Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (45 page)

Then everything changed.

Just like that. From one side of a moment to the other.

The audience was laughing their balls off about Billy Bob and Bubba the zombies and their monster truck when suddenly a woman’s scream knocked the whole night off its wheels.

“What the hell?” cried Lydia as she launched herself from her stool. Tom was a half-second slower, and he tried to see what was going on, but there was a waitress with a tray of drinks between him and the woman who’d screamed.

“Great fucking timing,” Tom muttered as he tried to edge around to get a better look. On the stage, Jeremy looked like he was frozen into the moment, eyes and mouth wide.

The whole club went silent for a heartbeat, but as Tom stepped around the waitress to see what was up, the entire club erupted into mad panic.

Utter.

Mad.

Panic.

Suddenly everyone was screaming. Women. Men. Everyone.

On stage, Jeremy screamed, too. The part of Tom Segura’s mind that was a regular guy felt twin pangs of fear and confusion. The part of him that was a professional comic actually provided commentary.

You scream like Chloë Moretz, dude.

But then the crowd split apart as people panicked and scattered, revealing an image that Tom knew was being burned onto the front of his brain as he looked at it. A bare-chested, bloody man, viciously tearing at the skin and muscle of a woman’s throat.

Right in front of him.

This wasn’t movie special effects and it sure as shit wasn’t someone’s idea of a practical joke. What Tom was seeing fifteen feet in front of him was real. Real blood, real flesh, real madness, real pain.

And he screamed, too.

He did not remember picking anything up, and even when he threw the beer bottle he was surprised that it was his hand that winged it at the attacker’s head. Tom was not a fighter. He didn’t know many comics who were. Words had always been both his sword and shield. Sarcasm was his left hook and insight was his right cross.

He saw the bottle leave his hand, saw it close the distance in what appeared to be ultra-slow motion. Saw it strike the killer right on the temple.

As good a throw as anyone in the Major Leagues ever hurled.

Dead on. A hundred-mile-an-hour ball that burned across the plate fast enough to make a fool out of a .300 batter.

Tom expected the killer to go down.

That would have been the button on this routine. That should have been the logical end, or maybe the opening act of a new phase of his career. Tom Segura, hero comedian. The stocky kid from Cincinnati who dropped a psycho with a bottle of Coors Lite.

That was the script he was already writing in his head. That was the lead for the Breaking News.

Except …

Except that’s not how the scene played out.

The bottle hit hard, hit with real force, hit hard enough to make a
clunk
that Tom could hear over the woman’s gurgling screams. Then it ricocheted off of the killer and hit the woman square in the right eye.

The bottle fell to the floor.

The killer dropped the woman right on top of it.

He turned to Tom.

And smiled with bloody teeth.

Tom thought, “Oh … shit.”

Or maybe he said it aloud. He wasn’t sure, because after that he was screaming louder and more shrilly than Jeremy.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

THE SITUATION ROOM

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

“Mr. Blair!” yelled a young officer, one of the sharpshooters from the military intelligence group. “You need to see this.”

Blair hurried over and bent to look at something on the officer’s laptop.

“What is it?”

“We were able to pick the IP address of Gregory Weinman’s computer from the files he uploaded to the Net. Well, sir, he just uploaded a new batch.”

“Is it more of Trout’s ramblings?”

“No, sir. There are several files, including what appears to be interviews with Homer Gibbon. The autodating on the video files say that the interviews were all done in the last few hours.”

“Christ!”

“And there’s more. Weinman posted a message, a plea that appears to be directed to us. To the military. He’s asking us to find him because he is with Homer Gibbon and Gibbon is spreading Lucifer.”

“Did he provide an exact location?”

The officer smiled. So strange a thing under the circumstances.

“Yes, sir, he did.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

The pain was immediate and excruciating, and Billy Trout screamed. He thrashed and beat at the woman, trying to shake her loose. The little girl shrieked, too, her voice as shrill as a seagull’s, and she began beating her tiny fists all over Trout’s face. She smashed his nose and hit him in the eye.

