Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (26 page)

And they died.

Feet pounded down the hallway and Trout turned to see a knot of adults racing toward him, guns and clubs in their hands. He saw them reach for the children and even though he hated himself for doing it, even though he knew it would earn him a sentence in hell, he yelled them back.

“They’re bitten!” he bellowed. “They’re infected.”

The adults stumbled to a halt, their fear and uncertainty warring with their basic humanity.

The little black girl with the pink clips had fallen down and she lay still and unmoving on the floor five feet away from Trout. Her wounds no longer bled, and as he stared the blood around the bite marks changed. At first the bright red seemed to fade to a paler pink, but that was an illusion created as thousands of tiny white worms seemed to explode within the mess. The process was so damned fast that it was like watching a movie speeded up. First there dots of white and then they expanded before his eyes before finally bursting open as worms. Then within seconds those newborn worms began seeding the blood with new eggs, which swelled and burst, continuing a cycle that seemed impossible. Except that it was going on, right there, right in front of his eyes. Volker’s monster at work.

The worms excreted an oily black substances whose nature Trout could not even guess, and soon the blood became as black as motor oil. Totally polluted, totally corrupted.

Then the little girl’s eyes opened.

She and Trout lay five feet apart. A child and a man. Both of them trapped inside a nightmare.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

TOWN OF STEBBINS

ONE MILE INSIDE THE Q-ZONE

Back in the Humvee, Sam took the radio booster unit, removed a small cable, and plugged it into his cell phone.

“I thought everything was jammed,” said Boxer.

“Special line,” explained Sam. “For emergencies. Have to keep the conversation short, though, because it’s not all that secure.”

Sam punched a number and was not surprised when it was answered halfway through the first ring.

“Are you inside?” asked Scott Blair. The connection was very bad, but workable.

“Affirmative,” said Sam, “and I have two things to report. First, there are definitely Zees at large within the area. Does that match your latest intel?”

Boxer mouthed the word “Zees.”

Blair said, “On-site command reports that the last Zees are being dealt with.”

“That sounds like the bullshit it is, sir,” observed Sam. “We found three without even looking. That tells me there are more, and probably a lot more. Between terrain and the storm, no ground search can make reliable claims.”

“For what it’s worth, even S.Z. agrees,” said Blair, careful not to name General Zetter over an open line. “He has requested ten thousand additional units be shipped to his warehouse. ETA two hours.”

Ten thousand new troops. Sam whistled. “Not soon enough,” he said. “And that brings me to the second thing. The checkpoint we passed was manned by a couple of kids who couldn’t keep anyone out of anywhere. S.Z.’s using two-man teams on the roads, and the roving patrols between checkpoints are a joke. They couldn’t keep kids out of a candy store. If the whole area hasn’t already been breached, then it’s a matter of time.”

Blair cursed.

“Listen to me,” said Sam, “I don’t know or care what you have to do to convince the Big Man that the current response is inadequate. Seems to me that everyone is proceeding like this thing is over, but it’s not going to take much for this thing to go into the shitter. If it helps any put me on the phone to the president.”

“It’s worth a try,” said Blair. “But now I have something to tell you. H.V. is dead.”

It took Sam a second. H.V.

Dr. Herman Volker.

“Ah … shit. Tell me he at least left the
accounts
.” He leaned on the word.

“That is a negative. Zero accounts.”

Sam watched lightning fork in the sky. “Where does that leave us?”

“With a mission change,” said Blair. “I need you to scrap the science trip and proceed to the secondary source. It’s all riding on that. Do whatever you have to do.”

The line went dead and Sam put the phone away. He told the others what Blair had said, and explained that the secondary source of Volker’s information was in the possession of Billy Trout.

“Which means we have to infiltrate a school full of scared kids and force this Trout guy to pony up the flash drives?” asked Boxer.

“In a nutshell.”

No one looked happy.

