His screams went up a notch. From man yell to something younger, higher, and more frightened.
The three girls raised their heads and snarled at him.
Like lionesses around a zebra.
Jake was fifty yards back and he could see strings of meat caught between their teeth, swaying as they looked at Richie.
Then two of them came off the ground and rushed him. It was so unexpected.
Not really fast.
It was awkward and even a little slow.
But there was absolutely no hesitation. One moment they were looking at Richie and the next minute they were at him. Just like that.
Richie skidded to a stop and tried to backpedal, but the mud was too wet. He went down hard and the girls were on him. Once more the screams changed.
Changed into something raw and filled with denial.
The other guys were there. Hank and Tommy and Vic.
Jake was almost there. He’d been farthest away.
They grabbed the girls. Shoved them. Knocked them back.
The girls turned on them. Their faces were smeared with blood that was so thick the downpour couldn’t wash it off.
Everyone was wrestling, struggling.
It was crazy. All those big men. Three teenage girls, none of them bigger than one-ten. The blood.
All that blood.
Jake stepped down wrong and sank to mid-shin in watery mud. Pain detonated in his knee and for a terrible moment he thought he’d broken his leg. But it was just jammed straight. Maybe sprained. It stopped him cold, though, and pitched him face-forward into the mud. It went straight up his nose, into his eyes, into his screaming mouth. Down his throat.
He coughed and gagged and blew, pawing at his face, trying to unclog his nostrils and mouth so he could drag in a breath. Swallowed more mud doing that and a worse spasm of coughing nearly tore him apart. His chest convulsed and he vomited mud and coffee and two Egg McMuffins into the storm, and the fierce wind blew it back into his face.
For a long, twisted time he lay there, dripping with mud and puke, trying to breathe. Failing. Trying.
Until black fireworks exploded in his head and the sounds of the rain dwindled into a distant buzz and Jake knew that he was choking to death. Right there. While his friends fought little girls and screamed and bled.
Desperate, terrified, Jake balled his right fist and punched himself in the solar plexus as hard as he could. It felt like being shot, but a ball of something—bread or Canadian bacon or mud or all of that shot from his mouth and vanished into the rain. He dragged in half the air in the world. The flesh around his eyes tingled and the world was incredibly bright but filled with fireflies.
Then the wind brought the screams back to him.
That was how the day started for Jake DeGroot.
It was the best part of his day.
It got so much worse after that.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Dez Fox made no sound at all as she opened the small door that connected the teacher’s lounge to the corner of the schoolyard. The wind screeched through the chain-link fence and rain hit the concrete so steadily it sounded like white noise. Dez took several small, quick steps, her feet barely lifting from the ground as she moved up behind two of the patrolling soldiers. They were twenty feet ahead of her, walking at a measured pace, heading to the turn at the far end. They carried their M4s at an angle to keep rain from filling the barrels. Even though both of them wore gray-green hazmat suits, Dez could tell that one was male and the other female.
Dez stopped behind a decorative outcropping of red brick and racked the slide of her Daewoo shotgun.
Even with the storm it was a loud and distinctive sound, and she’d waited until she was in position so the soldiers could hear it.
She yelled, “Freeze right fucking there.”
They froze. Right there.
“Unsling your rifles and stand them against the wall,” Dez ordered. “Do it now.”
The soldiers hesitated and the woman started to turn.
“Don’t make a stupid mistake, girl,” warned Dez.
“You’re the one making a mistake,” said the female soldier.
“And I’ll cry about it later. Drop the guns or I’ll drop you. Last warning.”
The soldiers exchanged a brief look, then they slid the straps from their shoulders and very gingerly stood their weapons against the wall.
“Place your hands on top of your heads, fingers laced. Good, now turn around slowly. Fuck with me and I will kill you.”
They did exactly as told and though Dez couldn’t see their faces behind the masks they wore, each of them stiffened in surprise. Dez smiled as she stepped away from the wall. Behind her, Uriah Piper and eight other men—each of them experienced deep-woods hunters—knelt in the rain in a shooting line with rifles snugged against their shoulders. A sound made the soldiers look up to see eight more gun barrels—small arms and long guns—pointing at them from half-opened windows.
“Yeah,” said Dez to the soldiers, “you’re that fucked.”
For a long moment there was no sound except the dull impact of raindrops on brick and pavement and clothing and skin. Dez lowered her shotgun and walked over to the soldiers.
“Jenny?” she called, and Jenny DeGroot trotted out of the building holding a plastic trash can. Then Dez began stripping weapons and equipment from the soldiers. Grenades, walkie-talkies, knives, IFAK first-aid kits, ammunition, canteens, equipment-belt suspenders, gun belts, and the rest until each soldier wore only their hazmat suit and their battle dress uniform beneath it. All of it went into the plastic trash can until Jenny staggered under the weight.
“Take it inside. Uriah, get their rifles.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Officer Fox?” asked the female soldier.