And then another screaming, howling thing plowed into them. It hit the zombie with so much force that teeth snapped off at the gum-line and the creature fell away. Trout instantly rolled the other way, shoving the child from him. He flopped onto his stomach and saw Dez Fox sitting astride the infected woman, fingers knotted in what was left of the woman’s hair, lifting her head and slamming it down on the concrete over and over again until the back of her skull exploded and sprayed the wet ground with brain tissue and black blood.

The little girl shrieked again and tried to rush to her mother’s defense, but Trout caught her wrist and pulled her kicking and screaming down to where he lay.

Trout was screaming, too, trying to determine how bad the bite was, trying to wriggle out of his jacket to see how soon he was going to die. The hysterical little girl kept hitting him, making it impossible to do anything. Then suddenly Dez pivoted off of the dead zombie, plucked the little girl off of him and then started tearing at Billy’s sportscoat. She yanked it down and tore his arm from the sleeve, then pawed at his shirt to find the bite.

“Am I dead?” Trout cried. “Oh, God, Dez … am I dead?”

And she kept saying, “Don’t you leave me, Billy Trout, don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking leave me, too. I’ll fucking kill you if you leave me…”

The lightning flashed and Dez used its brief light to bend close.

“God, please don’t let me be dead,” he wailed.

Dez straightened, glared at him and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It rocked his head sideways and he snorted blood from his broken nose. Then she grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and half-hauled him off the ground.

“It didn’t break the skin you stupid motherfucker.” She shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “I could fucking kill you, you stupid son of a bitch.”

Then people were crowding around them, pulling her back, lifting him to his feet, taking the little girl away from the horror that lay on the ground. Trout saw Sam there, firing a pistol instead of his sniper rifle. Moonshiner was with him, too. Firing, firing, firing.

There was an awful sound behind them and Trout turned to see another section of fence collapse and a wave of the dead come rushing into the lot. At least a hundred of them. Some fell with the fence, but the others climbed over them, shambling or running. Screaming their hunger, moaning louder than the storm. Sam fired and fired. There was no time to aim now.

Moonshiner yelled for them to get back. He dropped a spent magazine and reached for a replacement.

Which he did not have.

There was one terrible moment when his questing fingers spider-walked across his belt and harness and found nothing.

“Shit!” he said. He reversed his rifle in his hands and swung it like a baseball bat as the mass of zombies came swarming at them over the fence. Another section fell. And another. Hundreds of the dead were closing in on them.

The bus engines roared and fists pounded on the horns. Children screamed somewhere behind them. Trout kept swimming in and out of consciousness, aware that he was being half-carried, half-dragged along, but with no idea who was helping him. He saw Dez and Sam standing shoulder to shoulder, firing into the onrushing sea of the infected, trying to buy Moonshiner time to retreat.

And then the dead were on him.

“Noooooo!”
howled Sam.

The big soldier swung the rifle once more and two zombies staggered back with shattered faces, but a dozen more launched themselves at him. Sam fired over and over again, killing an infected with every shot. So did Dez.

It did not matter at all.

Moonshiner vanished beneath a tidal surge of the dead.

“Get onto the bus!”

Someone was yelling that over and over again, but Trout couldn’t tell who it was. It might even have been him.

Hands reached out and grabbed Trout, pulled him, lifted him, and then he was out of the rain, inside the bus.

But where was Dez? He began thrashing, fighting the hands, struggling to get to the window to see if he could find Dez. Guns were still firing. The dead moaned like demons.

“Go, go, go!”
yelled a voice.

Sam Imura.

Where was Dez?

God
, thought Trout as the darkness began to drag him down,
where was my Dez?

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

TRICKSTER’S COMEDY CLUB

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Lydia Rose was too short to see over the milling crowd.

