Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (27 page)

The ground began to slant downward and he followed it because it was so much easier than climbing uphill. He staggered along, going in and out of awareness.

Then his foot caught on an exposed root and Ross was falling, falling.

He felt himself hit the ground chest-first, the shock driving the air out of his lungs, and then as he fell face-forward into the mud there was sharp metallic
snap
and a white-hot explosion of pain on both sides of his face. He could feel something like knives punching in through his jaw and cheeks and temples. Broken bits of teeth filled his mouth and he tried to spit them out so he could scream. But he could not scream. Not the way he wanted to, not the way he needed to. The teeth held his jaws shut, locked. Trapped.

Ross Cruickshank lay there in the dark with a heavy-grade steel bear trap locked around his face, the teeth buried deep, a chain anchoring it to the trunk of a tree.

It took nearly an hour for him to die from blood loss, shock, and burns.

It took less than a minute for him to come back.

But all through that night and for all the nights and days to follow, Ross lay facedown in the forest, caught in the jaws of the trap, chained to the tree, unable to rise, unable to hunt, unable to do anything about the awful, gnawing hunger.

All he could do was lay there and moan.

And rot.

EAST OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS

Deborah Varas drove like hell.

And hell itself seemed to follow.

Mushroom clouds of burning gas billowed into the air, and the trees along both sides of the road burned like candles.

Her husband, Roger, was a silent, twitching hulk in the seat next to her. She tried not to look at him, tried not to smell the cooked meat stink of him. He’d stood between her and the first blast of superheated air. She would remember how it looked as he seemed to rise into the air, arms out to his side as if crucified against the night. And then flew back against her and they both went tumbling and crashing into the watery mud beside the road.

It was the mud that saved them, of that Deborah had no doubt.

If they were, in fact, safe.

It had been a screaming hell to pull him out of the mud and to support him as they staggered toward their car. The doors were still open from when they’d gotten out to see what was wrong, and Deborah pushed him in. She didn’t dare pull the seat belt around him. Too much of him looked blistered.

Instead she limped around to the driver’s side, got in, slammed her door, cut the wheel, and tore off another car’s bumper as she broke out of the line of stopped cars. She hit the gas hard to give the car enough momentum to fly across the drainage ditch. Even then the rear wheels hit the lip and for a moment Deborah thought the car would slide backward into the water. But the muscular front wheels somehow found purchase in the mud and the car lurched forward onto the median. She cut across, weaving around staggering survivors who were all trying to flee the blast, and then she hit the opposite lane, fishtailed around, straightened, and bore down to the west. The speedometer climbed to sixty and then eighty, and after that she stopped looking.

Deborah had no idea what had happened. The stalled cars and then something that looked like a riot, but it was half a mile from where she and Roger stood. It looked, though, as if whatever the commotion was it was coming their way, but then the world seemed to explode. She wondered about that, and whether she should be far more upset than she was. Shock. It was shock.

I’m in shock.

It was a strange thought to have. Like realizing you’re drunk. You know it, but can’t really take control of body or mouth or anything. Like being a passenger in a hijacked car.

I’m in shock.

She knew it to be true, but she didn’t know what to do or how to even react to that truth.

As she drove, she tried to work saliva into her mouth to clear away the awful taste. When the heat wave hit them, she’d taken a mouthful of ash and hot dust. She wasn’t badly burned—no worse than eating soup that was too hot—but the ash had a terrible taste. Sour and nasty.

And it itched something terrible.

Then she scolded herself for worrying about that when her husband was in such agony. She had to get him to a doctor. To a hospital.

Deborah fished for her cell phone, but there was no signal. None.

She turned the radio on, but the only station she could find was a conspiracy theory talk show. She switched it off.

Tears ran down her face as she drove.

Three times she saw flashing red and blue police lights, but they were on some other road, parallel to where she was, and far away. Heading toward the blast. And she did not want to go back there for anything. Deborah didn’t know if it was some terrorist thing or something equally horrifying, but she wanted no part of it.

In the darkness beside her, Roger moaned and shifted. She touched him as gently as she could, and he didn’t hiss or jerk away. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as he looked, she thought, praying that she was right.

“Roger?” she asked. “Hold on, baby, we’re going to the hospital.”

He moaned softly. An inarticulate sound. Like a dreaming person might make.

He pawed for her hand, though, and she let him take it.

“It’s okay, honey, we’ll get this taken care of.”

Roger kissed her hand, and his tenderness, even this deep into the horrors of his own pain came close to breaking her heart. Fresh tears filled her eyes as she spoke soothing words to him. Meaningless words, more a sound of comfort than any promises she knew she could keep. The world beyond the windshield was wet and vast and dark and she had no idea where the closest hospital was.

She drove on, faster than anything that was safe or sane.

Roger put her fingertips in his mouth. Kissed them and …

Licked them?

It was such a strange thing. Like he was trying to nurse on her fingers, the way a child would at her breast. God, was he that damaged? Was he that far gone that he was reduced to a childlike state? An infantile state?

“Oh, Roger…”

A heartbeat later she screamed as Roger bit down on her fingers.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Dez Fox knew that she should scream.

A scream would be good. It would punctuate this moment, seal it, send it into eternity.

People were supposed to scream when they died.

Especially when they died like this, trapped inside a nightmare.

Yet when she opened her mouth she said, “JT.”

In her ears the name sounded like “Daddy.”

It meant the same thing to her.

The dead shuffled forward, stumbling over the sprawled limbs of their dead companions. Some of them tripped and fell, but they got up again, mindless of cracked kneecaps and fractured wrists from their collisions with the unforgiving ground.

