Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (28 page)

But it screamed anyway.

It screamed like someone burning in the fires of hell itself.

The infected fell away and then human hands reached for her and pulled her inside the school and then slammed the door shut. Bodies thudded against the outside of the door and down the halls; echoing from the classrooms there was a last volley of gunfire.

Then three spaced shots from the hallway.

Dez knew what those shots meant.

Three shots for three small heads.

Followed by the sound of retching. And weeping.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

STEBBINS–FAYETTE COUNTY LINE

NORTH OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS

Dustin Lee Frye was making the slowest getaway he’d ever heard of.

It was driving him crazy.

Four hours ago a friend of his had dropped him at the parking lot of the Woodsman Rest, right off Route 381 in Fayette County. Dustin had crouched under a dark gray poncho in driving rain waiting for his ex-girlfriend’s new boy toy to come to work. The boyfriend, a shovel-jawed goon with little pig eyes, worked the night shift as bartender at the Rest, and that meant he’d be on until two a.m.

At ten minutes to eight, Shovel-jaw roared into the lot in his 1970 Mustang Boss 429. A perfectly restored, mint-condition classic muscle car. The Grabber green skin seemed to glow in the downspill of light from the sodium vapor bulbs arranged around the parking lot. Over two hundred thousand dollars worth of car, bought for the asshole by his daddy, who owned big chunks of logging and pulp all through Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Dustin didn’t think it was at all fair that the pea-brained mouth-breather should have his ex-girlfriend
and
one of the sweetest cars in the world. Actually, as Dustin saw it, he could keep the girl. She and Dustin had ended things badly. Harsh language was involved. So was a restraining order. Not the happiest times in his life.

She was elsewhere, probably fretting over what to do about the stretch marks now that Shovel-jaw had knocked her up.
If
the baby was even his. There had been one last bout of makeup sex with Dustin before everything went to shit, so the whole paternity thing was a dice-roll.

The car, though. Dustin didn’t want the Neanderthal to have the car.

It wasn’t fair.

The car was perfect. From tailpipe to headlights, it was the absolutely perfect car. And assholes should not be allowed to have perfect cars. Dustin was sure there was a law about that somewhere. Or ought to be.

So stealing the car, in Dustin’s view, was not so much a matter of committing a crime as it was serving the public welfare.

He waited for Shovel-jaw to park the car in his special extra-wide slot, lock it, give the creamy green hood its usual pat, and go into the hunters’ club to mix drinks for the other mouth-breathers. The parking lot was nearly deserted, though, because of Superstorm Zelda. A smarter person, Dustin mused, would have called out and stayed at home. But no one ever called this guy smart. Rich, yes. Obnoxious, to be sure. Smart? Not so much.

Dustin started to get up so he could boost the Mustang, but another car came crunching over the gravel. Two men got out and hurried through the rain to the restaurant. Then another came. And another. Then one of the cars left.

It was like that for hours. Despite everything that was happening in the skies and the world, the damned place was doing bang-up business. Dustin was afraid to leave his hiding spot for a minute, sure that someone would spot him and then there’d be real trouble.

Finally, well after one in the morning, the steady in-and-out flow dwindled and died. There was a protracted stillness and when it seemed apparent that the last drinkers inside were going to take it all the way to the bell, Dustin rose up quickly from his place of concealment beside the Dumpster and drifted around the perimeter of the parking lot to come up behind the Mustang. Dustin had a friend who boosted cars on a regular basis—not professionally, more of a hobby, but he was good at it—who’d lent him a slim-jim and a key gun. Dustin moved to the driver’s door, checked the lot again, eased the slim-jim from under the poncho and fed the thin strip of metal down between the glass and the door. Popping the lock was a breeze.

He shucked the poncho and slid behind the wheel, mindful to keep the rain off the leather seats. He chunked the door shut and fed the teeth of the key gun into the ignition.

The engine started at once.

And it started with a very loud, very distinctive growl. All of those horses under the hoods shouting at the storm.

