Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (21 page)

Fighting.

Struggling.

Rolling over and over in the mud or on the slick streets.

Punching and kicking.

Biting.

Biting.

Biting.

The president tried to say something. His mouth worked, but there was no breath in his lungs, no air in the room.

No words.

General Zetter’s voice croaked from the speakers. “Mr. President … my God, Mr. President. Permission to engage. Permission to engage.”

He said it over and over again as on the screen hundreds—no, thousands—of people fought, and screamed, and died.

And came back.

To kill.

To eat.

To …

Scott Blair touched the president’s arm. Lightly, almost gently. A gesture of pleading.

“Mr. President,” he said in a ragged whisper, “give the order.”

The president looked at him with eyes that were filled with so much confusion that it was clear the man teetered on the edge of collapse.

“Mr. President … please.”

“Congress,” muttered the president. “I need to inform them. I need approval for this. I can’t … I can’t … the nation…”

“There isn’t time, Mr. President. If we don’t act now there won’t be a nation to save.”

The president’s staring eyes blinked, blinked again, and then suddenly filled with a measure of understanding.

“Do it,” he whispered.

It was the loudest sound in the room.

Blair wheeled around. “General Zetter, the president has authorized you to go weapons hot. Engage the enemy with all resources.”

“Acknowledged,” said Zetter breathlessly, “going weapons hot.”

The guns on the helicopters opened up and instantly the screams of the dying were drowned out by the heavy growl of machine guns. The running figures began juddering and dancing as the rounds punched into them. Other helicopters—Apaches and Black Hawks—moved down out of the storm, flying awkwardly in the high winds. The pilots kept as much distance from each other as they could, but this was worst-case scenario for any pilot. High winds, heavy rain, enemies who looked like civilians, and no clear set of targets.

“Some of the pilots are not engaging,” said one of the officers in the room.

“General Zetter,” growled Blair, “half of your pilots have not engaged.”

There was the sound of arguing and shouting from the speakers and they heard Zetter yell, “There are no civilians, goddamn it. This is a target-rich environment. Fire at will. Anything moving is designated an enemy combatant.”

Even with that some of the pilots repeated requests to verify those orders. Finally the president himself had to yell into the mike, repeating the same words Zetter had used.

Blair thought about how clinical and detached those words were. Target-rich environment.

Enemy combatants.

No civilians.

Zetter was, finally, with the program. Finally getting it right, but it was still so insanely wrong.

On the screen, one by one the helicopters began to fire on the crowds.

General Armistad Burroughs growled, “All pilots, you are cleared to deploy all weapons. Deploy all rockets, all missiles.”

Once more there was a lag in obeying those orders.

Once more the president had to repeat the orders.

And once more the helicopters obeyed, one by one, slowly at first, and then with the kind of wild aggression Blair knew was only born from panic and despair.

The helicopters rained fire down on the road. Rockets struck pockets of shambling dead and exploded like parodies of big-budget movie special effects. In the movies, though, people flew away from explosions, pulled by wires or digitally added as computer graphics. Here, the people burst apart in ragged pieces that lacked art or style. And though real explosions are always less dynamic than movie special effects, they were far more horrible in their understated destruction.

Automobile gas tanks exploded one after the other, lifting the tail ends of Toyotas and Fords and Coopers and Hyundais with equal indifference and efficiency. Chain guns stitched endless lines of holes along pavements, through automobile skin, and through flesh and bone. The living and the living dead crumpled under the cudgel blows of rapid-fire lead. The living died and stayed down. The dead, those with no traumatic damage to their brains or brain stems, rose again; less whole, less human-looking, but infinitely more monstrous. The living tried to hide from the dead and from the rain of fire; the dead were indifferent to it, walking or running or crawling after the fresh meat, stopping only when the spark of life was blown from their central nervous systems.

Blair and the president stood together, their eyes open and mouths slack at the hell unfolding on the screen.

Then Blair forced his mouth to speak. He turned to the Air Force general. “General Susco, where are we with the fuel-air bombs?”

