Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (40 page)

Behind the reporter a man and woman, both bleeding from several wounds, were shoving their children into their car. The children were screaming, and the woman clutched a small, limp child to her breast. The husband slammed the doors and hit the gas so hard the rear tires showered a dozen people with mud. A moment later there was a heavy crunch and then the reporter was running with the cameraman following. On the road a woman in a waitress uniform lay sprawled in the road as the taillights of the car dwindled in the rain.

“Are you seeing this?” cried the reporter. “That car just ran over a woman.”

“Is this shit real?” asked the roustabout again.

“It’s real,” said Rob.

“This is crazy,” said one of the jousters. “That’s close. That’s like fifteen miles from here.”

“I know,” Rob said and cast a troubled eye toward the door.

The groom said, “It doesn’t make any sense. What kind of virus makes people do this kind of thing?”

“Maybe it’s a—” but that was as far as Rob got. There was a series of loud pops and they all whirled toward the door. “What the hell?”

There was another wave of them. Sharper now, closer.

“Someone’s shooting.”

But it was more than that. Beneath and between the shots, wrapped inside the fist of the storm, there were screams.

Suddenly the whole bunch of them were scrambling up from the table and crowding through the door into the rainy darkness.

The shots were louder but sporadic. A handgun, thought Rob. Not a rifle. Not automatic gunfire.

They peered through the rain, trying to orient themselves.

“There!” cried the groom, pointing down the long, wide avenue of the jousting field. The colored banners whipped and popped in the gusting wind. The field was turning into a muddy lake. On the far side of the field the horses neighed and whinnied with anxiety.

Rob took a few tentative steps onto the field and for a few seconds he couldn’t see anything.

Then there were three more shots. Three muzzle flashes that created a brief strobe-effect that revealed struggling, staggering figures. The screams came from there, and Rob’s mouth opened in horror as he saw staff members from the fair fighting with dozens of people. Strangers. Someone was firing, but there was only one last hollow crack and the gun fell silent.

The screams increased.

Some of the men—the groom, the roustabout, and a few others—immediately began running toward the melee. They all had friends there.

But Rob caught the arm of the jouster.

“No,” he said urgently. “There’s too many.”

“Christ, we have to do something…”

“I know. Come on.”

Rob dragged him toward the prop shed, which was bolted to the side of the greenroom trailer. Rob fished the key from his pocket, jammed it into the padlock, threw the lock and chain into the mud, and yanked the doors open. With only a quick worried glance at the jouster, Rob began pulling items from the shed. He pressed a broadsword into the jouster’s hands and then, almost as an afterthought, pulled a rondache shield from the rack and handed it to him.

“The fuck, man,” growled the jouster, holding up the sword, “it’s not even sharp.”

“Yeah, but it’s fucking heavy.” He grabbed his own long-sword—an exquisite replica of the ninth-century Viking Sæbø sword—and another of the round shields. Then he and the jouster turned and began running.

Some of the strangers were sprinting or staggering across the field toward them. They howled like animals. Their bodies were pale and wrong, and some of them had terrible wounds on their faces and arms and throats.

“Jesus Christ!” cried the jouster as two of them closed on him, racing forward with waxy white fingers.

The jouster was frozen in shock and indecision, so Rob shouldered him out of the way. He smashed one of the strangers in the face with the shield and struck the other one across the face with the flat of his sword.

The blows were heavy, backed by a lot of muscle and mass, powered by fear and a surge of adrenaline. The strangers staggered, slipped in the mud, and fell.

And then they got back up again.

Rob blinked in confusion.

The strangers snarled, revealing teeth that were smeared with blood so dark it was almost black. Then they launched themselves at him.

Once more Rob swung the rondache at one of the strangers. The shield was made of leather-covered wood with plates of metal studded with nails. Although the swords were unsharpened, the shields had to be fully functional or the performers would be crippled if they failed to block. Rob drove the metal edge of the rondache into the biting mouth of the closest attacker, and suddenly black blood and pieces of teeth filled the air. The man went down, but he writhed in the mud, trying to get back to his feet. Rob pivoted and brought his sword around in an overhand cut that packed muscle and gravity into the blow. Even without a sharpened edge, the second man’s head burst apart, showering Rob and the jouster with brain matter and more of the black blood.

