Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (13 page)

The dead were getting up now. The three who’d fallen and others. Goat didn’t know how many people had been in the Starbucks when Homer came in. Fourteen, give or take? Some of them were hurt but not dead, victims of Homer’s rage. Shattered bodies, torn limbs, bitten flesh. No one was whole. No one was uninfected.

Except him.

The moans of the newly resurrected dead filled the store.

“Think quick, son,” said Homer. “Big ol’ fucking clock ticking right here.”

Goat tried to answer, squeaked again, coughed his throat clear and forced out a reply. “You promise you won’t hurt me?”

He hated how weak and small and terrified his voice sounded.

And he hated it much more when he saw how his words and his tone changed the grin on Homer’s face. The killer licked the blood from his teeth and lips.

“I just said I wouldn’t hurt you, boy.”

“No,” insisted Goat, grabbing whatever thread of a lifeline he could, “listen, listen … you want your story told? I mean really told? Told so that it reaches everyone and everyone knows who you really are? That’s what you want? Then I can give it to you. I’m the one who broke this story. Me and my friend Billy Trout. I got the story out that no one else could. I know how to make sure it gets out.”

Homer narrowed his eyes.

There were sudden screams behind Goat and he turned to see the newly risen dead falling on the dying victims of Homer Gibbon. The infected snarled and growled as they tore into living flesh. Blood sprayed the walls and the screams were high and piercing and entirely without hope.

“You broke that story?” said Homer slowly.

“Yes. Billy and I.”

“I heard that Trout fellow on the news.”

“He’s still inside the town. In Stebbins. He’s at the school.”

The screams rose and rose. Goat cringed away from it, edging toward Homer only because he was closer to the door. If he could get Homer to take him outside, then maybe Goat could make a break for it. The highway was right there. He’d take his chances with high-speed traffic in the rain.

Homer was still studying him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.

Then his eyes flicked to what was going on behind Goat.

“Shit,” he grumbled, “those are some persistent fuckers.”

There was no need for Goat to look. The slap of slow feet on the wet floor told the story.

“Please,” begged Goat.

Homer snaked out a hand, caught Goat by the front of his shirt and jerked him forward just as something brushed the nape of Goat’s neck. As he stumbled forward, the cameraman craned his head around to see long, red fingers clutching at the air where his head had been a moment ago.

“I need my laptop,” Goat said. “And my camera bag.”

Homer shrugged. He picked up the MacBook and tossed it to Goat, then snatched the handle of the canvas camera bag out from under a murder victim who was twitching his way back from death. Homer slung the heavy bag on his brawny shoulder and began backing toward the door as the zombies shuffled forward.

“Get your ass in gear,” warned Homer as he grabbed Goat again and hauled him away. Goat staggered toward the door and then thrust through it into the rain. He wanted to slam it in Homer’s face, but the hydraulic door closer was too strong, Homer came outside and he tried to slam it, too. When it resisted him, he leaned his full weight against it. The dead hit the door with enough slack weight to push it several inches outward again.

“Shit,” said Homer, though he did not seem particularly concerned. He still held Goat with one hand and had the other pressed against the glass. He cut a sharp look at Goat. “Listen to me, boy. We got to make a run for the car or they’ll eat your dick sure as God made little green apples. But … and I want you to listen real hard to what I have to say now. If I let you go and you try to run, then you better pray that I can’t run faster than you, ’cause if I catch you then I’m going to bite your dick off and make you eat it. You believe me when I tell you that?”

Goat did. And he said so.

Homer pushed back against the door. “Then let’s go. Car’s unlocked. Go!”

He shoved Goat toward the passenger side and held the door long enough for the cameraman to take a few stumbling steps, correct himself, and begin backing toward the car. Goat clutched the laptop to his chest as if it was a shield. Forty feet away the highway was bright with headlights and fast metal. Could he make it? Then he caught Homer watching him; the killer turned to follow Goat’s line of sight, then turned back and smiled.

“Call the play, son.”

Goat’s heart hammered like desperate fists. Tears fell down his hot cheeks. His legs and muscles trembled with adrenaline and terror.

