It took Trout a couple of stumbling moments to match this new voice to a recent memory and then to fit those awkward pieces into a puzzle shape that made only fractured sense. He felt his heart lurch in his chest.
He said, “Homer?”
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Scott Blair closed his cell and wanted to scream.
Instead he made another call and got the director of the National Security Agency on the line. He explained about Goat Weinman having the flash drives.
“What do you want me to do?” asked the director.
“Hack his phone and email. He’s a reporter and he’s on the run. There’s every chance that he sent the data to himself as a way of keeping it safe. Find out.”
The director didn’t ask whether Blair had a warrant. That time had already passed.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
ON THE ROAD
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
“Why as I live and breathe, it’s Mr. Live From the Apocalypse his ownself,” said Homer. “Billy Trout, how do you do?”
Homer grinned into the phone as he spoke. Beside him, Goat cowered back, one hand pressed to the welt on his cheek where the killer had belted him when Goat answered the call.
“Homer?” repeated Billy Trout. “Is this really Homer Gibbon?”
“In the flesh. Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed your little speeches on the radio coupla hours ago. Really exciting stuff.”
“How … how…?”
“You gonna finish that sentence?”
“How are you with Goat? Is he okay? Did you hurt him? Christ, you’d better not have touched him, you sick fuck.”
“Hey, mind your manners,” warned Homer, “or I will do some particular damage to your friend.”
“No, don’t!”
“I ain’t done shit to him so far, but that could change right quick, so make sure you keep a civil tongue in your head.”
“Yes, yes, okay. I’m sorry. I’m just concerned for my friend. May I speak with him, please?”
Homer pulled onto the shoulder, put his hand over the mouthpiece, and turned to Goat. “This thing have a speaker?”
“Yes,” said Goat and when Homer held out the device, he flicked the switch. Homer leaned close and very quietly said, “You don’t speak unless I give the nod.”
“Yes. No problem.”
“And if you say the wrong thing, you know what I’ll do to make you sorry about it.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Homer held the sat phone up between them. “We got this on speaker, so Mr. Goat can hear you, too.”
“Thank you,” said Trout. “Goat … you okay there, buddy?”
Goat looked for approval and got a nod. “I’m okay, Billy. He hasn’t hurt me.”
“Thank God. Can you tell me where you are?”
Homer shook his head.
“No,” said Goat. “I can’t do that.”
“Can you tell me what you’re doing?”
Homer thought about it, then nodded.
“Mr. Gibbon wants me to tell his side of the story. The whole story. About the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. You remember those from the trial, Billy?”
“Sure.”
“That was only part of the story. A small part.” Goat saw Homer give him a small nod of approval and decided to take that script and run with it. “There’s so much more to the story, Billy. I know you’d really appreciate it. It’s the greatest story anyone’s ever told. It’s so … deep. So big.”
Homer looked pleased, but Goat was afraid of overdoing it, so he closed with that.
“I … see,” said Trout. “Sounds like something I definitely want to hear.”
“You really do.” An idea occurred to Goat and he hoped Trout would be sharp enough to catch the ball and run with it. “It’s like you always told me, Billy. There are layers and layers to Homer Gibbon. No one really knows him. The stuff at the trial was all bullshit. No one ever asked him the right questions. No one ever really wanted to know what he saw and why he does what he does. It’s like people didn’t think the Red Mouth or the Black Eye were real. You always said there was more to the story. You always said that it was a crime that no one ever let Mr. Gibbon speak to the jury, speak from his heart, and tell the whole truth. You were right, Billy. Absolutely right.”
There was only a half beat before Trout said, “Nice to know you were paying attention, Goat. And I’m jealous that you’re there to get that story. Will we ever get to hear it?”
Goat waited for Homer to give another nod.
“That’s what we have planned. I have some incredible stuff already. Really amazing stuff. As soon as we get somewhere with Wi-Fi I’m going to upload it and blow everyone’s minds.”
“That’s great, that’s—ah, I’m so jealous, man. You’re going to do more than blow minds, Goat. You’re going to open minds.”
“I know.”
“Goat, make sure you preserve everything. That information is too valuable to lose. You should back it up.”
“I have it saved to my hard drive.”
“No … back it up on those flash drives,” said Trout, very clearly and precisely. “That’s how the best reporters preserve the most important information.”
Goat almost asked him what the hell he was talking about when he realized that Billy was spinning the game on him. Telling him something.
And he got it.
The flash drives. Important information.
“You’re absolutely right, Billy. I’ll make sure I protect that information.”
“Good,” said Trout, and the relief was there to be heard in his voice. “Mr. Gibbon?”
“Call me Homer,” said the killer.
“Thank you, that’s an honor, sir. Please call me Billy. I want to thank you for what you’re doing for Goat. This is the kind of story he’s always wanted. Something big, something that will do a lot of good.”
“That’s what this is, sure enough.”
“Is there any way I can be of assistance?”
Homer snorted. “Aren’t you stuck in that little school with a buncha kids?”