“I volunteered for this gig, boss,” said Boxer, “but I didn’t sign on to kill civilians, and I sure as shit won’t cut my way through a bunch of kids.”

Sam Imura said nothing. Around them, the storm slapped against the windows of the Humvee and the night seemed to go several shades darker.

Gypsy very quietly said, “If this thing gets out of the Q-zone it’s game over for the whole world. That’s not trash talk, Boxer. That’s not a bad line from a monster movie. That’s real shit and it’s what we’re here to stop. I don’t want to hurt anyone but bad guys, either, but if it’s a few civilians versus the rest of the fucking world … I mean, c’mon, is that even a discussion?”

No one answered that, not even Boxer.

“C’mon,” said Sam, “let’s go hunting.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Dez Fox knew she was losing it.

Or maybe she had already lost it.

She knew that as certainly as she knew that she should not—should absolutely not—climb out of the window of the Stebbins Little School. All she had to do was close the window. Close it, lock it. Then close and lock the door to that room.

That was all.

Something simple.

A smart and very sane choice.

Which she did not make.

Instead she hooked a leg over the sill, shifted her buttocks onto the ledge, ducked her head out of the dry room and into the rain. Hands reached out of the storm to claw at her. Fingers that were withered to black claws by heat. Soot-stained teeth clacked together as the dead came for her.

Behind her, Billy Trout was screaming her name.

“Fuck you!” she growled.

Dez was never sure if she meant that for Billy or for the dead.

It didn’t matter.

Her mind was filled with the immediate images of those children.
Her
children. The little ones under her protection. Bitten. Infected. Doomed.

She jammed the barrel of the Glock against a charred forehead and fired.

Did it again to another infected.

Two of the dead fell back, their suddenly limp bodies collapsing against the other zombies, hampering them, tangling up with them.

Dez jumped down, using the pistol to smash aside the reaching hands. She kicked at wobbly legs, shattering bones, causing jagged splinters of white to rip through the blackened skin. She fired and fired. Every shot was point-blank.

Every bullet hit a face, a forehead, a temple.

Every hollow-point round did what it was manufactured to do. It expanded and exploded through the brain matter. Blowing out the backs of skulls, spattering the other dead with pieces of bone and brain. More than once the bullets, fired from so close, punched through one skull and then struck another.

She fired every round in the magazine. Released it, let it fall, swept another magazine from her belt, slapped it into place. The process was absolutely automatic, as orderly and efficient as the functions of a machine. A robot.

The dead kept coming out of the rain.

Ten of them.

Fifteen.

Thirty.

The gun was heavy in her hands, the recoil sending jolts of pain into her palms and wrists, her trigger finger burning with overuse, her skin tingling with powder burns.

When she had come leaping out of the window Dez had been screaming. A primal war cry, something like a cave woman might have bellowed as predatory animals stalked toward her own mewling children in the dark of a prehistoric night. But as she fired and fired, the scream burned away, leaving only the rasp of her panting breath and the thunder of her gun. She could feel her face lose expression. It wasn’t a calmness settling in her muscles. It was a deadness, a nothingness.

The dead wore no expressions either, and the battle became strangely dreamlike.

Dez dropped an empty magazine and fished for her last one.

And did not find it.

Suddenly the deadness was gone.

Panic returned in a terrible rush as she realized that she had miscounted the number of magazines she’d carried. That she’d used every last bullet.

There were at least a dozen of the dead still on their feet, and four or five more crawling along, trailing broken legs behind them.

She turned toward the school and with a cry of horror realized that somehow she had moved away from it, that she had walked into the schoolyard, leaving the building fifty yards behind her.

She was trapped out in the storm, surrounded by the dead, and there was not even a bullet left to take her own life.

The dead closed around her.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

STEBBINS–FAYETTE COUNTY LINE

EAST OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS

Ross Cruickshank staggered away from his burning car and ran for the woods. Steam rose from his clothes and he could feel a dangerous heat spreading on his skin. His mind was filled with mad images that were fractured and strange. Pale-faced people with black mouths. Blood-splattered people reeling out of the storm and throwing themselves at the crowd that stood watching in numb horror as helicopters fired on the lines of stopped cars. And then something else.

