Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (3 page)

Lonnie knew that he was a dead man. Would be a dead man soon. The captain had told everyone in his platoon about the infection. About how it worked. About what it did.

About how there was nothing anyone could do.

Nothing except die.

And how fucked up was that? How crazy? How impossible?

His legs needed to stop moving, and he collapsed against the corner of a burned-out store at the corner of Tunnel Hill and Doll Factory Road. Across the street was the hulking mannequin factory that had given the road its name. The windows were smashed out, the parking lot littered with the blackened shells of cars and bodies. A car stood alone in the middle of the intersection, its radio playing.

He moved on, stumbling down the long blocks, splashing through puddles. Some were filled with dirty rainwater; some were viscous pools of dark red.

There were so many bodies. All of them sprawled in a sea of black blood. Thousands of shell casings stood like tiny islands. Weak sunshine and dying firelight gleamed on the metal and winked on the rippling surface of that dark lake. No wind stirred the surface, though. Lonnie knew that for sure, and it was one of the things that made dying feel worse, more deeply terrifying.

The black blood was alive with worms. Tiny, white, threadlike. So small that they looked like thin slices carved from grains of rice. But there were so many of them.

From where he stood, Lonnie couldn’t see the worms, but he knew they were there. The worms were everywhere.

Everywhere.

He could feel them.

On him.

In him.

Wriggling through the ragged lips of the bite on his arm. Twisting and writhing inside the lines of blood that ran crookedly down his body.

He tried not to look at the wound. He could not bear to see the things that moved inside it, around it.

He could feel that wound, though. And even that was wrong.

The bite was deep. Skin and muscle were torn. It should hurt.

It should be screaming at him with the voices of all those torn nerve endings.

Instead it was nearly silent.

Cold.

Distant.

As if the skin around that bite was no longer connected to him. No longer belonged to him. As if it was on him but not of him.

Cold emptiness ran outward from the wound, tunneling through his body like threads of ice. Every minute he felt more of the cold and less of the warmth he needed to feel. With every step he knew that his desperate heart, his pounding heart, was pumping that infection throughout his body. Cold blossomed like small, ugly flowers all over him. Taking him away, stealing his awareness so that he wasn’t even sure he could feel himself dying.

Would he slip away completely and not be aware of it?

The captain had said something about that. And that guy on the radio, the reporter trapped inside the Stebbins Little School. What was his name? Billy Trout? He’d said something scary. Something that was crazy wrong.

That the self—the consciousness, the personality, the everything—of the victim didn’t die with the body. Instead it would be there. Hovering, floating, aware but no longer in control of the meat and bone that had been its home.

“Please,” said Lonnie, asking of the day. Of the moment. Of anyone or anything that could listen. “Please…”

He did not want to die like this. He didn’t want to become something sick and twisted. He didn’t want to be a ghost haunting that stolen home of flesh and blood.

Above him, somewhere up there, hidden by the buildings, he could hear helicopters. Black Hawks. Vipers. Apaches.

And way above them, the growl of jets carrying fuel-air bombs, waiting to turn the whole place, the whole town, into hot ash.

Forty minutes ago Lonnie Silk would have screamed and run at the thought of that fiery response to the plague.

Now he looked to the heavens, and prayed for it.

It was better to burn on earth than be damned here. Hell here, heaven later?

“Please,” he said to the sounds of salvation that flew in formation above the storm clouds. “Please.”

But there was no one and nothing to help him.

Lonnie turned and headed along a side street toward the edge of town.

Trying to go home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Scott Blair, the national security advisor, wanted a drink so bad his skin ached. He was not normally a drinking man. A few martinis at a State Department dinner, a beer after eighteen holes. But now he wanted to crawl into a closet with a bottle of bourbon and chug the entire thing.

Instead he opened a drawer, removed a bottle of Tums E-X, shook ten of them into his palm, and them shoved the entire handful into his mouth.

Everything was spinning. His head, the room, the media, and maybe the world.

The actual world.

All because of a tiny shithole town in an inbred part of Pennsylvania no one gave a damn about. Not in any strategic sense.

The devil is off the chain.

That was how it started. For Blair and for everyone.

The director of Central Intelligence called the president to forward an urgent message from a nonentity named Oscar Price, a CIA handler whose only job it was to babysit retired Soviet defectors. How hard could it be to keep tabs on a bunch of old men? Instead, one of Price’s charges, Dr. Herman Volker, a former Cold War scientist, had taken an old and classified bit of science and turned it into what could only be described as a “doomsday weapon.”

Doomsday.

There was a time in Blair’s life when that concept was a ludicrous abstraction. A scenario to be considered with no more reality than something cooked up by a Dungeons & Dragons games master.

Except now this wasn’t a role-playing game for nerds. It was the most important issue to ever cross Blair’s desk. Perhaps the most important issue to ever cross the desk to fall under the umbrella of “national security.”

A doomsday weapon. Conceived by devious minds, funded by a desperate government, constructed in covert labs, and then brought to America by a defector who was long past the point of relevance.

And given a name that was far too appropriate.

Lucifer.

Blair wondered if that kind of name was too close to actually tempting fate. It felt like a challenge. Or an invitation.

All Price had to do was keep the old prick out of trouble until old age or the grace of a just God killed the son of a bitch.

But then that message came in.

The devil was off the chain.

That was how it started. A flurry of phone calls, teams of investigators put into the field, and the machinery of control and containment put into play. Except that nothing was controlled, and Blair did not share the president’s confidence in General Zetter that this thing was contained.

