Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (41 page)

Jake punched it, hitting the infected man in the face, in the throat, in the chest, but it was hard to find the balance and resistance to throw a solid punch. Jake was six-eight and more than three hundred pounds and this man couldn’t have been more than two hundred, but in the mud and water they were evenly matched.

Except that the thing did not react to any of Jake’s punches. Jake felt cartilage collapse beneath his knuckles as he hammered at its nose and throat. He felt bones crack in the face and temple and ribs. And he felt pain explode in his fingers and knuckles and wrists as the impacts took their toll while the struggle reawakened shocked nerve endings.

But the thing kept fighting as if pain was not even connected to its existence.

And maybe it wasn’t.

This thing was like Burl and those girls. It couldn’t have been alive. Not with the injuries it had. And yet it was fighting. It was a monster.

A monster.

He rammed his forearm under its chin and pressed the damned thing down into the mud. Inch by inch he pulled himself atop until finally he straddled it, pinning its arms down, battering its head deeper and deeper into the mud.

“Die you motherfucker!” he shouted, then choked on spit and snot and mud.

Jake kept shoving it down, using his massive body to try and smother it, bury it. Mud filled its mouth. The bones of its throat crumbled to nothing. And yet … those hands kept flailing beneath Jake’s shins. Buried in mud and drowned, battered to a wreck, it kept flailing.

Jake sobbed with helpless terror. He fought a thing that could not be whipped and his own understanding of the world began warping at the edges, pieces flying off it until everything seemed distorted and surreal.

Something inside Jake’s head broke.

Not a bone, not anything physical.

Something much deeper.

Something in his mind that was stretched to its farthest limit could not stretch any further and it snapped.

The blackness became blacker still as his eyes filled with dark poppies that blossomed like fireworks. He heard a weird tearing sound in his ears and an animal growl that he could feel coming from his own throat. The growl turned into a roar as Jake reared back and tore the dead thing out of the mud, then grabbed its chin and a fistful of hair and with more raw power than he had ever put into a single action ever in his life, he wrenched the head around. Bones exploded inside the savaged throat and still Jake turned. The body stopped struggling, and still Jake turned. His mind began falling into a dark, red well and still Jake turned.

And then he was pitching sideways, all resistance gone, the hair and chin locked inside his hands, but the creature’s torso flopping the other way.

Jake plunged into the waters, still holding the head.

He lay there for a moment and in that moment he heard, saw, felt, and tasted nothing. There was nothing. Only a vast blackness.

Then …

Water seeped past the spasm in his throat and he inhaled it.

With a wracking, aching, gargling cry he came awake again. Lightning flashed and its reflection lit the underside of the front-end loader’s bucket. Jake saw what he held in his hands and with a choking cry of disgust he flung it away, and then he was scrambling again, thrashing his way out of the pit, away from the headless thing, away from the reality of what he’d just done.

The screams that made it through the coughs were high and shrill and inhuman.

He got sloppily to his knees and tried to run, but gravity and balance were at war and all he could manage was a sloppy lope on all fours. He fell, got up, fell again, and finally managed to get to his feet, and there he stood, wide-legged, wide-armed, letting the rain assault him as he screamed.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

THE SITUATION ROOM

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

“Where the hell is General Zetter?” thundered the president.

General Burroughs had a phone to his ear, but he said, “There’s no technical problem, Mr. President. We pinged the lines and everything’s working. However no one is picking up.”

“Get some-damn-body on the phone,” the president insisted. “I want to know what the hell is happening.”

Aides scrambled to call secondary contacts.

“Sir—
sir
—” yelled one. “I have one of the helicopter pilots on the line. Lieutenant Mills. Putting the call on the speaker.”

“…
ah, Christ this hurts … Jesus
…”

“Lieutenant Mills,” said the president loudly, “this is the president. I need you to give me a sit rep.”

“Sir? Sir…?”

The pilot’s voice was filled with panic and pain.

“Listen to me, son,” said the president, “I need you to take a breath and tell me what is happening. Can you do that?”

