“Frag out!” he cried as he flung it into the midst of the dead closing on the front of the Humvee. He ducked down a split second before the grenade exploded. Everything in the blast radius was torn to ragged pieces and at the edges of the blast the concussion knocked the zombies off balance, leaving a rough opening that was clouded with blood-red mist.
Sam punched Boxer on the shoulder. “Punch it.”
Boxer gave it all the gas it would take and the Humvee leapt forward, smashing through the crippled dead, crushing others. Behind him the main mass of the infected closed like the waters of the Red Sea. They collided with one another in their desperate race to get to the living flesh. Gypsy and Moonshiner leaned out of the windows and fired back at them, shooting at legs to shatter thighbones and drop the pursuers into the path of the rest of them. Shortstop climbed back up and turned the Browning in a circle, not needing to aim. There were targets everywhere.
The Humvee shot through the bloody opening and there was clear street beyond it. Boxer kept his foot on the pedal all the way down to the floor and with every second the horde of the dead dropped behind. One by one the guns stopped firing, and after a full minute Sam touched Boxer on the shoulder.
“Okay, kid, ease it down.”
Boxer dropped the speed from seventy to fifty to forty and kept it there. They passed other zombies, but by the time the infected could turn and target them, the Humvee was past. No one fired at them.
Everyone sagged back, exhaling balls of burning air, their hands trembling with adrenaline and shock.
“Reload,” snapped Sam. “Do it now.”
They did it, and the orderliness of that action helped steady each of them. Not completely, but enough so they could reclaim themselves. Enough so they could dare look in each others’ eyes.
They drove on, no one speaking. There was nothing that needed to be said.
Then a soft purring buzz broke the silence. And Sam lunged for his satellite phone.
“Sir,” he said as soon as the connection was made, “Stebbins is not under control. There is extreme activity and—”
“Sam, to hell with that,” Blair snapped. “The Q-zone is compromised. I repeat, the devil is off the chain. The president has ordered the Air Force in. Drop everything else and get to the school. Get those flash drives. Do it now.”
“How bad is it?”
Blair paused for a shattered moment. “It’s bad, Sam. Volker is dead. We’re going to have to go big on this to try and stop the spread—but we need those drives. You are authorized to use all means and measures to secure them.”
Sam felt his throat tighten.
“Understood, sir,” he said. But the line was already dead.
The members of the Boy Scouts exchanged looks.
Then Boxer kicked down on the gas, the tires spun on the wet ground until smoke curled up behind the Humvee, and then they were rolling fast, gaining speed, heading toward the Stebbins Little School.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
The president was surrounded by ghouls.
Every face of every person at the table looked like a death mask: pale, devoid of hope, sunken, and hollow-eyed.
On the screens the glowing icons that represented the jets were streaking toward Bordentown. Other dots indicated the movement of General Zetter’s National Guard forces and the reinforcements that had been ordered in to help hold the quarantine line. With that line broken, the troops were being deployed in a wide circle around the Starbucks.
The president took a long drink of water, but it did nothing to soothe his dry, raw throat. He set the glass down with a clunk that seemed absurdly loud in a room that was unusually quiet.
“What are our options?” he asked of the people around the table. The people whose job it was to always have answers.
General Amistad Burroughs said, “The jets will—”
“No,” interrupted the president. “I want to know what we need to do afterward. After the bombs.”
Sylvia Ruddy shared a look with Scott Blair. She said, “You’ll have to address the nation again.”
“And say what?” asked the president. Ruddy flinched. “No, I want you to tell me, what can I possibly say that will help the country understand this.”
“Sir, I—”
The president picked up a sheet of paper and shook it at her, at everyone. Everyone had a copy of the same report in front of them. None of them had touched the report after first reading it. The papers lay on the table, unwanted, feared, despised.
“These are casualty estimates. In just under five minutes we are going to kill thousands of American citizens. Thousands more are already dead. And we don’t yet know if this is the end of it. So, tell me … what exactly is it I’m supposed to tell the nation?”
The dead faces stared at him and said nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
The last of the military vehicles rumbled out of the parking lot, leaving behind a scene of disorder and desolation.
“Now what?” asked Trout.
Dez nibbled thoughtfully on her lip. “If they’re really gone…”
“What?” he prompted.
“I can think of only three reasons they’d leave,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “It’s over and they’ve been told to stand down.”
“Is that likely?”
“No. They left too fast and left too much shit behind. They were told to drop and run. Question is whether they’re running from or running to.”
“Huh?”
“That’s choice two and tree. So, the second option is that there’s another problem. Maybe they found a bunch more of these zombies. Or, more likely, there’s a problem at the quarantine line.”
“What’s the third option?”
She gave him a flat stare. “Getting out of the line of fire.”
For emphasis she pointed up to the ceiling. Trout followed her finger as if they could both see a jet loaded with fuel-air bombs screaming its way across the skies of Stebbins County.
“Well,” Trout said slowly, “shit.”
“Yeah.”