A screech from above the dark clouds.

Streaks of bright yellow light.

And then fire.

Fire.

Everywhere.

Cars leapt into the air and exploded.

People ran screaming, their hair and clothes ablaze.

People flying apart; each separate piece of them igniting as the heat blooms spread out from the point of impact.

The shimmering wave of hot air moved across the road like an attacking mirage, surreal and deadly.

Ross was at the extreme edge of the blast zone. His car was more than two miles back from the Starbucks on Route 653, and until the blast he stood on the edge of the median, hands cupped around his eyes so he could see through the rain as he tried to make sense of what looked like a soccer riot there on a rural highway in Pennsylvania. The radio had been weird all night, with local news talking about virus outbreaks and rumors of people being killed in Stebbins.

Ross had never heard of Stebbins beyond it being a place on the map between his long drive from an uncle’s funeral in Akron to a friend’s wedding in Cape May, New Jersey. He’d taken the back roads because the news said the Pennsylvania turnpike was slowed to a crawl, even this late. Because of the storm and because of whatever the hell was happening in wherever the hell Stebbins was.

Then he hit the traffic jam on Route 653, totally blocked in, sitting there for forty minutes before finally getting out of the car to see what he could see. What he saw was the riot.

Or whatever it was.

Then the helicopters.

That made no sense to Ross.

Then the jets and the flashes of bright light.

And now he ran through the rain with steam hissing from his clothes and a mouth filled with hot ash and gritty debris. He coughed and gagged as he ran. He fell several times, dropping knees-first onto the highway, then falling off the asphalt into the rainwater that surged through the brimming run-off ditch. Falling into the cold water was like plunging into a river of knives. Ross screamed hoarsely, his burned throat seemingly filled with razor blades.

He scrambled up the other side and struggled weakly to his feet just as a second streak of fiery light arced out of the clouds and struck the line of stalled cars. Then Ross felt himself flying.

Flying.

He soared through the storm winds, wondering if this was real or a dream.

Ross did not remember landing.

His next conscious perception was pain.

And sickness.

He lay in the dark, legs and arms splayed, face turned to the sky as water filled his mouth. He coughed. Swallowed too much water and then rolled to his side and vomited. The insides of his mouth ached from the superheated air he’d inhaled and there was a burning line of scalded tissue running along the wall into his lungs, and down into his stomach. It hurt. And it itched.

He coughed again and spat something bitter and foul into the mud.

Ross pawed at the dribble on his lips and he thought, just for a strange little moment, that he could feel something wriggle between his fingertips. Something tiny. But the rain washed it away.

The itching in his throat continued.

Sickness sloshed like sewer water in his stomach.

He vomited again. And again, unsure of whether anything was coming up. It was too dark to see and his throat hurt too much to tell.

The darkness took him again.

When he was next aware of things, he was on his feet, walking. It wasn’t the median anymore, nor was it farmlands. When the lightning flashed it painted vertical lines all around him. Tree trunks. He was in the woods.

Ross did not know which woods. At night, in the dark, he hadn’t seen much of the landscape. This was rural Pennsylvania, though, and it was a green state. Lots of damn forests.

He knew, on some level, that he was in shock, and that he was hurt. Maybe badly hurt. But he didn’t seem able to care about it.

He did care about the sickness, though. His stomach felt like it was full of wriggling snakes, and his entire esophagus itched terribly. His skin did, too. He scratched his arms and chest, but it didn’t help; the itch was under the skin. Deep and painful.

I got to get home,
he thought.

And while he understood what that meant, it felt somehow irrational and stupid. Home was hundreds of miles away from here and he didn’t even have a car.

Why didn’t he have a car? he wondered, but he couldn’t answer that question. It was so hard to think clearly.