Go, he told himself. Go, go, go!

A sob broke from his chest as he spun around and reached for the door handle of the metallic green Nissan Cube.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Billy Trout left the basement gymnasium after the bodies had been taken care of. Because they were forbidden to open the exterior doors to the school, the two corpses in their makeshift body bags were placed in one of the shower stalls. After the others left, Billy lingered and stared down at the silent forms.

He wanted to say something, a prayer or something of importance, but even though he kept calling on God since this whole thing started, his actual faith was as dead as the town. This sort of thing did little to rekindle what had always been a weak flame in him. Even so, he mumbled something, a fragment of the Lord’s Prayer, getting some of the words wrong but getting the gist of it out there. For the dead, in case they believed. And … in case he was wrong about there being no God. Trout was open to taking any help they could get. He’d have prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster if he thought it would earn the people in this school even a small measure of grace.

Then, heavyhearted, he turned away and climbed the stairs to the first floor. He tried again to call Goat, but he still had no signal. Frowning, he went to the second floor and found a room with big windows so there was no chance of interference.

Nothing. The little meter on the satellite phone said that he still had half a charge. Power, but no signal. No contact with Goat, or with anyone.

The explanation for it was obvious to the realist in him, but Trout resisted it nonetheless. He didn’t want it to be the case.

“Uh oh…” he murmured.

Depressed and frightened, he went downstairs and looked once more into the big classroom. Two of the teachers were handing out little plastic containers of fruit cocktail. Trout thought it was such a bizarre sight. He remembered getting those little cups when he was a kid in this school. It was always a happy moment. They packed a ton of sugar into those cups, and it was nice to see halved maraschino cherries floating among the chunks of peach and pear. Now it seemed incredibly sad. The children took the cups, opened them with clumsy fingers, spooned out the fruit, chewed, swallowed, and all in a ghastly silence.

Trout backed out of the room and went to find Dez.

At first she seemed to be nowhere at all, and he poked his head into every room. Then he caught sight of her heading toward the fire tower at the far end of the hall. He immediately understood where she was heading. He limped down the hall as quickly as he could, hissing whenever the pain shot down the back of his leg. The heavy fire tower door creaked as he opened it, and for a moment he listened to the sounds from below. Soft footfalls fading into silence. He descended slowly and silently, and finally paused on the stone steps and saw her there, standing with her palms on the steel door, shoulders slumped, head bowed.

On the other side of that door was what was left of the infected from the school.

And JT. He was out there, too.

“Damn,” breathed Trout. His voice was soft but in the utter stillness of the fire tower it carried and Dez suddenly stiffened. She didn’t turn though.

“Billy?”

“Yeah, babe.”

There was a beat. “Don’t call me that.”

“Right. Sorry.” Now wasn’t the time to test the limits of whatever new connection they’d forged.

He descended the last few steps and moved toward her, mindful to come into her peripheral vision well out of strike range. Experience is a wonderful teacher.

She stared at the closed door as if it were made of glass. “What do you want?”

He almost said that he came looking to see how she was, but Trout preferred his balls still attached to his body. So, instead he said, “They said they’d airdrop some food to us. That’s fine, but nobody I talked to knows how to get up on the roof without going outside.”

“There’s a fire access stairway.”

“Right, okay, that’s good,” he said. “But no one else knew that.”

She turned to look at him, but said nothing.

“Once they drop the stuff,” Trout continued, “it’s got to be inspected, sorted, and distributed. You’ve seen how people are reacting. They’re going to do it wrong. Some of these people are a twitch away from losing it. They might grab stuff or horde stuff. We have to take control of things. We have to make sure we do everything right.”

Her eyes searched his face and after a long moment she gave a single nod.

“There’s something else,” he said. “No, two things. The first is that we have to double—no, triple—check everyone. I mean everyone.”

“We did. No one has a bite.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. The guy who … I mean the guy down in the gym. I didn’t see a bite on him.”

A line formed between her brows. “Of course there was a bite.”