“We have four MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones fitted out and on deck. We can have them in the air in—”

“ETA?” interrupted Blair. “What’s the flight time?”

Susco didn’t even pause. “Twenty-two minutes and change and that includes launch time.”

“Shit.”

“And we have four A-10 Thunderbolt II’s from the 104th Fighter Squadron at the Warfield Air National Guard Base in Maryland. Fires are lit and all they need is the word.”

Blair again touched the president. “Sir, we have to order them in
now
.”

The president’s entire attention was locked on the screen.

Blair wanted to punch him. He had never in his entire life wanted to beat anyone as badly or as brutally as he did this man. Before he even knew he was going to do it, he grabbed the president’s sleeve, spun him around, and backhanded him across the mouth. Blair was not a big man but there was so much rage, so much fear in every ounce of his body that the blow sent the president crashing sideways against the edge of the big table. Blood burst from torn lips.

And a split second later Blair was on the floor, his body exploding from sudden agony in his back and the after-impression of a Secret Service agent kidney-punching him. He was slammed to the carpet with a knee on his cheek and a pistol barrel screwed into his ear. Someone clicked cuffs onto his wrist, cinching them painfully tight.

“No …
no
!” bellowed someone, and through the pain Blair realized that it was the president’s voice. From the corner of his eye, past the knee of the Secret Service agent kneeling on his face, Blair could see an agent and General Burroughs helping the president to his feet. Blood streamed down onto the president’s chest, staining his white shirt, dripping onto his shoes. “Leave him alone, goddamn it. Let him up. I am ordering you to uncuff him and let him up. Christ, someone get me a cloth.”

The agents hauled Blair roughly to his feet and took the cuffs off, but they weren’t gentle with either task. He stood there, legs weak and trembling, his right hand beginning to swell from where his knuckles clipped the president’s cheek. The president gave him a look of savage intensity, but for the first time since the crisis began there was that old spark in POTUS’s eyes. That old fire. The fuck-you blaze that had won him the primaries and enabled him to bully his way through brutal debates and a nail-biter of an election. The fires that had allowed this man to play hardball with Iran and North Korea, to refuse to be bent over a barrel by the Chinese.

This was his president.

The president pointed a finger at General Susco. “Scramble the jets. Launch the drones.
Stop
this.”

The general began shouting orders into a phone.

Blair sagged with relief and fatigue.

But then the president grabbed a fistful of his necktie and pulled Blair so close they were breathing the same air. Secret Service men closed in on both sides but the president growled them back. He tightened his hold on Blair and in the coldest, most dangerous voice Blair had ever heard the president use, said, “Call Sam Imura and tell him to get me those flash drives.
Now
.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

“This does not look good,” said Trout. Beside him, Dez simply shook her head.

They stared out the window, stunned, mystified, and deeply frightened by what they saw. The soldiers were scrambling to get into their gear and climb into vehicles. The roads leading away from the school were choked with Humvees and Strykers and an assortment of smaller and lighter armored vehicles. Then one of the big eight-wheeled M1135 Stryker Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconnaissance Vehicles rumbled through the gates, the decks crowded with armed men in hazmat suits. Its fifteen-ton mass made the windows rattle.

“Damn, it looks like they’re all going,” said Dez.

She snatched up the walkie-talkie and tried to raise General Zetter, but all she got was static. Trout tried the sat phone, and it was as dead as it had been all night.

“Something really bad’s happening,” muttered Dez.

Then the whole building seemed to rumble and they craned their necks to look up. A phalanx of helicopters flew over. Black Hawks and Apaches.

Trout counted thirty of them before the rain obscured his vision.

They were not coming to attack the school. They were not headed toward the center of Stebbins. They were all headed northwest.

Toward Bordentown.

Toward the edge of the Q-zone.

“Oh shit,” said Dez.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

TOWN OF STEBBINS

TWO MILES INSIDE THE Q-ZONE

Boxer turned off the farm roads and drove along the stretch of Mason Street, heading toward the center of Stebbins. According to the GPS, they needed to turn onto Doll Factory Road, and then veer off of that to follow a secondary road to the Stebbins Little School. The rain slowed to a desultory drizzle for a few minutes, but the thunder was closer and louder, and the lightning flashed like artillery fire.