“I might be able to get out of here. I’d be happy to help Goat with this story. With his camerawork and me doing the interviews we can—”
“No thanks,” said Homer. “We got this covered. You have a good day now.”
He ended the call and pulled back onto the road, heading northwest.
Goat’s heart was hammering with painful insistence and he stared longingly at the satellite phone. His mind, however, was replaying Billy’s word.
Preserve the most important information.
He cleared his throat and made his voice sound normal. “Billy’s right,” he said. “I need to backup everything on flash drives.”
“What are they?” asked Homer.
Goat explained, then added, “I always carry some extras. It’s a reporter thing.”
He dug into his pocket and showed Volker’s drives to Homer.
“All the videos you been taken fit onto those little things?”
“Absolutely, and then we need to get it out to the world.”
“Wi-Fi, right?”
“Wi-Fi,” agreed Goat.
“Okeydokey,” said the killer. He stepped on the gas and the Escalade plowed through the storm winds, heading toward Pittsburgh.
Heading toward hope.
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
MOBILE COMMAND POST
FAYETTE COUNTY
Major General Zetter and his top aides met in the mobile command post parked three miles from the blast zone. The big vehicle rocked as winds buffeted it. Electronic workstations provided real-time intel from satellites and field observation posts, and one wall of the MCP was covered in a high-res satellite map of Stebbins and Fayette counties.
“Sir,” said one of his captains, “we’re clocking sustained winds of forty miles per hour with gusts
up to seventy. Western Fayette has winds above fifty. We can’t keep the birds in the air.”
This had been a problem since the start of this campaign. Helicopters do not like high winds, and with storm gusts, high-tension wires, unlighted structures such as grain silos, cellular towers, and trees swaying in the wind, the helos had had a difficult night. Five were down with damage. Two were wrecked, with the loss of one complete crew and two other Guardsmen in the hospital.
Zetter coughed and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, found one and covered his mouth as the coughs continued. It was the ash from the firebombs. He needed some clean air and maybe a gallon of mouthwash.
“Sir,” his aide prompted gently. “Should I recall the birds?”
On the big satellite map there were hundreds of small red dots. People fleeing from the attack on Route 653 and the resulting bombs.
“Keep them flying,” he said. Another fit of coughing wracked him, shorter but intense.
“Sir, did you say—”
“I said keep them flying,” snapped Zetter, his face bright red from coughing.
The aide nodded and turned away to relay the order.
As Zetter dabbed at his mouth, aware of the eyes that were on him, listening to a couple of other officers coughing. They’d all been out there with him.
It made him remember the respiratory problems from people who’d inhaled the smoke after the collapse of the Towers. Some of those people got sick from what they’d sucked into their lungs. Some died. He fished for the condition caused by breathing in particulate matter. Pneumonitis? He thought that was it.
Zetter wondered if he was going to get sick from the smoke. He already had some mild emphysema from all those years he smoked. He didn’t smoke anymore, but it was damage done. No cancer, though, so he’d been lucky there, but his wind was for shit. A long flight of stairs could put him on his ass for ten minutes.
Now this.
The dust.
The stress.
The fear.
Another aide, who was hunched over a small desk speaking into a phone, raised his head and pointed to the western edge of the map. On it several larger dots were moving in opposition to the outer wave of fleeing people.
“General, the additional units have reached the Outbreak Zone. I have their commanding officer on the line.”
Zetter hauled himself out of the chair and lumbered over to the desk, snatched the phone and identified himself. “With whom am I speaking?”
“Sir,” said a woman’s voice, “this is Colonel Ruiz.”
“Give me a sit-rep, Colonel.”
“We are tracking a large number of individuals heading west through farmlands. Estimate four hundred plus. They appear to be civilians.”
“Colonel, have you been briefed on Lucifer?”
“I have, sir.”
“Are you able to determine if these people are infected?”
“No, sir. Though a large number of them appear to be injured. We are seeing torn clothing, what appear to be flash-burns, and—”
“Colonel, can you contain the civilians and examine them for bites? We need to make certain that—”
Before the colonel could answer, Zetter could hear sounds from her end of the line. Military personnel yelling to the oncoming wave of people. Zetter turned and looked at the satellite map and saw the outer edge of the wave of lights closing very fast on the line of larger dots—military vehicles and their crews. He heard the shouts turn to yells.
And then there was the rattle of gunfire.
A few sporadic shots at first.
Then sustained gunfire.
And screams.
Colonel Ruiz never came back on the line.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
LAUREL RIDGE STATE PARK
FAYETTE COUNTY
Demolitions specialist Mike Chrusciel liked blowing things up. After getting caught once rigging cherry bombs to the tailpipe of his high school disciplinarian, Mike was given the first of what became a series of lectures. Half the lecture focused on not playing with dangerous items and the dangers to himself and others. Once during that half of the lecture Mike had made the mistake of saying “Yeah, blah, blah, blah” out loud. He spent the next month in detention and got his ass hammered flat at home. That was ninth grade.