Dez wasn’t surprised to hear her name. She was the only police officer left alive in Stebbins, and her presence in the school was certainly known to the military. Even so, she didn’t like hearing this woman say it. She produced two sets of plastic flex-cuffs, handed her shotgun to Piper, spun the female soldier roughly around, yanked her arms down behind her and quickly fitted the cuffs around the wrists. She repeated this with the man, who had so far kept silent.
“This isn’t how you want to play this,” warned the woman.
Dez tore off the woman’s goggles and yanked down the cowl of her hazmat suit. The woman had olive skin, short black hair, and dark eyes. She did not look even remotely afraid of Dez or the guns pointed at her, which was very strange. The woman was also older than Dez expected, maybe thirty-three, with crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines etched around her mouth.
“Listen, sister,” said Dez. “You think I’m making a mistake here? Are you really that stupid?”
“You’re only making more trouble for yourself. What do you hope to accomplish?”
Dez wiped rainwater from her eyes. “What do I hope to accomplish,” she echoed, “Sure, fair question. I’ll tell you and maybe it’ll even sink in.” She pointed to the school. “There are eight hundred people in there. Most of them are scared little kids. None of them are infected.”
The woman nodded. “And?”
Dez almost smiled at how cool this woman was. Cuffed and captured, she was keeping everything in neutral. Dez wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or nervous.
“The other reason is that we need some insurance that General Zetter won’t bomb this place. He might be willing to kill civilians, but I don’t think he’ll pull the trigger on his own people.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“No,” admitted Dez, “but fuck it. You play the cards you’re dealt.”
The woman studied her, then nodded. “Fair enough. However, I don’t work for General Zetter. He doesn’t know my name, or my partner’s name, and he has no idea that you and I are having this conversation.”
“Bul
lshit. If you’re not with Zetter, what are you? Regular army? Who are you working for?”
“His name is Captain Sam Imura,” said the woman. “Hurt either of us and he will blow your head off.”
“That’s mighty tough fucking talk but I don’t—”
“Dez…,” said Trout suddenly. “Oh God … Dez.”
She looked at him and then down at her chest. There, between her breasts, right over her heart, was a tiny red dot. It quivered ever so slightly.
A laser sight.
She stood facing the soldier, which meant that someone out there in the storm was aiming a rifle at her. Someone hidden by rain and the humped shapes of buses and cars.
Dez shifted her shotgun so the barrel pointed at the woman’s face. She took a breath and yelled loud enough to be heard above the rain. “Take your shot, motherfucker. I’ll blow this slut’s shit all over the wall before I go down.”
“Officer Fox,” said the woman calmly. “This isn’t about you.”
Suddenly two more laser dots appeared. One was on Uriah Piper’s chest. The other moved in a slow line up Billy Trout’s body, over his chest, across his face, and stopped exactly between his eyebrows. This dot did not quiver at all.
“Captain Imura was one of the top three snipers in U.S. Special Forces. The other two men are superb shots and they are in positions of concealment. They can drop nine of your people in under four seconds, including you.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” sneered Dez.
“If we wanted you dead, Officer Fox, we’d have taken you as soon as you stepped outside of the building. This isn’t about who’s brave enough to die. It’s about who’s smart enough to live.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
ON THE ROAD
PITTSBURGH SUBURBS
Goat whimpered when he saw what Homer Gibbon did inside the 7-Eleven; however, he kept the camera rolling.
There were five people there. A family of three, a man who dressed like a bartender, and the young man working the cash register.
The store’s employee lay where he’d been dropped, his chest on the floor and his feet still hooked on the counter. That’s how it had started. Homer walked in, reached over the counter, grabbed the kid, dragged him up, and took a bite out of his throat.
Then Homer dropped him.
The other people in the store screamed and panicked.
The woman pushed her ten-year-old son behind her as she backed into an aisle. Her husband tried to drag Homer off the cashier. Homer wheeled on him and drove a savage kick into the man’s crotch that sent him crashing into a display of chips and pretzels. The other man, the bartender, apparently knew some karate, because Goat saw him throw his own kick, catching Homer in the gut. The blow staggered Homer, but the killer folded around the bartender’s leg, clutching it to the point of impact. He bent all the way over it and Goat suddenly realized that he was bending to take a bite.
The bartender screamed and pounded on Homer to let go.
Homer did. Abruptly. He whipped the trapped leg up into the air, which caused the bartender to flip backward. He crashed down on the wire rack, scattering brightly colored bags of Utz pretzels, Lay’s potato chips, and Snyder barbecue pork rinds. The man lay there, back arched over the twisted wire, writhing and hissing between gritted teeth.
That’s when the woman began throwing things at Homer.
Cans of Spam and Campbell’s soup struck the killer’s back and shoulders. He threw an arm up to protect his face as he waded toward her. He never once stopped grinning. Homer was as dead as the other monsters, but he wasn’t like them. Not entirely. Because he was the first infected person in this plague, because the purest form of Dr. Volker’s Lucifer 113 pathogen had been directly injected into his veins, the parasitic reaction was different. His mind did not die along with his flesh. Goat knew this. Understood it. And it terrified him. It made Homer into a kind of monster that was so much greater, so much more dangerous than anything else.