They heard the man take a long, hissing inhalation. Then in a voice that was a fraction steadier, the pilot said, “It’s … it’s all falling apart.”

“Are you injured, son? Can you tell me that much?”

“The bites … damn, you never think they could hurt this bad.”

The president closed his eyes. “Son … do you know what happened to General Zetter?”

There was a very long pause filled only with rapid breathing that was close to hyperventilation. Then in a substantially weaker voice, the pilot said, “He wasn’t bitten. I’m sure about that. None of them were.”

“Who wasn’t bitten?”

“The general. Everyone in the command truck. I was with them. I was on the ground by then. We weren’t anywhere near the fighting. Nobody was bitten. But … but … oh God. We thought he was sick, you know? From the dust cloud after we dropped the fuel-air bombs. We thought it was just from breathing the ash. But, damn it, nobody was bit. Not until … not until it all went to shit. General Zetter, Captain Rice. All of them. They went apeshit. Ah, jeez … I think they clipped the artery. The tourniquet’s not doing shit. Oh God, oh God.”

“Where is General Zetter?” asked the president.

But there was no answer.

None at all.

Which was too much answer for everyone in the Situation Room.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Billy Trout was no damn use at all to anyone. He knew it and everyone else knew it. Too much of him was bruised or strained, which meant he couldn’t drag bodies—and body parts—out of the buses, and he couldn’t work the janitor’s power-hose to wash away the black blood. It was gruesome work and he was not sorry that he couldn’t help.

Instead he set up his camera and began filming it. That and everything else.

With the jamming off, he put together a new field report, explaining the facts as he knew it, with many of the blanks filled in by Sam Imura.

It surprised Trout how forthcoming Sam was, and he pulled him aside for a moment to ask about that. They stood by a window that looked down on the parking lot and the rows of big yellow school buses.

“I’ve interviewed a lot of cops, soldiers, and federal types in the past,” Trout said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever had one actually spill the goods without either going off the record or prosecuting a personal agenda. In a nutshell, what gives?”

Sam shook his head. “I come from a long line of realists. My dad’s one. He’s a cop in California, in a small town out near Yosemite. He was never the kind to pad the truth or get behind an ‘official’ story. Dad believes that the truth is the truth.”

“No one I ever met in Washington agrees.”

“They can’t,” said Sam. “They’re politicians, and politics is about leverage, not about the truth. Not sure I ever heard a politician ever give a straight answer to anything. Everything’s agenda-based with them.”

“Okay, but you work for a bureaucrat.”

“Sure, but Scott Blair’s a lot like my dad. He’s not very well liked in D.C. because he always wants to cut to the bottom line.”

“He’s the one who wanted the president to bomb us back to the Stone Age?”

Sam met his eyes and nodded. “Yes, he was.”

“Nice.”

“Tell me something, Billy. Considering what’s happened and how things might be if POTUS followed Scott’s recommendation … do you think he made a bad call? Or do you think the president was right to cave and send the bombers back to the barn?”

“That’s unfair. You’re asking me to say whether it’s right or wrong to kill six hundred kids.”

“Take fairness out of the equation. Look at it for exactly what it is, a problem of survival. Not of a few, but survival of the species. Take a step back and look at the real problem, the big picture, Billy, and tell me what we should have done?”

“First, tell me the absolute truth … is it really that bad out there?”

“Yes.” Sam said it without hesitation.

“Are we in danger of losing control of this whole thing?”

Sam’s face turned to stone. “Billy, we may have already lost control of this thing. The math is so bad. There are so many ways this can go bad on us, and almost no way that we can put this genie back into the bottle.”

“You’re saying we’ve lost? Christ, Sam, is that what you’re saying?”

“I … don’t know. There are still some cards we can play. And the spread will hit some natural barriers. Rivers, mountains, lakes, bridges. All of those are potential chokepoints or they can act as firebreaks. Can we get ahead of it? I don’t know. Not unless we up the game.”

“Up it from fuel-air bombs? Shit, what’s the next upgrade after that?”

Sam said nothing.