The second half of the lecture took a different direction. It was filled with suggestions for how he could turn his “hobby” into something useful. The military. Nobody loves blowing things up more than the army. That was the gist. Not in those words, of course, but that’s the message Mike took away with him.
Occasionally there was a third part of the lecture. More of a warning, really. The only really likely alternative for someone like him was a different institution. One with bars.
After high school, and with no adult criminal record at all and his juvie offenses sealed, he rode an administrative recommendation from the school vice principal into the National Guard. During screenings and training it became clear to everyone that Mike Chrusciel liked to blow things up. And when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be a danger to his fellow Americans, they put him into the right classes and taught him everything he ever wanted to know about explosives, IEDs, mines, grenades, satchel charges, and all of those other wonderful toys. He discovered that his connection to explosives went beyond the simple pleasure of seeing things go bang—he had a real talent for it. And working in the field, being allowed to play with explosives, gradually erased the immature thrill seeker part of him in favor of a more focused and intellectual aspect. Bombs of various kinds became like puzzles. Selecting the right device for each situation, purpose, or goal. He’d earned another stripe in Afghanistan and there was already some talk about him going higher. There was talk about OCS and maybe a career in the army rather than a short hitch to keep out of jail.
In the world of military ordnance, Mike Chrusciel had found himself.
He never expected to be planting mines here on American soil. Not outside of a test range. But the orders from General Zetter had been crystal clear. The infected were breaking through the lines. There were several chokepoints, where the landscape and the presence of rivers and streams would funnel anyone on foot to routes of least resistance. He and his partner, Cyrus, were assigned to mine one of those routes. Two miles farther down the road, a checkpoint was being reinforced in case any infected got through.
Mike smiled at that thought.
Get through?
Not once he was done. No, sir.
The orders were to disable any infected. Killing them, Mike was told, was more difficult in that it required very specific damage to the brain and brain stem. Fair enough. He could rig the paths so that anything dumb or unlucky enough to step onto that path would be crippled in a hot second. That would allow Mike and his partner to finish them off with headshots, or they could be left for the roving patrols that were scheduled to check all of these hot spots.
He studied geodetic survey maps and then walked the landscape to make his own determinations about likely routes. The infected were supposed to be as close to brain dead as made no difference. Aggressive but stupid, that’s how one of the guys described them. Mike had to make some important decisions and he took a little extra time to do it, fighting the clock to get it all right.
Mike concentrated on blast mines that would be triggered by someone stepping on them. He set the tension so that anyone over sixty pounds would trigger it. A deer’s footstep wasn’t heavy enough because its weight was distributed between four legs. But a human? When a person stepped on a blast mine, the device’s charge detonated, creating a blast shock wave composed of very hot gases traveling at extremely high velocity. When the blast wave hits breaks the ground surface, it results in a massive compression force that blows a victim’s foot off.
Infected or not, they were going down.
In areas where a larger group might pass, Mike planted the bigger and heavier fragmentation mines. These were crammed with several kilogra
ms of shrapnel. A real party pleaser.
And for narrow areas where a single infected might pursue one of the patrolling soldiers, Mike positioned more than a dozen M86 Pursuit Deterrent Munitions. These PDMS were small U.S. antipersonnel mines generally used by Special Forces to deter pursuit. In function they were like small hand grenades, and each had a pin and fly-off lever. Once the pin is pulled and the lever has been ejected, a timer starts and after twenty-five seconds it launches seven tripwires with a maximum range of six meters. That creates a spiderweb effect; anyone pursuing the user trips a wire that activates the mine and a liquid propellant charge launches the mine a couple of meters into the air. The fragmentation warhead detonates, breaking the mine into six hundred flesh-rending fragments. Normally these devices deactivated themselves after a few hours, but Mike disabled the timers. To warn other soldiers, however, he tied plastic tags to tree branches. Yellow for land mines, orange for devices mounted in the trees. The tags had tiny sensors that would alert troops to their presence. Modern warfare, baby. Mike loved it.
Elsewhere, in spots where the infected were closing in on fields, Mike heard that planes were going to be dropping cluster bombs. Part of the GATOR land mine system. The Navy would drop five-hundred-pound CBU-78/Bs and the Air Force would lay down some thousand-pound CBU-89/Bs. Very heavy shit, and Mike wished he could be there to see it. Not the drop … he wanted to see what happened when a bunch of infected tried waltzing across a field of those puppies.
Ka-boom.
Once Mike had everything just so, he carefully retreated to where his partner waited. The guy they paired him with was a moonfaced kid from Monroeville named Cyrus who never said two words when no words would do. Mike knew chattier rocks. But that was okay. It was better when Cyrus said nothing because when he did say something it was dumb shit like, “Look, a deer.” Like it was a thing of wonder.
A deer.
In the woods?
How amazing.
This was the ass-end of Pennsylvania, deep in farm country, and both Stebbins and Fayette counties overlapped with state forests. Deer were as thick as mosquitoes out here, and just as annoying.
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