definition because it all felt too big, too grandiose.

Except that it wasn’t.

It was unprecedented.

This was no longer the world he and Dez and the children on the bus and the people in these cars knew.

Since the release of Lucifer 113 it had become a different world. And in every bad way that mattered, it seemed to him that this new world did not belong to these people. Or to any people. This world now belonged to the Devil.

Maybe it wasn’t the biblical Devil, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure if that distinction even mattered.

Lucifer, by any definition, in any form, owned this world now.

“God help us,” he murmured as the line of buses moved slowly past. He saw the pale faces of terrified children, and the blank and vacant eyes of those for whom terror was a minor milestone left behind in a distant country. “God help us.”

But if anyone listened to that prayer, no voice offered even the ghost of a promise to Billy Trout.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

They bumped and thumped along the access road for nearly five miles until they came to a forest service station near the crest of the mountain. There was a small building and a large parking lot with various pieces of heavy equipment. A road grader, flatbeds for hauling downed trees, a dump truck piled with gravel.

There were no people and no personal cars.

Dez, Boxer, and Gypsy approached the building, guns up and out, but they found nothing. The door was open, the lights were on, but the station was deserted. Jake led the way and the buses pulled into the lot and lined up in a row. Somehow Trout found it disturbing that the row was so neat. Each of the adults driving the buses parked in a precise line with the other vehicles. There was something wrong about that, but he couldn’t decide what it was.

A disconnection from reality, perhaps. He kept it to himself.

The last vehicle in the convoy was a flatbed truck they’d stolen from a construction site a few miles from Sapphire Foods. Jake had loaded his Big Bird onto it and one of the parents helped him and drove the big rig. He parked the rig with the same precision.

Maybe they’re trying to impose order on chaos, thought Trout. That was probably it, though it felt a bit like tidying the furniture and vacuuming the rugs during a house fire.

Trout got off the bus and waited for Dez to come out. He watched the parents and teachers begin lining up the kids for trips to the bathroom in the station. Some — those that couldn’t wait — were escorted to the tall grass on the far side of the parking lot. Jake, his niece Jenny, and a few of the adults who had guns, began fanning out to stand perimeter watch. As if that was something they’d always done. As if that was somehow normal.

It is now, he told himself. And that wrenched the knife in his heart another quarter turn.

Dez came out of the station, looked around for him, then came over, her shoulders slumped, face haggard.

“Anything?” he asked. “You were in there a while.”

“There’s a radio,” she said.

“And?”

She simply shook her head.

They walked together to the edge of the drop-off. He could barely walk and needed to lean on her for the seventy paces to the bench that offered a beautiful view of the mountains and the sky. On any other day it would be breathtaking.

Down below, the traffic on the highway crawled.

“At least it’s moving,” said Dez.

“Yeah, there’s that.”

Neither of them could manufacture any convincing optimism.

“What did the radio say?”

From where they sat they could hear the sobs of the children and the constant murmur of adult voices as the parents and teachers did everything they could to convince the kids that it was all going to be all right.

Trout marveled at how similar a promise sounded to a lie. Or was it all just wishful thinking?

“Dez?”

She removed the walkie-talkie from her belt and turned up the gain. It babbled at them in a dozen overlapping voices. Military and civilian authorities, and even some militia groups whose shortwave signals were breaking into the flow. It was all hysterical and most of the voices were asking for backup, for relief, for medical attention, for emergency services, for help.

For answers.

“The radio’s the same. No one has any answers,” she said. “Most people don’t know about Homer or Volker or any of that. All they know is that there’s a plague and nobody seems to be able to stop it. There’s a lot of bullshit, too. People saying it’s the Rapture, shit like that.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

“Don’t start, Billy.”

“Sorry.”

He bent forward and put his head in his hands. Some of the glass cuts on his scalp and arms hadn’t yet been seen to, and he didn’t care. Dez sat beside him, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, her arms mottled with powder burns, her knuckles as raw and red as her eyes as she methodically reloaded her pistol and shotgun.

Slowly, painfully, Trout raised his head as a flight of six fighter jets screamed overhead into the northeast.

“Thunderbolts,” said Dez automatically.

“Where do you think they’re headed?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “Charleston, maybe.”

He nodded.

There were more than a hundred thousand people in Charleston.

Maybe, he corrected himself. He didn’t really know if that was true anymore.