Dustin had no idea if Shovel-jaw heard the car start. He didn’t wait to find out. He put the car in gear, spun the wheel, and kicked ten pounds of wet gravel at the back of the restaurant as he peeled out. As soon as he was out of the lot, he turned left and followed a couple of crooked feeder roads until one spilled him out onto 381, where he turned north to catch 653, and from there he planned to turn the car west and drive it until he figured out what tomorrow would look like.

But after he turned onto Route 653 and drove ten miles, crossing out of Fayette and cruising the outer edge of Stebbins County, things started to slide downhill.

First it was the rain.

The sky split apart with thunder and for a moment it seemed as if the clouds themselves were being ignited by the lightning. Flash after flash, boom after boom. It hurt his eyes and rattled the windows. And the rain that fell was so thick that the windshield wipers did exactly nothing. It slowed him to a nervous crawl. All he could make out were the taillights directly in front of him. Those lights rolled forward at barely over twenty miles an hour and it was like that for a long time. The rain did not let up once. Dustin had never seen rain like this before.

Then the car in front of him—an old Camry—slowed more and more.

It finally stopped, and after a long time, the driver shut his engine off.

The rain only began slackening after Dustin had been sitting there for ten more minutes. It was still coming down pretty steadily, but it wasn’t wrath of God rain. It wasn’t Noah’s ark rain.

The Camry up front didn’t move, though. The driver simply sat there.

Dustin didn’t dare toot his horn or make any kind of fuss. Not while driving a stolen car worth a couple hundred g’s. No, sir. That would be monumentally stupid.

So he waited.

And waited.

That’s when the thunder started again. And lightning.

Except that’s not what it was, and Dustin realized it by slow degrees as balls of yellow light lifted from over the horizon. He watched as the light illuminated the thousands of cars stalled in long lines ahead of him, and in the rearview he could see thousands more dwindling into the distance behind him.

Then he heard the screams and the gunfire. Dustin had seen every war film and action movie ever made. He knew the sound of heavy-caliber machine-gun fire.

“Holy shit,” he said aloud.

People were running up the road between the cars. Fleeing whatever the hell was happening. But also … fighting?

He leaned forward to peer out at the night.

Not a hundred feet away he saw a woman in a pretty autumn dress dive at a guy in coveralls, slam him against the fender of a Chevy Aveo and …

“Holy
shit
!” he cried as he saw blood shoot up from the man’s neck like water from a broken fountain.

Two men pulled open the front doors of an Expedition and dove in. Blood splashed the insides of the rear window. A teenager with one arm missing—
just fucking gone—
ran directly at the front of Dustin’s car and flung himself onto the hood, denting it, smearing it with blood.

“
Holy shit!”
screamed Dustin.

He put the car in reverse to get away as the one-armed teenager began pounding on the windshield, but the Mustang shot back only twenty inches before crunching into the front end of a Focus.

“Fuck you!” bellowed Dustin, both at the Focus and the insane teenager. He threw it into drive and rammed forward, crushing the grille against the Camry’s rear. Glass exploded and one of Dustin’s headlights went blind. Five minutes ago he would have been heartbroken if a road stone tore a fingernail-sized scratch on the Grabber Green hood. Now he rammed forward and back three times, accordianing the bumpers, screaming at the howling thing that still knelt on the hood and pounding one-handed on the glass. Then he had an opening, and he was out. He jerked left out of the lane and onto the shoulder, spilling the bloody teenager off with a bone-jarring crunch. Beside the shoulder was a drop-off that was filled with water and it looked like a death trap to Dustin. Behind him other cars were pulling out and blocking the route for a backing-up escape. A quarter mile ahead there was a wide pull-off. If he could get there, maybe he could find a way to cut across the median. The opposite lane was completely clear. Farther along the road he saw a guy on a motorcycle do exactly that. So Dustin shifted again and hit the gas, sending the big Mustang rocketing forward.

