The Dead Town

Chapter 58

Rusty Billingham ran for his life along the center of the street, directly into the wind-driven snow, which had grown icy enough so that the flakes mostly didn’t stick to his face and melt but instead bounced off like grains of sand. He glanced back a few times at the Trailblazer, expecting it to be reversing out of the hedge or already coming for him, driven by something no one would write a song about, at least not the kind of songs that Rusty wrote. But the SUV didn’t move, and he figured the blond she-devil might need a while to digest all of those people.

That had to be the craziest thought ever to cross his mind, but he knew his eyes had not deceived him. Facts were facts, and they fit together how they did, not how you wished they would. There was one right way to make perfect dovetail joints for a drawer box, and there was no way to deny that the blonde was not really a woman, that she was some new kind of predator, ravenous. Movies trained you to think aliens. Maybe that’s what she was, but right now what she was didn’t matter. What mattered was whether more like her were in the vicinity and how many.

A chatter of gunfire from a house on the left gave him a partial answer. The rapid semiauto fire shattered a second-floor window, glass bursting onto the padding of snow on the porch roof. No one up there screamed, but fantastic shadows throbbed across the portion of the room that Rusty could see. A mere two-shot follow-up to the first fusillade suggested that either the shooter or the target had succumbed, probably not the latter.

He was in good shape, he stayed fit after the war, and he could run a mile while breathing as relaxed and as steady as if he were only crossing a room. But now he gasped for breath, heart knocking as though he’d done half a marathon. He wanted to live, but he also wanted Corrina to live, and it was the possible loss of her that wound tight the clockworks of his fear.

From a distance, out of the west, too faint for him to get a fix on it, came another scream. Then more than one screamer, three or four, somewhere to the east, maybe from the street parallel to this one. As Rusty reached the next intersection, two big German shepherds raced along the cross street, as silent as ghost dogs, too terrified to bark, in flight from something that not even dogs of their size and fabled courage dared to confront.

Running through the intersection in the wake of the dogs, Rusty saw something pulse in the sky far off to the east, a pale yellow light at first but suddenly brighter and orange. Not a mother ship descending with more storm troopers like the one who attacked the Trailblazer, not an object at all, but a fire reflecting off the low clouds and the streaming snow. Something was burning out there. Judging by the spreading glow, it had to be a large structure.

One moment he was walking home in the snow on an evening like any other, and the next moment the gates of Hell were open and the world was full of demons. He knew that other places were hells and potential hells, but not Montana. Elsewhere in the world, you could buy a thousand flavors of crazy, but only a few were for sale here.

Corrina Ringwald lived in the next-to-the-last house in this block, on the right. Look at it: not grand yet beautiful, built with loving care and maintained with pride, a place that said home, that said love and family. Not a place Norman Bates would live or Charles Manson, not a place where bad things should ever happen, but they could. You always had to remember that they could.

The porch light was on, amber panes in a copper lantern, her invitation to him. She had prepared dinner for them. He heard music inside, Rod Stewart singing “Someone to Watch over Me.” Rusty rang the bell, pressed it again without waiting for the first passage of chimes to finish. Suddenly he wondered what he would do if it wasn’t Corrina who answered the bell, if it was another one like the blonde in the blue robe. He retreated one step, two, terrified that he was too late.

Corrina opened the door. Rusty had never been so glad to see anyone in his life. She was smiling, relaxed. The music prevented her from hearing the sounds of rising chaos outside.

As she opened the door, she said, “Our special tonight is pot roast—” She read his face at first glance, and her smile froze. “What? What’s happened?”

Rusty glanced back at the street. Deserted. For now.

He didn’t strip off his boots, but instead reached for her hand, crossed the threshold, closed the door, and locked it. He switched off the porch lamp, the overhead foyer fixture. “Turn out the lights. Every room. They might think no one’s here, they might not come in.”

Bewildered, she said, “Who?”

He went into the living room, extinguishing lamps. “First the lights, then I’ll explain.”

“Rusty, you’re scaring me.”

“Damn it, I mean to. Hurry!”

He never raised his voice to her. She knew him too well to take offense, and she hurried off to do as he wanted.

Rusty clicked off the CD player and made his way through the gloom to stand beside an open panel of drapery, to one side of a living-room window. He had an angled view of the street, looking south, the direction from which he had come.

Nothing out there. No vehicles. No women who weren’t women. No fleeing dogs.

Corrina returned through the dark house, into the living room. “Where are you?”

“Here,” he said and guided her to stand on the opposite side of the window from him, so they faced each other with the width of it between them, neither of them directly in front of glass.

He could see her as a shadow and a pale face barely illuminated by the weak influx of the street lighting.

“I tried to call 911,” she said. “The phone doesn’t work.”

“Keep a watch north on the street. I can see south all right.”

“You’ve given me goose pimples. What am I watching for?”

“Anything. Tell me the moment you see anything. There was this woman, standing in the street, just standing there, like in a trance. She asked for help. That’s what she said—‘Help me’—and I started toward her. These people drove up in a Trailblazer, rolled down a window to ask her if something was wrong, and she killed them all.”

“Oh, my God.”

“If I’d been closer, she would have killed me.”

“Shot them?” Corrina asked. “What? She just shot them?”

Rusty’s mind was spinning, thinking what else he ought to do. “My footprints in the snow. Up the walkway and onto the porch. Maybe they won’t come right away, maybe there’ll be enough time for wind and snow to erase the prints on the walkway.”

“They? You said a woman.”

“Keep a watch on the street. Don’t look away from the street. There’s more than one. They’re killing people all over town. Outside, you can hear it. Screams. Gunshots. Something’s on fire way over to the east. But no sirens, no one seems to care, maybe because there aren’t any firemen to respond.”

“Rusty, you don’t joke like this.”

“No, I don’t.” The aroma of pot roast and parsley potatoes alerted him to another danger. “If they come in here, dinner nearly on the table, they’ll know we’re in the house. No matter where we hide, they’ll keep looking until they find us. Listen, we can’t hole up here. Our best chance might be to stay on the move, like the dogs, till we can find help.”

“Dogs?”

“I’ve never seen dogs so terrified.”

She said, “Here come some people, walking right up the middle of the street.”

Rusty couldn’t see them from his angle, but he had no illusions that the cavalry had arrived. This was moving as fast as a firefight, except this enemy didn’t need guns, and Rusty didn’t have one. “How many?”

“Eight. They’re strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Walking two by two, just staring ahead, walking but it’s almost as if they’re marching. Five women, three men. None of them dressed for the weather.”

Leaning forward, Rusty dared to expose his face at the window and peer north.

Corrina said, “What’re they, performers or something, the way they look?”

He leaned away from the window again, his heart hammering as hard as when he’d been running in the street. “They aren’t human. They … change. I don’t know what the hell they are.”

Something she saw in the behavior of the eight so disconcerted Corrina that she didn’t question his bizarre assertion.

“Come on,” he said, “quick, we gotta get out of here, back door.”

Entering the foyer behind him, jerking open the closet door, Corrina said, “I need a coat, boots.”

“Grab a coat. No time for boots.”

She shrugged into the coat as they followed the hall toward the back of the house.

Rusty led the way. As he crossed the threshold into the dark kitchen, he saw a figure looming on the back porch, a half-seen face at a window. He retreated into the hallway, pulling her with him. “One already out there.”

As they followed the hallway toward the foyer, the door chimes sounded. One of the things must be on the front porch.

“Upstairs,” he whispered, holding her hand to prevent her from falling if she lost her footing on the un-lighted staircase.