Dez got up and went back to the bus, then returned with a bottle of water, his camera bag, and a map. She set the bag down in front of him.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“In case you want to use it.”

He shook his head.

They left it there as she opened the map and spread it out over their laps.

He studied her blue eyes for a few moments. He saw so many things in those eyes. A fear so deep that it looked like it was cracking the hinges of her sanity. He saw ghosts in her eyes. JT, the dead children, her colleagues and neighbors in Stebbins, the people who had died on the buses. Each of them had left its specter in her mind, polluting her, driving fissures into her. Trout knew with absolute certainty that if Dez had to live on this edge for much longer, she was going to break. Those qualities that made her so strong — compassion, her love for the children, her need to save as many as she could — they were each failures waiting to happen. A person cannot be sustained on a diet of their own failure, even if that failure is not their fault. This thing was so big, so vast that it even consumed people like Sam Imura. What hope did Dez really have?

He almost took her in his arms, almost made the unforgiveable error of offering comfort and a shoulder to someone who was right there at the edge of her control.

Billy Trout almost made that mistake, but he didn’t.

Some instinct stopped him even as he began to raise his hands. It was as if JT Hammond stood behind him and bent to whisper advice in his ear. JT, who was more of a father to Dez than her real one had been. JT, who was, very likely, the best person either of them had ever known.

She needs to be strong, Trout imagined he heard JT say. She needs to take these kids home.

Trout took a breath and let it out.

“Asheville, huh?”

“That’s what Sam said.”

“Okay,” said Trout, “then it’s Asheville.”

He did not dare ask what they would do if the infection had reached Asheville. That was a war they could fight on another day. If they had the chance.

For now, Asheville was a direction.

It was far away from Pittsburgh.

It was in the mountains, so maybe that would be something.

Trout didn’t know and really couldn’t make any guesses. It was a direction, a place to head to. And that felt much better than having a place to run from. So much better.

They heard a sound like thunder and looked up to see more aircraft. Helicopters this time. Dozens of them.

Maybe hundreds.

Black Hawks and Apaches. And the big cargo choppers, the Chinooks. An armada of the air. Powerful, threatening. They filled the sky, flying in waves, heading north, and the clouds seemed to fall back before them, revealing blues skies that offered at least the illusion of promise.

Trout wanted to feel hope when he looked at them, but it was slow in coming.

“The storm’s over,” he said, hoping it meant more than a weather report.

Dez watched the helicopters fly across the clearing sky.

“Will it be enough?” Trout asked.

Dez shook her head. “I don’t know.”

After a thoughtful moment, Dez nudged the camera bag toward him.

“I told you, I don’t—”

“You need to file a report,” she interrupted.

“Why? What’s the point?”

Dez bent and unzipped the case, removed the camera, studied it, and found the record button. She rested a finger over it. “This isn’t everywhere yet,” she said. “It’s spreading, but it isn’t everywhere yet.”

“I know, but—”

“You need to tell people, Billy. You need to keep telling people. You need to tell them everything we know. What it is. How it spreads. How to fight them. Everything.”

“Who’s going to listen?”

Dez shrugged. The drone of the helicopters was fading to a rumor in the sky. “What does it matter? Somebody will. Maybe if all we do is get the word out to a few, that’ll matter. Maybe we’ll help some people get through this.”

“We’ll get through it.”

Dez smiled faintly and nodded. “Then it’s on us to help whoever we can. However we can. Everything’s going to shit, Billy. We can’t be a part of that. We can’t be a part of the end. We have to be a part of whatever survives. We have to help people so they know how to fight back. Am I … am I making sense?”

He stared at her for several seconds, watching her eyes, seeing the lights deep inside the blue. Loving her for this.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re making sense.”

After a while Dez took his hand. Then Billy Trout reached out and pulled her gently into his arms. Not to comfort her.

He kissed her with all the heat and hope and love that he had left inside.

The kiss she gave back was scalding.

When they stopped, gasping and flushed, Trout murmured, “I love you.”

She said, “Now, Billy? Really? God, you’re such a girl.”

Laughing out loud, she walked back to the bus.

CHAPTER ONE-HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR

Tom Imura ran and the night burned around him.

The darkness pulsed with the red and blue of police lights; the banshee wail of sirens tore apart the shadows of the California night.

The child in his arms screamed and screamed and screamed.

Tom clutched little Benny to his chest. He could feel his brother’s tiny heart beating like the flutter of dragonfly wings. His own felt like a bass drum being pounded by a madman. Sweat ran down his chest and mixed with the toddler’s tears.