At that moment, there was the biggest explosion yet from over the hill. A massive fireball that seemed to lift the whole road up and drop it. Thousands of people fled from it, screaming and bleeding, chased by waves of heat that set their hair and clothes ablaze. Behind them, mixed in with them, attacking them as they ran were other people. Wild-eyed and bloody, with snapping teeth and grabbing hands. Some of them were on fire, too, but they didn’t seem to care about that. All they seemed to want—or seemed capable of wanting—were the people who ran from them.

Heat punched at the Mustang, blackening the green paint, covering the windshield with ash. And in one frozen moment, Dustin could see things in that ash. Tiny threadlike worms that wriggled as the hot wind slapped them against the glass. There were other things hitting the car, too. Pieces of charred meat. Pieces of broken bone and burning swatches of cloth.

Dustin’s mind absorbed all of that visual data in a microsecond, and then he drove the gas pedal to the floor and the Boss 429 engine hurled the Mustang at the crowd of living and dead.

By the time he hit the wall of them he was going fifty miles an hour.

Dustin felt himself rising from the seat. He felt the steering wheel hit him in the chest. Saw the windshield coming at him so fast.

So fast.

The fires and explosions, the rockets and bullets, the teeth and hands of the dead—none of that did any harm to Dustin Lee Frye.

In the end, it was the car that killed him.

SOUTH OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS

Major General Simeon Zetter got slowly out of his command vehicle and watched hell unfold. He and his aides were in the safe zone, outside of the blast area, well beyond the perimeter of violence that the satellites and surveillance helicopters determined enclosed all of the infection.

No one spoke.

No words really fit the moment.

During the drive here from the school, Zetter was absorbing the intel from FEMA, from the White House, and from other sources. Initial estimates of potential civilian casualties were staggering. Four thousand minimum.

Minimum.

More than that were expected.

More than that were likely, perhaps inevitable.

The fireballs from the fuel-air bombs rose like the pillars of hell, seeming to push back the storm. The heat was so intense that it turned the rain to steam.

Behind where he stood, the Black Hawks and Apaches were touching down in the parking lot of an abandoned drive-in movie theater. It had been dangerous bordering on foolhardy to have them in the air at all with a storm of this kind, and they’d lost one crew to a crash. Something he had not yet reported to the president. Now, with these bombs, there would be shockwaves that would endanger all the others.

He heard one of his aides say something to himself, and for a moment Zetter thought it was a prayer. It wasn’t. It was the thing that Oppenheimer had said when the first atom bomb was tested.

“I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.”

And while fuel-air bombs were non-nuclear, the point was eloquent. Zetter felt like striking the man, but hitting someone for speaking the truth was not the way to survive this moment.

In silence, he endured the rebuke implicit in that statement.

Destroyer of worlds.

Destroyer of lives.

So many people.

The outer edge of the heat wave rolled through the night toward them. It had been greatly weakened by distance and did little more than brush past his face and fill his mouth with a bitter taste. Zetter turned and discretely spat into the mud. Some of the others did, too. A few still wore their hazmat masks.

The heat blew past them and for a moment there was a deceptive stillness, a calm that told lies about the night. Then the rains began to fall again, and the storm winds blew, and the sounds of screams echoed through the night. Car horns blared, faint and muted.

“Sir,” said another aide, hurrying toward him from the communication truck, “you need to see this.”

His voice held a rising note of panic that made Zetter spin around and go running after him, with his other aides in tow. As he ran Zetter turned and spat again, trying to clear his mouth of the acrid, itchy dust from the shock wave.

He felt sick to his stomach, but he decided that it was the shock, the stress, the horror of it all.

In that, General Zetter was entirely wrong.

ACROSS THE FAYETTE COUNTY LINE, PENNSYLVANIA

They moved across the quarantine zone alone and in packs. In the ragged, bloody, and fire-blackened clothes of farmers and tourists, travelers and news reporters. A few wore National Guard BDUs. They moved together, weeping, crying out in unending pain from bites that had torn through skin and muscle, or from blistered burns that bubbled on skin that had been touched by the hellish heat.

They staggered away from the flaming pit where the Starbucks had been, and away from the blackened shells of their cars. They left behind friends and family members.

Those that could run, did.

The rest limped and shambled and crawled.