Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (42 page)

There was a beat and for a moment some of the people around the table seemed unable to comprehend the implications.

The president wiped at his own tears. “Say the rest, Scott. Tell them.”

Blair placed his palms on the table and leaned heavily on them, his head hanging down between hunched shoulders.

“Lucifer 113 has gone airborne,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

THE NORTHERN LEVEES

FAYETTE COUNTY

Jake DeGroot came back to himself slowly.

So slowly.

With pain and realization and horror.

He stood in the rain and slowly looked around, trying to remember what world this was. Fifty feet away the yellow bulk of Big Bird stood like an anchor that held him to the world.

He gasped and spat out the awful tastes in his mouth, and wiped his face with the back of one big hand.

His first clear and cogent thought was that this was not an isolated event. It couldn’t be. The girls had been hurt—
Killed? Was that the word?—
somewhere else and had walked onto the construction site. That meant whatever this was didn’t start here. This wasn’t some old Indian burial ground or any of that horror movie stuff. This was something else, and whatever it was, it was happening out there.

Out … where, exactly?

The second thing he thought was that they knew about it.

They
.

The government, or at least the National Guard. Those were soldiers who shot Burl and the others. Soldiers.

That meant that this thing was really damn big.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

He listened to his voice. There should be panic there, that desperate whine, but it wasn’t there. He sounded like himself. The way he should.

It was the second thing that anchored Jake DeGroot.

It helped him take a real breath.

“Think it through,” he told himself, liking the sound of his voice.

He didn’t have much family in the area. Only a niece, Jenny, who lived in Bordentown.

He could go there.

But no. Jenny was a single woman and a teacher.

With the storm, the single teachers volunteered to work at the region’s emergency shelter. The Stebbins Little School. The kids would have all been picked up, but the cops would have moved the old folks to the school. And some families from the flooded areas. The school had cots and food and a generator.

That’s where Jenny would be.

And suddenly he was very afraid. Not for himself this time. Jake thought about Jenny. She was a tiny little thing. It took everything Jake had to stop that one guy.

Jenny?

She could never …

Before Jake even realized he was doing it he began running for his car, slapping his pockets for his car keys.

And not finding them.

They’d been in his jeans pocket.

He looked back at the pit under Big Bird.

They must have fallen out. Down in the water. Down in the mud.

Jake swallowed a lump the size of a fist.

“No fucking way.”

Even if he could work up the nerve to crawl down there where the dead man was, what were the chances he would find those keys in all that mud and water. After all that fighting and thrashing. His car was useless to him. Even if he knew how to hotwire it, there was no time and no tools.

His heart started to sink, but then he raised his eyes. Just a few feet.

And stared at the big metal monster.

Big Bird.

“No,” he told himself. It was too clumsy, too slow. And the school was too far.

Then he was running through the mud toward the machine.

The key for Big Bird was still where he’d left it, right in the ignition. He twisted it and the big diesel engine roared to life with a growl so loud that it sounded like a dragon rousing from a troubled slumber. He pulled the door shut, sealing himself inside the Plexiglas cab. He turned the heat to high, shifted hard, and began moving through the mud. The Cat’s top blacktop speed was forty, and the mud cut that down to less than half.

The school was eleven miles away, almost due south.

“I’m coming, Jenny,” he said aloud, and the fact of having a purpose, of having someone else to fight for, made his whole body feel as hard and powerful as the steel of the machine in which he rode.

He did not hear the crunch as the left rear tire rolled over the corpse in the mud. Nor when the right rolled across the nearly submerged body of Burl.

Or, if he did, Jake refused to allow himself to acknowledge it.

“I’m coming, Jenny.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

“Everyone back to the school!” screamed Dez, but the adults were already dropping hoses and running. She ran behind them, shoving the slower ones, chasing them all to safety. “Check the doors. Keep the kids away from the windows. Move …
move
.”