Billy looked down at his hands. “Oh, man…”

“So, again I ask you, Billy, last night, what should we have done last night?”

It hurt so much for Trout to say it, but he managed to get the words past the stricture in his throat. “You should have killed us.”

“Yes,” said Sam, “we should have killed you. And God help my soul for saying and believing that.”

They sat in silence for a moment, each of them looking at the world through that lens.

“Then why are you helping us now?” Billy asked again.

Sam nodded to the buses down in the lot and the dozens of people scrambling to prepare them for an escape. “For me and my guys it’s like being cut off behind enemy lines. Sure, we could make it back to the front, but I have a feeling that this is going to change from a gunfight—which is what we do—to a war we’re only going to be able to fight from the air. Providing the storm ever stops. In a mechanized war, we’re not much better than five extra sets of hands. It’s a waste of our specialized skill sets.” He gave Trout a rueful grin.

“And here?”

“You kidding me? Six hundred kids, two hundred civilians, and a horde of flesh-eating monsters? We might actually get to be bona fide heroes. And wouldn’t that make a nice change.”

“You’re joking.”

Sam held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Only a little.”

Down in the lot the four members of the Boy Scouts were helping with the preparations. Trout had been introduced to them only by their combat call signs and what little he could deduce about their personalities. The woman, Gypsy, was a problem solver and apparently the second in command. Moonshiner was gruff and lacked obvious warmth, unlike Boxer who seemed to wear his heart on his sleeve. Shortstop was the most detached of the bunch, very pragmatic but aloof.

“What about your team?” asked Trout, nodding out the window. “Are they on the same page as you?”

Sam nodded. “They usually are. We tend to think like a pack of…”

He stopped speaking and leaned close to the window as lightning flashed and flashed again. The soldier’s body went suddenly rigid with tension. Then he tapped his earbud.

“Team Alert, this is Ronin. I have eyes on the street beyond the north fence. We have potential hostiles. Repeat, potential hostiles.”

It was Boxer who turned first, snatching his rifle from where it lay under a jacket and out of the rain. He brought it up and snapped on the top-mounted light. The beam cut through the rain and the openings in the chain-link fence, and there, filling the street, were silent figures who moved with slow, implacable steps.

“Give me numbers,” ordered Sam.

“Christ, boss, I got forty of them. Shit, no, there’s more coming.”

Gypsy’s voice cut in. “We got more coming in from the west and…” Her words trailed away.

Boxer turned, saw what she saw, and said what Sam and Trout were only now just beginning to see.

“They’re soldiers,” said Boxer. “Oh, goddamn, it’s the National Guard. They’re all … they’re all … ah, shit.”

“Got to be fifty of them,” said Moonshiner.

Moonshiner popped a flare and sent it high into the air.

There were not fifty.

There were hundreds of them.

Torn, bleeding, shambling, and hungry.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

THE SITUATION ROOM

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The experts did one threat assessment after another, each time rebuilding both outbreak and response models to fit new data.

With each new assessment the president felt the world slip away from him. He sat in his chair, fingers balled into fists on the tabletop, staring at speaking mouths and screens filled with data.

Scott Blair looked every bit as bad. He hung up from a call and rubbed his eyes. Or was he wiping at tears? The president couldn’t tell.

Blair held up a trembling hand and the room fell into a flawed and troubled silence.

“That was Dr. McReady. She’s with the NBACC field team in Fayette County. They reached General Zetter’s command post. It was deserted except for several infected. The, um, infected were all members of the Guard command staff.”

“How the hell is that even possible?” demanded General Burroughs. “If they’d been overrun we’d have known about it.”

“That’s why Dr. McReady called. Her team was able to subdue and examine the infected at the command center. A few had been bitten, but most showed no signs of violence. No bites, nothing.”

“Then what in hell happened?” asked the president.

Tears broke from the corners of Blair’s eyes. “Dr. McReady thinks that the bombs reduced many of the infected to particulate matter and ash. Those particles still contain parasitic larvae, and the storm winds are spreading them throughout the region.”