Goat watched Homer grin, heard him laugh, as he swatted the cans out of the air like someone playing a game.
A game.
It was a mercy—for Goat, not for the woman and her child—that Homer tackled them and they vanished between the aisles. Blood shot upward, though, spattering the top rows of canned goods and stacks of plastic-wrapped Stroehmann bread.
Goat never once looked at the door handle.
He never once seriously thought about running.
He understood that he was trapped inside this drama and that there was no exit cue on his script.
After several minutes, Homer rose from between the rows, his face painted with a new coat of red. He wiped his mouth, though he was still chewing something. He looked across the bloody tops of the bread toward the window, and through the glass to where Goat sat behind the dispassionate camera.
And he gave Goat a cheery, buddy-buddy thumbs-up. Like a football jock after a successful play.
The bartender was struggling to rise, but Homer stepped over him and walked in a casual swagger toward the door. Then he paused, turned, went to the cooler and took out two cold bottles of Coke, and plucked a handful of candy bars from the rack. He nodded to himself and left the store.
When he opened the driver’s door he held the Coke and candy out to Goat.
“Guess you got to eat, too,” he said.
It took a lot for Goat to accept these things. It cost him an expensive chunk of his soul.
Homer got behind the wheel and started the car.
Inside the store, the mother and child, both of whom had been savaged, were on their feet. Her husband was only now struggling to his feet, his hands still cupped around his crotch, face purple with agony. Goat had never seen a man kicked that hard in the groin before, and from the awkward way the man stood it seemed obvious that bones had to have been broken. He raised his head toward his family.
And screamed as they rushed toward him, reaching for him with bloody hands. He fell beneath them and Goat turned away.
“No,” barked Homer, hitting him hard on the shoulder, “you don’t look away. You fucking well look.”
It cost Goat another part of his soul to turn back. To witness another death.
And another resurrection.
The cashier was rising, too, scrambling toward the bartender with the bitten leg.
More blood.
More screams.
“There,” said Homer, “there it is.”
“W-what…?”
“That’s the secret the Red Mouth wants you to know. The Black Eye wants to open in the center of your forehead so you can see. You can see it, can’t you?”
“I … see it.”
“Glad to hear it. I was beginning to have my doubts about you, son.” He tapped the video camera. “Did you get everything like I asked?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll put it on the Net?”
“As soon as we get somewhere with a Wi-Fi.”
Homer grunted, a note of deep satisfaction, perhaps of relief.
“Good,” he said.
He pulled back onto the highway and headed toward Pittsburgh.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
THE NORTHERN LEVEES
FAYETTE COUNTY
“Please, God…”
Jake DeGroot prayed nearly continually, but he prayed under his breath.
He didn’t dare make a sound.
In case someone could hear.
He didn’t want anyone to hear him. Not the things that had pretended to be teenage girls. The things that had done those awful things to Burl and Richie and the others.
He was sure they were dead.
He just wasn’t sure that it mattered.
After the attack had started—if “attack” was even the right word—Jake had been down in the mud for too long. When he’d fallen face-first into the muck and choked on it and on his breakfast, getting his shit together took a long damn time. Lying there, gasping like a gaffed billfish, his leg screaming at him, hi
s chest on fire, he had no strength at all. Not for a long time. Too long. Maybe. Or long enough. It was all a matter of how you looked at it.
Since then, hiding in the ditch under Big Bird, he’d thought about it a lot.
He thought it all the way through as the HDTV in his head played and replayed it. There was no remote to aim at it and surf away to something better and saner. To something that made any kind of sense.
Before Jake could struggle back to his feet the whole thing with Burl and Hank and the others seemed to have changed. To have ended in a way Jake didn’t understand.
The other three guys, Hank, Tommy, and Vic, had pulled the girls off of Burl and Richie. Pulled them off, fought with them, fell to the ground wrestling with them, and beaten the shit out of them. Through pain-filled eyes, Jake watched the guys punching and stomping the girls. It was surreal. Like something out of a bad movie. Like snuff porn.
Except that this was real and no matter how many times his friends hit the girls, they couldn’t put them down.
Not down so they’d stay.
First one girl would fall, knocked into the mud by a fist or foot, then another, but then they’d get right back up. With faces broken to ugliness by the blows, with teeth sliding out of their mouths on tides of black blood, with the white ends of ribs coming through their skin and broken fingers, they go right after the guys again.
And again.
And again.
Until Tommy knocked one of them down and stomped on her head. But it took five or ten kicks. At first all he did was drive the girl with the torn sweatshirt deeper into the mud. Tommy was bleeding from half a dozen bites on his hands and wrists. Then one of his kicks must have done something worse. Broke her head, maybe. Or her neck. Something. Because she suddenly stopped fighting, stopped trying to get up. Stopped everything.
Tommy staggered back, staring down at her, his face as slack as if he’d been slapped, eyes bugged. Jake could understand that. The craziness of the attack. The bites and the blood. And what he’d just done.
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