Moonshiner and Shortstop laid their rifles atop the front and rear hoods of a burned-out police car. Boxer climbed atop one of the buses and Gypsy went into another one and pointed her gun out the window. Only Sam and Trout stood their ground.

“We’d better get inside,” warned Trout, but Sam didn’t move.

“There are so many of them,” he said softly.

Dez ran back to join them, her Glock in a two-handed grip, face set and hard.

“You want to fight them here?” she asked incredulously. “There are too many ways they can come at us.”

The dead were closing in. The nearest ones were fifty feet beyond the fence.

“It’s your house,” said Sam. “It’s your call.”

“There’s more coming across the yards,” called Boxer, pointing. They turned and saw more of the infected staggering through the lines of connected yards to the east.

“Dez,” said Trout, taking her by the arm, “this is stupid. There are too many of them. Let’s get inside.”

But Dez pulled her arm free. “No.” She turned to them. “Listen, Billy, Sam—we can reinforce the building and hole up, but for how long? The supplies we have won’t last. Sam, can you guarantee that the army’s coming back for us?”

The answer was on Sam’s face. “This is falling apart. I don’t think anyone can make promises right now.”

“What are you saying?” asked Trout. “That we could be stuck here for weeks?”

“Billy … I’m saying if this keeps going the way it’s going, then no one will be coming for us.”

“Until when?”

Sam shook his head. “We could lose this war.”

“War? It’s an outbreak…”

Sam pointed to the dead soldiers who were approaching the fence. “Not anymore.”

Trout felt his blood turn to ice. He cut a look at Dez, who looked horrified, but she was nodding to herself.

“How long can your team hold them on the other side of the fence?” she breathed. “How much time can you buy us?”

The soldier’s mouth tightened. “How much time do you need?”

“An hour,” she said. “Maybe less.”

“To do what?” demanded Trout.

“To do what we started out to do. Get all the supplies and everyone in the school onto the buses.”

“And then what?”

“We get the fuck out of here.”

“And go
where
?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Philly? New York?”

“No,” said Sam. “Go south. Go to Asheville.”

“North Carolina?” asked Dez. “Why there?”

“Because the storm is heading east. Roads will be bad and they’ll be blocked. Because everyone running from this will be going east. And we can’t go west because when we pinged Goat Weinman’s satellite phone it was clear he was heading northwest. Maybe to Pittsburgh. We should go south and get into the mountains.”

“Sure, but why Asheville?” asked Trout. “Why there specifically?”

Sam hesitated for a moment. “There is a government installation there.”

“Since when?” Dez asked skeptically. “I never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. It was built during the Cold War. The mountains there are honeycombed with miles and miles of labs, living quarters, the works.”

“That’s just an urban legend,” said Trout. “I read about that. It’s not real.”

“It’s real. In the event of a nuclear exchange it was deemed a save zone because it’s outside of the prevailing drift patterns for likely nukes.”

“Hey,” called Gypsy, “somebody out there want to make a fucking decision? We’re going to be dancing with these things pretty soon.”

Sam touched Dez’s sleeve. “It’s there. Trust me.”

Dez met his eyes, searching them for truth and trust. Then she nodded. “Okay.”

“Good,” said Sam, looking relieved. “We’ll hold them as long as we can. You better get your asses in gear. Hurry!”

Dez spun and ran for the building. They could hear her shouting orders before she was even inside.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

THE SITUATION ROOM

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The president stood up slowly and walked the length of the room until he stood in front of the big screen. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, appearing to stare into the middle distance.

“Mr. President,” said Scott Blair, “we’re starting to get reports of random attacks in other places. Harrisburg, Gettysburg…”

“How?” asked Sylvia Ruddy. “How is that possible? None of the infected could walk those distances, and the winds can’t have reached there yet.”

“Survivors,” said Blair. “People in cars or trucks. Either bitten or people who breathed in the ash. We know that some escaped the containment. We have to shut down the highways and the airports. Trains and buses, too. We need roadblocks. If we have to, we can blow the tunnels and bridges on the major highways.”