“But … the flash drives … they want those. They won’t blow us up if they think we have them.”
“Sure. Unless they found Dr. Volker, in which case when this is over you are going to be one inconvenient motherfucker, Billy. Same goes for me and anyone you may have talked to in here. Which is everyone.”
Even after everything that happened, Trout was aghast at the thought of such cold-blooded murder. He kept shaking his head, but he wasn’t sure he actually disagreed.
“We have a window, Billy,” said Dez as she turned, hurried to the desk and began shoving the guns and ammunition back into the duffel bag. “We need to get the fuck out of here while there’s still a here to get out of.”
“What are you doing?” asked Trout.
She nodded to the windows. “Neither of us believe this is over, right? Not with the way they left. And maybe they’re not going to bomb us, but where does that leave us?”
“In a nice, safe building that we’re reinforcing,” he said. “With lots of food and supplies.”
“For a week, Billy. Now, think it through. If this is as big a disaster as Zetter said, as big as what Volker told you, then are you telling me that we might only be stuck here for a week?”
“No, but they said they’d airdrop supplies to us.”
“You want me to punch some stupid off of you?”
He rubbed his chest. “No thanks. What am I missing?”
“If the Guard had to run out of here like their dicks were on fire, then this thing is spreading. Which also means that there are so many of those dead fuckers out there that they had to take everyone including the cook. Does that sound like anything’s under control?”
“No,” he admitted sheepishly.
“No,” s
he agreed. “It sounds like big trouble. So, go big picture for a minute. Pull back and look at it. If you’re General Zetter and things are going to shit, do you give a crap about, as I said, inconvenient people trapped in a school, or do you go fight the fight?”
“You go fight the fight.”
“Right, now look at it from where we stand. Sure, we have a secure building and, yes, I think we could hold it against a million of those things.”
“Exactly.”
“Until we run out of bullets and bread. Until there’s no more gas for the generator, no more fresh water, and no more cans of Spam. Tell me, Billy, what happens then? And before you say something stupid like ‘but they’ll come for us by then,’ take a moment and think about how long people waited after Katrina. Weeks, in some cases. And that was without a bunch of dead sonsabitches trying to eat everyone.”
Trout used her words as a lens to stare into the future, and the things he saw were ugly and wrong.
“Jesus,” he murmured.
“We’ve got our window. No one’s watching us and, for the moment, no living dead assholes are trying to bite us. I say we load all our supplies and all of us into those buses. We have more than enough of them. We load up and we get the hell out of Dodge.”
“And go where?”
She shrugged. “Pittsburgh’s nice this time of year. So’s Harrisburg. So’s Philly.” Then she paused. “Actually, if things are really hitting the fan, there’s Sapphire Distributors in Fayette.”
“What’s that?”
Dez smiled. “A food distribution warehouse. Big-ass brick building. No windows on the ground floor, truck bays where we can backup the buses, its own generator with probably a lot more fuel than we have here, plus enough food to replenish a dozen full supermarkets. We could survive there for months.”
“How do you know about it?”
Dez’s eyes slid away for a moment and she focused on packing the bag.
“Dez—?”
“I, um, dated a guy who works there. Head of security.”
“Who? Do I know him?”
“Maybe.”
“Who, Dez?”
“It doesn’t matter, damn it.”
Trout sighed. “What makes you think your boyfriend would even let you in?”
Dez colored.
“Dez?”
“He’s, um … still sweet on me.”
“Jesus H. Christ in a clown car.”
Dez glared at him. “Give me a better idea, then.”
Trout picked up a box of bullets, looked at the label without reading it, and shoved it into the bag.
“Is anything with you ever simple?” he muttered. “I mean ever?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
ROUTE 653
BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
Patrick Freivald knew that he was crazy to be out on a motorcycle in the middle of one of the worst storms in Pennsylvania history. Crazy and maybe a little suicidal. The problem was that his car—his nice, warm, dry car—was parked outside of his nice, warm, dry house way the hell up in the Finger Lakes region, on the far side of Canandaigua Lake, and that was a hell of a lot of miles from here.
He’d hit the road after a very good but very long couple of days bartering and dealing at Monster Madness, a small pop culture convention in Friendsville, Maryland. Patrick had traded some old Aurora monster model kits, including an absolutely pristine Forgotten Prisoner for some newer stuff, including the Vampirella, which was a new limited edition based on a Frank Frazetta painting. He’d made enough profit off the Aurora model to stock up on a bunch of lower-end but still cool PVC statues of classic Universal monsters. All of that was in UPS boxes on their way home, and like a lot of the conventioneers, he’d waited out the storm yesterday and hit the road when they said the worst of it was over.
The weatherman was dead wrong.
Big surprise.
He’d barely hit the Pennsylvania state line before the rains started again. Not the sluggish end-of-the-storm showers, but a real downpour. So bad a lot of cars were pulling off the road. Good for them, they could sit there and listen to Howard Stern on Sirius and stay dry. Can’t do that on a hog.