They reeled back, spitting out the blood, gagging at the horror of what had just happened.

Then they heard feet slopping in the mud and they turned to see a dozen of the strangers running toward them.

Rob and the jouster exchanged a brief look.

For years they’d played the roles of warriors—swordsmen and knights, Viking raiders, Roman soldiers, even pirates. They’d each fought in thousands of duels, and on their off days they fenced with their peers. They were superb swordsmen and each of them held weapons with which their hands and reflexes and minds were perfectly attuned.

So despite the absolute madness and unreality of this moment, deep in the hearts of each of them some ancient voice cried out a challenge. A warrior’s call to arms. A bellow that would not have been out of place on the medieval battlefields of feudal Europe. As they yelled, their mouths began to curl into fierce smiles as if remembering those ancient days of bloodshed and glory.

With swords in hand, thy rushed forward to meet the charge, hacking and smashing.

The crowd of zombies swept over them in seconds.

But oh, how glorious those seconds were.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Dez said, “What in the big green fuck was that all about?”

“Goat has the drives and I just told him that he needs to upload the contents and get them out.”

“I didn’t hear that,” said Dez.

“I did,” said Sam Imura. “And it was mighty damn clever. You think your friend understood what you were saying?”

“Positive.”

“Good.” He took the phone from Trout and removed the cable he’d jammed into it as soon as he realized who was on the other end of the call. The cable was plugged into a small computer strapped to Imura’s forearm, and the captain spent a few seconds tapping keys.

“What’s that?” asked Dez. “You running a trace?”

“Trying to. We already pinged the satellite Goat used earlier when he broadcast Billy’s messages from here. And…” His voice trailed off as he read the display. Then he snapped his fingers and one of his people hurried over with a different sat phone connected to a portable battery pack. Sam snatched the phone and made a call, which was answered immediately. “Sir … we may have caught a break. Goat Weinman is still alive and we’re reasonably sure he has the flash drives in his possession. The call was too short to get an exact fix on him. He’s in Pennsylvania, closing in on the suburbs of Pittsburgh. We need a team monitoring the frequency of his sat phone, and we need people watching the Net. Goat is going to upload videos of Homer Gibbon. Interviews. They should be large files, which means fairly long upload times. Once the first is up we need to capture his computer signature and backtrack him. He may try to upload the Volker files at the same time, so we have to put together a pattern search that includes as many keywords as we think might be in the Volker files. I suggest the Latin names of the parasites. They’re not likely to be in any other uploads tonight. Search on those and then feed that to the ground forces. We’ll need all local and state police in on that, too.” Sam listened for a few seconds, and then said, “No, sir, I don’t think that’s an option. The storm’s getting worse. There’s no way a chopper’s going up in this, which means that my team is too far away. I’m handing the football back to you.” He listened again. “That’s not how I see it, Scott. I do have my priorities straight. I’m not in a position to be of use in the manhunt, but there are other fights worth fighting.”

Trout thought he heard Blair yelling as Sam ended the call. The captain handed the sat phone back to his soldier.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve actually been a big help.”

“If it works out,” said Trout.

“Sure, if it works out.”

“Now what?” asked Dez bitterly. “You and your goon squad waltz off and leave us ass-deep in the alligator swamp?”

Sam smiled. He had a lot of very white teeth. “Actually, Officer Fox, I was rather hoping that I could help you get a few hundred kids the hell out of this particular ring of hell.”

Dez and Trout stared at him.

“What?” they asked in unison.

“You said that you wanted to load the buses and take the kids somewhere safe? Well, if you could use five very well-armed bodyguards, consider us part of
your
team.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

THE NORTHERN LEVEES

FAYETTE COUNTY

Jake DeGroot realized that he couldn’t hide in a wet hole all night.

They might find him.

The soldiers. And the …

He had no word for the other things. Things like the girls. Like his friends. Like Burl.