“What’s that?” asked Gypsy, leaning forward from the backseat to point at something on the road ahead.

Boxer slowed as they approached a pair of wrecked cars that were little more than burned-out shells. The blacktop around the vehicles was littered with shell casings. Sam Imura rolled down his window to get a better look. A hunting rifle lay on the hood of one car. Beside it, its shape slowly distorting to pulp in the rain, was a box of .30-30 cartridges. A second gun, a military M4, lay sideways across the yellow line down the center of the two-lane. Near it was a Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap, and a dozen feet away was a blue wool women’s sweater.

“No bodies,” murmured Shortstop.

No one commented on that.

“Keep going,” said Sam, and Boxer gave the wrecks a wide berth.

They passed other cars, and once they saw a big eighteen-wheel Peterbilt that had gone off the highway and smashed its way through the young maples that grew wild beside the road, until it crashed itself to silence against a massive old oak. The driver’s door stood open, the cab empty.

And that was the pattern of it. Wrecked cars and trucks with open doors and broken windows, houses and buildings with doors standing ajar, and miscellaneous debris, but no trace at all of the people of the destroyed little town.

No living people.

Several times they found bodies sprawled haphazardly on the road, on the verge, on porch steps, in parking lots. Every single one of them showed evidence of traumatic injury to their heads. A few lay with their heads hacked off.

“Somebody put up a hell of a fight,” said Boxer.

“Doesn’t look like they won.”

They reached a deserted gas station and made the turn onto Doll Factory.

And stopped before they went two blocks.

Slowly, all five of them got out of the Humvee and stood looking at the monstrous thing before them.

A Stryker armored combat vehicle sat at an angle in the middle of the street. It was a brute. Eight feet wide and twenty-two feet long, sitting on eight fat tires, with a big Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the top—the same model as the one mounted on the deck of their Humvee. Thousands of empty brass shell casings littered the top of the vehicle and their curved sides peeked out from puddles. At least three hundred bodies clogged the street, many of them civilians, but there were uniforms of local and state police and even some soldiers.

Dead.

All dead.

Sam had seen the Browning in action, had fired one himself. He could easily—too easily—visualize the moment of slaughter as the living dead shambled into the storm of lead.

But what puzzled Sam was how the soldiers lost this fight.

The Stryker was abandoned here in the rain, the gun silent.

How many of the dead had the Guardsmen faced? Had it been overwhelming odds? Had they run out of ammunition? Or had they been caught in one of those terrifying moments when a gun jams or reloading takes one second too long?

He would probably never know, but looking at the scene sent a chill up Sam’s spine. It felt like the icy breath exhaled against trembling flesh during a moment of precognition. Or, perhaps it was an icy touch not of revelation but of realization as he saw, here on this battleground street, what was coming. Soldiers were more than a match for the dead in any kind of fair fight. Even five to one, ten to one.

But there were at very least seven thousand infected in Stebbins, and possibly many more.

When a crowd attacks, the front ranks take the bullets so the ranks behind them can advance. Given sufficient numbers the defenders simply run out of time or ammunition or both, and the wave passes over them. It was something used on battlefields ever since armies went to war. The foot soldiers of Alexander and Napoleon knew it, the riders of Genghis Khan and Santa Ana, and the marching lines of the Romans and the Confederate boys in butternut brown. Cannon fodder. A forlorn hope.

Only here it was no more planned or orchestrated than the thousands of worker ants that die when the entire nest goes to war, or the millions that fall when locusts swarm. In the end, all that matters is that the main host survives. The hive.

This was what Sam was seeing, he was positive. This was the real terror of this infection. The parasitic impulse to procreate through infection and to sustain itself through feeding was matched with a ferocious aggression that had no parallel in nature because it was not natural. Volker had made this, building it on the bones of Cold War bioweapons madness.