Tom turned once and saw them.

He saw her first.

Standing in the window, her arms reaching toward him. She was so pale, so beautiful. Like a ghost in a dream. Her dark eyes were wide with terror, her mouth shaped words that were lost in all the noise. He knew what those words were, though. Just one word really, said over and over again.

“Go!”

Tom ran. He felt like a coward.

Tom Imura, the police cadet. Tough, top of his class. Tom, the martial artist, with black belts and trophies and certificates. Tom, the fighter.

Tom, the coward.

Running.

“I’m sorry!” he yelled, but he was sure Mom didn’t hear him.

And then he saw the other figure. Paler, larger, infinitely stranger, coming out of the shadows of the bedroom, reaching as Mom had reached, but not reaching for Tom and Benny. Those pale hands reached for her. For Mom. Reached for her, and dragged her back into darkness.

With all of the sirens and gunfire and the pounding of his own heart, Tom could not have heard her screams. He could not have.

And yet they echoed in his head. In his arms, Benny kept screaming.

Tom screamed, too.

Pale shapes lurched toward him from the shadows. Some of them were victims — bleeding, eyes wide with shock and incomprehension. Others were them. The things. The monsters. Whatever they were.

Tom had weapons in his car. His pistol — which he wasn’t even allowed to carry yet because he didn’t graduate from the police academy until tomorrow — and his stuff from the dojo. His sword, some fighting sticks.

Should he risk it? Could he risk it?

The car was at the end of the block. He had the keys, but the streets were clogged with emergency vehicles. Even if he got his gear, could he find a way to drive out?

No. Buildings were on fire. Fire trucks and crashed cars were like a wall.

But the weapons.

The weapons.

Benny screamed. The monsters shambled after him.

“Go!” his mother had said. “Take Benny … keep him safe. Go!”

Just … go.

He ran to the parked car. Benny was struggling in his arms, hitting him, fighting to try and get free.

Tom held him with one arm — an arm that already ached from carrying his brother — and fished in his pocket for the keys. Found them. Found the lock. Opened the door, popped the trunk.

Gun in the glove compartment. Ammunition in the trunk. Sword in the trunk.

Shapes moved toward him. He could hear their moans.

He turned a wild eye toward one as it reached for the child Tom carried.

Tom shouted in terror. He lashed out with a kick, driving the thing back, splintering its leg. It fell, but it was not hurt. Not in any real sense of being hurt. As soon as it crashed down it began to crawl toward him.

It was unreal. Tom understood that this thing was dead. It was Mr. Harrison from three doors down and it was also a dead thing. A monster.

Benny kept screaming.

Tom lifted the trunk hood and shoved Benny inside. Then he grabbed his sword. There was no time to remove the trigger lock on the gun. They were coming. They were here.

He slammed the hood, trapping the screaming Benny inside the trunk even as Tom ripped the sword from its sheath.

Three terrible minutes later, Tom unlocked the trunk and opened it.

Benny was cowering in the back of the trunk, huddled against Tom’s gym bag. Tears and snot were pasted on his face. Benny opened his mouth to scream again, but he stopped. When he saw Tom, he stopped.

Tom stood there, the sword held loosely in one hand, the keys in the other.

Tom was covered with blood. The sword was covered with blood.

The bodies around the car … more than a dozen of them were covered with blood.

Benny screamed.

Not because he understood — he was far too young for that — but because the smell of blood reminded him of Dad. Of home. Benny wanted his mom.

He screamed and Tom stood there, trembling from head to toe. Tears broke from his eyes and fell in burning silver lines down his face.

“I’m sorry, Benny,” he said in a voice that was as broken as the world.

Tom tore off his blood-splattered shirt. The T-shirt he wore underneath was stained but not as badly. Tom shivered as he lifted Benny and held him close. Benny beat at him with tiny fists.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said again.

He gathered up what he could carry, turned, and with Benny in one arm and his sword in his other hand, Tom ran into the night as the world burned around him.

CHAPTER ONE-HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE

“This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse…”

The car sat in the middle of the street with the radio playing at full blast.

All four doors were open.

The voice on the radio was saying that this was the end of the world.

There was no one in the car, no one in the streets. No one in any of the houses or stores. There wasn’t a single living soul to hear the reporter’s message.

It didn’t matter, though.

They already knew.