Outrunning the storm wasn’t going to happen, Patrick could tell that much without having to listen to the news. There was lightning so thick and frequent it looked like a neon forest stretched all the way to the horizon. To every horizon. Going back was for shit, too.
His only real option was to motor through until he hit the first town with a cheap motel. With a storm like this even a roach motel would be good. If it got any heavier, a barn out here in the sticks would be just fine.
Patrick wasn’t crazy enough to listen to an iPad while driving his bike, but he didn’t need the weatherman to tell him there was a storm. Everyone knew about Superstorm Zelda, Sandy’s country cousin. As the miles fell away, though, he began wishing he could hear a traffic report. Ahead of him he could see the double rows of red taillights thickening from a sparse few into tightly packed lines that vanished into the distant rainy darkness. Road speed, already down to forty because of the rain, was slowing more and more until he was barely making enough headway to balance his bike.
“Shit,” he muttered as the line of cars finally ground to a complete stop. Right out in the big dark, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The last sign he remembered seeing was for a twenty-four-hour Starbucks in someplace called Bordentown. He’d never heard of the town, and at that moment didn’t give a crap if it was a nice tourist spot or not. A coffee shop open all night was like a gift from God.
He roll-walked his Italian motorcycle out of his lane and saw that the shoulder was clear ahead. He gunned the bike and began moving again. The winds tried to knock him sideways into the line of stalled cars, but Patrick leaned forward to cut the resistance and kept moving. He cut quick looks at the people in the cars. Some of them ignored him, some flipped him off for doing what they hadn’t yet dared.
The first thing that troubled Patrick was the sudden sound of a helicopter overhead. With the helmet and the roar of the Moto Guzzi’s burly engine he couldn’t hear most sounds, but this was a roar, and he risked a look up as a big damn chopper flew right above him. It was huge, one of those bulky military machines, with stubby wings laden with what looked like missiles.
Missiles?
He was so surprised that he almost rear-ended a Civic that cut onto the shoulder right in front of him. The chopper moved slowly above him, heading farther up the road. The rotor wash took the rain and wind and churned them into a fresh and more intense miniature storm. Patrick had to really fight to keep from having those winds knock him down.
The second thing that bothered Patrick was how low the chopper was flying. It could not have been more than a hundred feet above the tops of the cars. Patrick had never even seen a news helicopter fly that low, especially in winds like this.
That’s when Patrick saw beams of light sweeping down from the storm clouds. Massive, bright searchlights. Intensely bright, but for a moment they did not appear to belong to anything. It was like a scene from that old movie Close Encounters, and for a brief, irrational moment Patrick thought that’s what he was seeing. UFOs. Aliens.
Then the helicopter above him switched on its light, and Patrick understood.
The stormy sky was filled with helicopters.
No.
That wasn’t exactly right.
The sky was filled with military helicopters.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
ROUTE 653
BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
Goat Weinman was pretty sure he was dead.
So why was he moving?
He tried to open his eyes but either the world was totally without light or he was blind.
Am I dead? He wondered.
Panic detonated in his mind as everything Volker had said about the Lucifer pathogen came sweeping back. When a person is infected, the physical body dies but the mind, the consciousness, lingers, trapped inside hijacked flesh
, floating, observing, able to see and feel, connected to every nerve ending but totally unable to do anything.
Trapped.
Was that what was happening?
Was his body now a … a …
“Oh, God!” he cried out. “I’m one of them … please, God, no don’t—”
Then a voice said, “Wake the fuck up.”
That was immediately followed by a hard slap across his face and Goat felt himself reeling and then slamming into some hard. Metal. He began to fall and thrust his hands out to stop himself.
He.
Thrust.
His.
Hands.
He did it. Not some parasitic impulse over which he had no control.
Goat grabbed on to what had to be the fender of a car and he crouched there, sore, his face stinging, terror and doubt screaming at each other in his head. He could feel his hands on the wet metal of the car. He flexed his fingers and they obeyed.
He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t one of them.
Then he felt the wetness on his face. Not the rain. Something heavier, thicker. On his forehead. In his …
Eyes.
Suddenly he was pawing at his eyes and immediately there was faint light. Bad light, but there. He wasn’t blind after all. Not blind or dead. There was something in his eyes. He tilted his face to the rain and rubbed at his eyes until he could see. There was something black on his fingers.
Until the lighting flashed and then he saw that his black fingers were red.
Slick, glistening red.
It was blood. His eyes had been pasted shut with dried blood that was now washing away in the rain. And there in front of him, crumpled against a tree, was the ruin of a metallic green Nissan Cube.
And that’s when it all came back to him. Homer. Starbucks. The accident.
He turned sharply to see Homer Gibbon standing behind him. The killer stood there in the howling wind and pouring rain, bare-chested, wide-legged, with a monstrous grin of red delight on his face as the lightning burned the sky behind him.
“Don’t you go die on me,” he said with a wicked chuckle. “Not until I want you to.”
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