The president nodded, and phones were snatched up to make those calls.

“Sir,” said Ruddy, “I think we need to initiate the Emergency Broadcast Network.”

Another nod.

“I’ll draft a speech to the nation,” she said, and hurried out.

After she was gone, the president turned slowly to face his tableful of generals.

“Talk to me about nuclear alternatives,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

BESSEMER COURT

WEST STATION SQUARE DRIVE

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

“You said you need to connect to the Net, right?” asked Homer.

Goat looked up from his laptop. He was cutting Homer’s diatribes into video bites that would be short enough to be watch in their entirety.

“Yes. I have several bits ready to go up on YouTube. Why?”

Homer tapped the windshield, and Goat peered through the whisking wipers to see the words “F
REE
W
I
-F
I
” glowing in blue neon on the front of a redbrick building.

“How long’s this gonna take?” asked the killer.

Goat hedged. “Video files are big,” he said slowly. “Takes a while for them to upload and—”

“You need both hands to do that shit?”

Goat immediately flinched back, pulling his hands back as far as he could get them from the murderous madman. But Homer laughed. A deep, creaking bray.

“I ain’t gonna eat your hands, you dumb shit,” he guffawed. “Jesus. You’re fucking hilarious sometimes.”

“Why—why did you ask?”

“’Cause I want to go inside for a minute and I want you here where I get back.”

“I don’t—”

Homer reached into the backseat and produced a coil of heavy, hairy twine. It was brown and the spiky hairs made it look like a vast, coiled centipede. “Took this out of that last place. Useful shit. Gimme your left hand. C’mon, give it here unless you want me to take it.”

With great reluctance, Goat slowly extended his trembling hand. Homer caught his wrist with fingers that were as cold and damp as worms but as strong as steel. He jerked Goat’s arm toward the steering wheel and then began looping the hairy twine around wrist, steering column, and between the spokes if the wheel. He tied sophisticated knots in the twine, looped more twine, tied additional knots, and then pulled on the ends until the bulb of each knot was compressed into a tiny, rock-hard nugget.

“That ought to do ’er,” he said, admiring his work. He gave Goat a friendly grin. “You only need one hand to jerk off with, right, boy?”

“I—”

“You set about putting my story out there for people to see and hear. You do that while I go see some folks about something I need.”

“What is it? What are you going to do? What is this place? Why are we here?”

Homer’s friendly grin became lupine. “You ain’t figured it out yet?”

“Figured what out?”

“What I am.”

“I … know what you are. I mean I understand what Dr. Volker did to you. I know about Lucifer 113.”

“I ain’t talking about no zombie bullshit, boy. Try again.”

Goat licked his lips. “I understand about the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. Is that what you mean?”

The killer sat there for a long moment, his eyes flicking back and forth between Goat’s as if looking for something first in the left, then the right, and over again. It was like the flickering of a candle. “You listened to everything I said and you sat as a witness to everything I done tonight, and you still don’t understand. That’s a damn shame, boy, ’cause I thought you were going to be my apostle. I thought you were like Luke and John and all those holy men who wrote the Bible. I thought I could use you to tell the truth. The real and gospel truth.”

The shift in Homer’s voice and phrasing was immediately chilling. Instead of the faux homespun shit-kicker lingo, these few sentences were spoken in a slow, more precise manner. Goat had noted it only once before, when Homer discussed the way the Red Mouth spoke through him to tell the truth. He wanted to replay that clip, to listen once more to what the man said then because now he felt—no, he was absolutely certain—that it was far more important that the pseudoreligious rant of a psychopathic killer. He saw the dangerous look of cold disappointment in Homer’s eyes and knew that he needed to do something right now.

He said, “I’m trying to understand,” he said, making his words come out with equally slow and sober gravitas. “I
want
to understand. But the apostles—how many of them understood right away? They had to think about it, to witness it, to let it speak through them, right?”