Just because they hadn’t found him so far didn’t meant they wouldn’t.

Or couldn’t.

He had no real idea what they could or couldn’t do.

He had to move. To get out of the hole.

Before that.

And before he froze to death.

Jake knew that it wasn’t really cold enough for that, but the water was cold enough to numb him. He remembered seeing something about hypothermia on an old episode of
Survivorman
. His teeth chattered constantly, shivers swept over him in waves, and he didn’t like the way his heart was beating. No, he didn’t like that one bit. He was a big man, and the last thing he needed now was a heart attack. Or slow feet because his nerves were in some kind of shock.

But leaving the pit … That was so scary. It made his balls want to climb up inside his body. It made him want to cry. Or scream.

Or go to sleep.

That was the other problem.

Between working hard all day yesterday and last night, and then lying here for hours in the cold, he was getting weirdly drowsy. He kept nodding off and then jerking awake when his face fell into the water.

“Got to get out of here.”

He didn’t know he was going to say it out loud until he’d said it. His voice sounded ridiculously loud and very strange. There was a sharp note of panic in his voice. A whine that was almost a sob.

He didn’t like that, either.

“I’m losing my shit here,” he told himself, trying to make his voice sound normal and reasonable. It didn’t.

The rain was heavy, relentless. The ditch was so completely filled that the whole area was becoming a small lake.

“You’re going to drown here, you dumb fuck.”

There was anger in his voice now. That was better.

Better.

Even so it took Jake another three minutes to will his right arm to rise out of the water. Not because it was so numb with cold—which it was—but because he was numb with terror. There was no light except what flashed across the sky, and all that showed him was water, mud, and the bodies left behind by the soldiers.

Burl.

“Move, goddamn it. Move, move, move, move.”

His right arm came up slowly, rising to the surface, then above it, and finally out toward the mud beyond the ditch. The rain immediately washed the mud from his hand, and when the next lightning flashed he was horrified to see how pale he was. Blue-white. Corpselike.

Like one of them.

“It’s the cold, asshole,” he told himself. “It’s just the cold.”

He reached for higher ground at the edge of the pit, but his fingers sank into the mud and found nothing to hold. He tried again and did nothing more than splash and stir the water in which he lay.

“No,” he said, and that note of panic was back in his voice, stronger and sharper than before. Jake tried it with both hands. Nothing. He tried to kick against the near edge of the ditch, but his feet sank to the ankles. It took real effort to pull his feet out again. The right one came first, plopping free of the mud, but as he pulled the left one out he felt his shoe slide over the bulb of his heel.

Then he heard the sound.

Off to his right, on the other side of Big Bird, his yellow front-end loader.

It was a splash, but it was too heavy to be rainwater.

He froze and listened.

Another splash.

And another.

Each one just a little louder and more distinct than the last. Coming closer to where he wallowed in the mud.

“Oh, Jesus…”

At the sound of his voice the sounds of splashing paused for one moment and then began again. Not faster, but faster. Coming around the end of Big Bird. Coming in his direction.

He heard the other sound then.

The moan.

Jake almost screamed, knowing it for what it was.

One of
them.

Stay or go, stay or go? He was trapped inside a bubble of indecision for a terrible long moment. Then the splashes got even louder, and suddenly Jake was moving. His whole body thrashed and twisted like a beached dolphin. He pawed at the mud and kicked and wormed his way up the edge of the pit.

Closer and closer. The moan louder. A single voice raised in a plaintive cry.

Jake was halfway out of the pit when he saw it.

It was a man. A stranger. Dressed in a business suit, jacket torn, tie askew to expose a ravaged throat.

For an awful moment their eyes met. The man in the mud and the thing in the rain. Then with a cry like a wild animal, the creature rushed at him, hands outstretched. Jake screamed and tried to scramble away, got halfway to his feet, and then it was on him, slamming into him, knocking them both down so they slid back into the muddy pit under the front-end loader. It clawed at Jake, trying to grab him, trying to pull him toward teeth that snapped and clacked.