His desk was littered with intelligence reports. The latest on the storm. Satellite pictures and thermal scans of Stebbins County. Casualty estimates. And projections of how bad this could get if even a single infected person made it past the Q-zone. This wasn’t swine flu or bird flu or any other damn flu. It was a genetically engineered bioweapon driven by parasitic urges that were a million times more immediate and aggressive than those of a virus, though equally as encompassing and indifferent to suffering. Every infected person became a violent vector. Everyone exposed to the black blood was likely to become infected, even if they were not bitten. The larvae in the infected blood clung to the skin and would find an opening. Any opening. A scratch would do it.

There were response protocols. Of course there were. Politics floated on a sea of paper, so there were reports for everything. There were reams of notes on the Lucifer program. Tens of thousands of pages. And right now virologists and microbiologists and parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, and over a dozen bioweapons labs were poring over those protocols and the accompanying scientific research records. The protocols prepared after Volker’s defection were very specific. Coldly alarming, detailing in precise terms the consequences of inaction or insufficient action.

There was, in fact, only one possible outcome of a Lucifer outbreak.

Doomsday was no longer an abstraction.

Blair made a series of phone calls to get the latest on the hunt for Volker. With each call his heart sank lower in his chest.

The bastard had vanished. He’d walked out of his house, got in his car, and disappeared from the face of the earth, taking with him the greatest hopes of understanding his variation of the pathogen. Lucifer 113, the version loose in Stebbins, did not precisely match the profiles of the old Cold War version. It was much faster, much more aggressive, and the reanimation of the “dead” victims took place in seconds.

Seconds.

It would mean that in any confrontation with a group of infected, the newly bitten victim would become an aggressive vector—a combatant, in a twisted way—while the fight still raged. Apart from the obvious tactical disadvantages, that scenario created a devastating psychological component. When soldiers would be required to suddenly fire upon their fellow soldiers, doubt and hesitation would be born. And many more would die.

It was a nightmare.

It was surreal.

His secretary tapped on the door, poked her head in, and waggled a sheaf of papers at him. “Mr. Blair? The speechwriters have a draft of POTUS’s address. They want you to take a look at it.”

“Good, let me see it.”

She crossed to his desk and handed him the speech. “This is unusual. Asking for your input on a speech.”

“‘Usual’ was last week, Cindy.” He bent over the speech.

But Cindy lingered. “Sir … the word is that they stopped this thing. That’s true, right? I mean, this is just winding down now?”

Blair raised his head and looked at her for a long time, saying nothing. She finally retreated from him and fled. He wished he had something comforting to say to Cindy. However, he liked the woman and didn’t want to lie to her.

Blair read through the speech, making disgusted sounds at the end of nearly every paragraph. The speech—written by well-intentioned people who lacked a clear perspective on the problem—took the wrong tack, focusing on a response to Billy Trout’s impassioned and ill-considered Internet tirade. Blair felt the president needed to go in a radically different direction. And not only in terms of the speech. General Zetter in Pennsylvania kept trying to convince the president that the devil was
back
on the leash, that the situation was contained. Which, as Blair viewed it, was a criminally distorted view of the facts. He grabbed a red pencil and began hastily redrafting it.

CHAPTER NINE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Billy Trout went to the auditorium to find his camera. It lay on its side among the debris. Less than an hour ago the big multipane windows that lined the east wall had been obliterated by machine-gun fire as attack helicopters fired on the school.

Trout looked at the damage and shivered.

Tens of thousands of rounds had torn the window frames apart, showering the big hall with millions of fragments of glittering glass and jagged wood. The bullets had carved away at the bricks, leaving a gaping maw through which cold winds blew the relentless rain.

The kids were all gone now, moved to other rooms so their wounds could be tended to. It was a freak of happenstance—the only real luck Trout could remember in that long, bad day—that none of these kids had been shot. He couldn’t even work out a scenario that explained it. A quirk of physics, a bizarre collision of angle, the storm winds, uncertain targeting, the slanted floor with its rows of seats, and who knew what else.

But the kids were alive.

Not okay, not all right. Merely alive.

Trout skirted the main floor, which was nothing but bullet-pocked detritus, and made his way to the stage, where he’d left his camera and satellite phone. They were beaded with rain, but when he tested them they still worked.

Another stroke of luck, and it made him wonder about the perversity of whatever gods there were that small luck was afforded them while on the whole the fortunes of Stebbins County seemed to have gone bad in the worst possible way.

Shaking his head, he took his gear backstage and found a small office with a desk. Trout cleaned the camera lens, wiped off every last trace of moisture, and set the camera’s tripod on the desk. He tested the mike and the signal.

Then he called Goat to make sure that this message would go out as smoothly as the others. The satellite phone was routed directly to Goat’s Skype account.

The phone rang and rang.

Goat never answered.

Trout checked all of the connections. Everything seemed to be in order.

He called again.

Nothing, just the meaningless ring with no answer.

Screw it,
he thought. He’d record an update anyway and send it to Goat. Maybe his friend was ordering a refill at that nice, warm, safe goddamn Starbucks. Or he was in the nice, warm, safe bathroom taking a leak.

“I am going to let Dez kick your bony ass,” Trout promised as he clipped on his lavaliere mike. He hit the record button and set himself in front of the camera.

“This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse,” he began, then shook his head. “I know how that must sound. If you’re anywhere but here it’s probably pretentious and corny. But not from where I’m sitting. Right now I’m in a small office near where the military fired on six hundred children a few minutes ago. Since then we’ve reached a kind of détente with the National Guard. They offered us a deal. We had to gather all of the sick and wounded people—anyone who showed any signs of infection from Lucifer 113—and we had to take them outside. That’s right, out where the monsters are. And we had to leave them there. Men and women, and children.” He paused and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Children. I … still can’t believe that we did it. Does that make me a war criminal, too? Did I help staunch the spread of a deadly pathogen or did I participate in a heinous act of brutality. I honestly don’t know. I don’t know.”