“No, there wasn’t. I, um, checked. Everywhere. I even had to cut his clothes off just to be sure.”

She pushed off from the wall and turned completely to him, her eyes hostile and hot. “The fuck are you trying to say, Billy?”

“That guy didn’t die from a bite. Maybe he got infected some other way. Maybe he got some of the black blood in his mouth. When Goat and I interviewed Volker he said something about the infected spitting. So maybe it was that.”

“Shit.”

“Or maybe it’s just enough to get blood on your skin. Everybody’s pretty badly dinged up. Maybe the worms in the blood can get into an open wound and…”

His voice trailed off. Both of them wore clothes that were caked with dried blood. A lot of that was black blood. Dez began wiping at her clothes—almost absently at first and then she started slapping at her uniform faster and faster until her hands became a hysterical blur.

“
Stop it!”
yelled Trout.

He had to yell it three times before she froze. For a moment Dez’s eyes were so wild that the whites showed all around. Crazy eyes. Trout had seen her like that before. Once, naked and wild-eyed, she’d chased him with a shotgun. Not one of their better moments as a couple.

“Dez … we wiped ourselves down with Purell, remember? Remember? You damn near did Jell-O shots of the stuff.”

The wild look slowly faded, and she gave him a slow nod. She was panting, though. “Right, right … sorry. Jeez … I’m sorry.”

Trout tried to touch her, to give her arm a reassuring squeeze or maybe coax her into a hug, but Dez walked a few paces away, hands on hips, and stared at the wall as she worked on her breathing.

Without turning she asked, “Volker gave you all that research stuff on a couple of flash drives, right?”

“Sure. Goat has them and—”

She half-turned. “Did you think to keep a copy of it?”

Trout shook his head. “There wasn’t time for that. Things were already falling apart. I dropped him at the county line and he walked across a field to the Starbucks in Bordentown and I went to my office to get the satellite phone. Things just kept going wrong from then on. Why?”

Dez chewed her lip for a moment, then tapped the walkie-talkie on her hip. “General Zetter called me on the walkie-talkie. They want the drives.”

“I bet they do.”

“He said that they need the science and research on them. Apparently that ass-pirate Volker did something to the Lucifer disease thing. Changed it somehow. They don’t understand what he did and they can’t come up with a way of stopping it without Volker’s notes.”

Trout slumped. “Ahh … damn it.”

“Zetter thinks you have them.”

“How do they even know about them?” mused Trout. “Wait, no, that’s my bad … I may have mentioned something in my last broadcast.”

“That was stupid.”

“I was making a point.”

“About being stupid?”

“Dez…”

“They need that stuff. Zetter didn’t go so far as making a direct threat, but with all those guns out there pointed at us, he doesn’t really have to. I told him that if he tried to storm the place and take the drives by force I’d destroy them.”

“What did you do that for?”

Her eyes shifted away. “I didn’t know what else to tell him. And I—”

“You wanted him to think we had something he needed. Okay, I get it. It was—”

“What? ‘Stupid’? Are you going to throw that back in my face?”

“No, I’m not,” he said with a smile. “I was going to say that it was an understandable stalling tactic.”

She grunted. “We need to get in touch with Goat. Maybe he can email stuff to us. There have to be flash drives here. If we can send the stuff we could actually have something to bargain with.”

Trout held out the satellite phone. “That was the second thing I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I can’t get a call through to Goat.”

“What?”

“I know.”

“Where’d you call from? Maybe there’s no reception down in the—”

“I’ve called from a dozen different places on the first and second floor. Right by the windows, too. Nothing.”

“Shit.”

“What I don’t get,” said Trout, “is why they’re bullying us about this. All they have to do is talk to Volker.”

“Zetter said they can’t find Volker.”

“Oh … crap.”

“So,” Dez asked, “what do we do now?”

Trout shook his head. “Geez … I really don’t know. Keep trying to get in touch with Goat.”

“Billy,” said Dez, “we could tell them where to find Goat.”

“And have them put a bullet in his head?” Trout fired back. “No thanks.”