She saw the bloody man enter the club and saw Tom throw a bottle at him, but then everything went totally to hell. People screamed and screamed as they ran for the exits. They collided with one another and tripped over tables and chairs. Lydia was buffeted back by the crowd and fell hard against the corner of the stage. Five feet in front of her a frat boy in a Pitt sweatshirt lay sprawled like a starfish, eyes open, mouth slack, as at least forty people ran over his body. Not leaping across it, but stepping on the college kid’s stomach and legs and chest. Then a skinny white woman with beaded dreads hooked a foot in the frat boy’s armpit and pitched face forward to the ground. A dozen others fell atop her, wrenching a terrible scream from her collapsing lungs.

Lydia crawled onto the stage, where Jeremy was yelling at the crowd to get out, which they were already trying to do, and alternately yelling at the bloody man to stop biting the woman.

It seemed to Lydia to be such a strange thing to yell.

If the guy was biting someone, then how likely was it that he’d be reasonable enough to take Jeremy’s suggestion to heart? What was he supposed to do? Let her go, spit out what was left of her throat, give a rueful apology and buy a round for the house?

She got to her feet and from the stage platform was able to see what was actually happening there at Trickster’s.

She saw.

She screamed.

Beside her, Jeremy was still yelling at the crowd. Across the club, Tom Segura was running from the bloody man and throwing chairs at him. Most of the chairs were hitting the guys who were trying to throw punches at the intruder.

The bloody man snatched one of the chairs out of the air and swung it into the face of a burly football player who was winding up a haymaker. The football player went down hard.

Two other guys piled atop the bloody man, punching him with both fists. Lydia lost sight of the killer for a moment, then she heard a piercing shriek, and one of the guys reeled back clutching a hand from which blood spurted from the stumps of two fingers that were now missing beyond the first knuckles. The second guy rolled off, clutching his throat, and Lydia couldn’t tell what the bloody man had done to him. Punched him?

Tom waded in as the killer was rising to his feet, swinging yet another chair, but someone stepped into the path of the swing, and for a moment Lydia couldn’t understand what she was seeing.

It was the woman who’d been bitten.

Her face and clothes were splashed with her own blood and there was a black, ragged hole in the front of her throat, but she bared her teeth and leapt at Tom like a cat. They both went down and Lydia lost sight of her friend.

Then she was moving. She snatched the microphone stand from in front of Jeremy and leaped off the stage. She was only five-one and the mike stand was taller than she was, but Lydia took it in a two-handed grip and swung it with all the force and focus of a Major League ballplayer. The chrome shaft made a glittering arc and the heavy black base hit the woman who was atop Tom right in the side of the head. There was a meaty crunch that sent such a shockwave up the length of the stand that it shivered it right out of Lydia’s hands. She staggered backward and collided with someone. She felt hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her backward. Lydia pivoted and swung her right arm as hard as she could to dislodge the grabbing hands. She didn’t need any Galahad to pull her to safety. Lydia knew how to fight, mean and dirty, and she wasn’t about to let some psycho bastard hurt Tom.

But as she spun she looked up into the face of the man who’d grabbed her.

A tall man.

Bare-chested.

Ugly and powerful.

Covered in blood from eyes to knees.

A man who smiled at her. A man whose dark eyes looked her up and down.

“Nice,” he said. “Juicy.”

And they he lunged at her, teeth snapping.

It’s not funny,
she thought.
This isn’t funny.

Those were her last thoughts and then all she saw was a big, black nothing.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

DOLL FACTORY ROAD

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

It was too dark down in the hole and there were too many monsters, so Billy Trout fought his way back to the surface. He came awake with a cry.

For a moment he did not know where he was. The world seemed to be moving.

The ceiling was low and curved and seemed to be made out of metal.

He heard voices.

Prayers and whispers.

People crying with dry, broken sobs that seemed to cling to the ragged edge of sanity. Other voices, younger and more plaintive, called for mothers and fathers and were not answered. One voice kept repeating the word “no” in a relentless monotone.