Dez backed away, but she knew that she had nowhere to run. There were zombies between her and the school. The lighted window was fifty yards away. It might have been a window on the face of the moon for all that it mattered to her.

She saw figures moving inside. Teachers, parents. Maybe even Billy.

It didn’t matter.

“JT,” she said.

And as if in answer to her speaking that name she thought she heard his voice.

This isn’t done, girl.

“JT…?”

Desdemona, you listen to me. You’re a cop and you’re a good one, but you’re not acting like one now.

“I … I can’t … I don’t…”

The closest of the infected were a dozen feet away. In four steps they would have her.

Four.

What about the kids, Dez?
Asked JT.
What about the little ones?

The school was a million miles away.

“I let them die.”

Damn it, girl, don’t give me that crap. It’s not your fault some damn fool opened that window.

Three steps. She could smell their burned flesh.

“I let them die, JT. I should have been there. I should have been smarter.”

You can’t unring that bell, girl,
he said sternly, his voice as clear as if he stood right beside her.
You can’t undo that. But you can damn well save the rest of them.

“No … I can’t…”

You can. That’s your job. Saving them is why you became a cop. Saving them is what’s kept you alive all these years, and you know it.

Two steps.

“JT … how can I do this?”

You know how.

“I don’t,” she said, but even as she said it her hands touched her belt, feeling the things clipped to it. The pouches with the handcuffs. The empty slots for magazines. The pepper spray.

Nothing there.

No help.

The stun gun.

No use against the dead. They didn’t react to pain.

Damn it, Dez. Be smarter than that,
growled JT.

Stun gun.

The dead were driven by parasites. That’s what Billy had told her.

The parasites shut off most of the body’s functions except a little respiration, a little blood flow, and the nerves needed for standing, moving, grabbing, biting, swallowing.

Nerves.

Nerves.

Nerve conduction.

The hands touched her sleeves, her shoulders, her breasts, her face.

And then her hand drew the Taser.

Nerve conduction.

She heard JT laugh quietly.
There you go. You’re not the fastest, girl, we both know that, but damn if you don’t always get there in the end.

The weapon came free of its holster. The Nova SP-5.

The stun gun had a five-shot magazine.

Open a door and go home,
said JT.

She brought the weapon up, activating the laser site. Found a target a yard from her. Fired.

The flachettes whipped through the air and struck the dead flesh high on the chest. The charge surged through the wires and instantly the infected body arched back, all four limbs trembling like a puppet hanging in a stiff wind. The eyes bulged wide and the mouth opened and it tried to scream.

Scream.

Oh God … it actually tried to scream.

Two other infected were behind it, pressed against it to try and get to her. The rain and the intensity of the charge flashed from one to the other and the three of them were suddenly falling.

Falling.

Opening a hole in the wall of charred flesh.

Dez released the first cartridge and chambered the second, moving now, running through that hole. She fired again and a woman with no eyes suddenly juddered to a stop and then fell away, a whistling shriek rising from between her burned lips.

The scream was the first human sound any of these monsters had made.

It chilled Dez Fox all the way to the core of her soul.

The screams were so—
normal.
God … did that mean the people who had been in those bodies before the infection took over were still in there?

Don’t think about it,
bellowed JT.
Run. Run!

She ran.

She released the second cartridge. Fired a third, heard another tearing scream of human pain.

The zombies tried to close in on her, but she smashed into them, driven now by panic as much as need. She elbowed them and jump-kicked them in the stomachs, and rammed them with her shoulders.

Two shots left and twenty yards to go.

The air around here was suddenly split apart by thunder.

Small thunder. Not from the sky but from …

Gunfire rippled from the windows of the school.

All of the windows. A dozen barrels cracked. Four of the zombies went down. Two stayed down, two others began instantly to climb back to their feet, their bodies absorbing anything except headshots.

“Dez!” called a voice, and this time it wasn’t the ghost of JT Hammond hollering in her fractured mind. It was Billy Trout. “Run! The side door. Go … go …
go
!”

She saw it then, the staff entrance door stood ajar and five men were clustered there. Piper was among them, a shotgun spitting fire in his hands.

Dez fired her fourth shot and a man she recognized—Albert Thomas, who owned a tattoo parlor on Buckley Road—staggered back, a human cry torn from his dead throat. It sounded like Albert, too. But there was a quality to it, a rising note of panic as if in that one instant the man she knew was able to give voice to all the horrors that had been done to him. And it was then, with perfect and dreadful clarity, that Dez Fox realized the true and full extent of what Dr. Volker had unleashed on humanity.

Lucifer 113 was intended to make Homer Gibbon be aware of every moment, every sensation of what was happening to him as his dead body rotted in a coffin and was consumed by maggots. This was a punishment intended for a serial killer to make him pay for what he had done to the innocent.

And now it was doing that to every single infected person.

They were all in there. Their consciousness trapped in the hijacked bodies. Aware, connected to nerve endings, and totally unable to prevent their stolen flesh from committing unspeakable things.

Only in the moment of intense electric shock from the stun gun were those people able to give voice, to cry out. For mercy. For forgiveness. For release.

As she ran, Dez thought about the effect that bullets had. It ended the unnatural life of the living dead.

Did it also end their torment?

Was a bullet to the brain a kindness?

It was so twisted and perverse a concept that even as she ran she nearly doubled over and vomited.

There was one last zombie between her and the door, but it was in a direct line between her and the men with guns. She had one charge left in her gun. Could she use it, knowing this ugly truth? Could she bear to hear that scream again, knowing that she couldn’t then end the suffering of the person trapped inside the dead flesh?

It came at her, mouth wide to bite, hands reaching to grab.

She shot it in the throat, hoping to drop it without the scream.