Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (47 page)

They found an armoured personnel carrier standing alone and empty on the shoulder of the road. Sam and the remaining members of the Boy Scouts got out to check it. Dez went with them and Trout, weak and trembling, stood in the open doorway of the bus. There was no blood on the APC, no scattering of shell casings, nothing to indicate a battle. However, it was completely empty. No crew, no bodies, no traces of how it came to be abandoned there. Boxer, Shortstop, and Gypsy came back with armloads of ammunition and extra guns. Sam tottered back carrying a heavy metal case of fragmentation grenades.

They stripped the APC of everything of use, and all of it done in a hasty silence. Then they piled back into the buses and the convoy began rolling.

The landscape that whipped by seemed murky and deserted to Trout, though his gut told him otherwise. Twice he saw figures in the woods, pale and silent, watching the buses as they passed.

Inside the bus things quieted down. Many of the children were asleep, dragged into troubled dreams by shock and exhaustion. Others sat and watched the forest with the fixity of attention of a bunch of plastic mannequins. Dez followed the line of Trout’s stare and took his hand to give it a gentle squeeze.

Sam sat nearby thumbing bullets into a stack of empty magazines. His eyes were shuttered windows.

Jenny DeGroot came and squatted down in the aisle. She had somehow conjured hot coffee. “It’s instant,” she apologized, handing out steaming Styrofoam cups.

Trout took his with a greedy sigh. “I don’t care if it’s boiled gutter water.”

He burned his tongue on the first sip, didn’t care, blew on the surface and took another sip.

Sam Imura sat with his head cradled between his palms, eyes unfocused as he stared into his own thoughts.

“I was sorry to hear about your friend,” said Trout.

“Moonshiner,” murmured Sam, nodding his thanks.

“What was his real name?” asked Dez.

“Staff Sergeant Bud Hollister. Good ol’ boy from Alabama.”

Dez nodded. “He had biker tats. He used to ride?”

A memory put a faint smile on Sam’s hard mouth. “He rode with the Outlaws before he moved from ’Bama.”

“Rough boys,” said Dez.

“Very. He rolled out with them when he was sixteen lying about being nineteen. He was with them until just before his eighteenth birthday, then got arrested for some petty stuff. Judge offered him a choice of jail or enlistment. Not that he stopped kicking ass and taking names as a soldier. Running joke was that he had Velcro on his stripes because he kept losing them.”

Trout cleared his throat and cut a look at Dez. “Lots of that going around.”

“Bite me,” muttered Dez. “You can live small and boring or you can go and tear a piece off for yourself.”

Sam grinned. “You and Moonshiner would have gotten along fine.”

“He wasn’t half bad-looking.”

“Hey, I’m sitting right here you know,” Trout reminded her.

Dez ignored him. She held out her cup. “To Bud ‘Moonshiner’ Hollister. A true American ass-kicker.”

“And a good man,” added Sam, touching his cup. Trout did the same and they drank in silence for a while.

“After we get to Asheville,” asked Trout, “what will you do? Stay there or go back?”

“Back is a relative term. I’m not part of the regular army, so I don’t have to report back. I’ll stay in touch with Scott Blair and if he needs me to do anything special, something that could help, then I’ll do that.”

“And if there’s nothing you can do?”

Sam shrugged. “My family is in central California. Dad and stepmom. Brother who’s twenty and in the police academy, and a stepbrother who’s eighteen months old. Dad’s a cop, too, but he’s getting up there. Been driving a desk for the last ten years. Mom’s an E.R. nurse. If this thing continues to spread, then I’m going to want to get to them and help keep them safe.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Trout, and Dez nodded. Sam made no comment. The conversation dwindled down to a shared, moody silence.

Trout stared out the window as he sipped the last of his coffee, then he frowned. “Hey,” he said, “I thought we were going to North Carolina.”

“We are,” said Dez.

“Then why did we just pass a sign for Fort Necessity? You planning on visit a historic battlefield during a flight to safety? I don’t know, Dez, I doubt the gift shop is open this early.”

“We’re not going to the fort,” said Dez irritably. “We’re going to Sapphire Foods. It’s a mile past the fort on Route 40. I told you about it. The big food distribution warehouse.”

“Ah yes, the one where your ex-boyfriend works. If he’s still an
ex
-boyfriend.”

“Don’t start, Billy.”

“It’s a good call,” said Sam. “We got less than half the supplies out of the school.”

Trout knew that it was a good idea but he didn’t want to admit it. He fished for an objection. “What if they won’t let us take anything.”

“We’ll ask nicely,” Sam suggested.

“Charlie will give me what I want,” said Dez.

“Charlie? Charlie who? And why would he give you anything? Would that be a matter of him committing a crime?”

“We’re in a state of emergency.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And Charlie likes kids. He always has. He coaches the boxing and wrestling teams at the PAL in—”

“Whoa, wait, are you talking about
that
Charlie?”

Dez colored and said nothing.

“Are you freaking serious, Desdemona Fox?
Him?”

“Who?” asked Sam, but he was ignored.

“He’s a scumbag, a thug, and very likely an actual criminal,” said Trout.

“He’s not that bad.”

“Your nose grew six inches when you said that.” Trout shook his head in genuine disbelief. “I know you’ve dated some lowlifes over the years, Dez, but how drunk were you when you thought dating Charlie Pink-eye was a good idea?”

“He doesn’t like to be called that.”

“I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like. Charlie’s a psychopath. So’s his brother and so’s his dad. Didn’t his old man kill Charlie’s mother?”

“It was never proved. Might have been suicide. But what does that matter, Billy? We’re not going there so I can give him a blow job. We need supplies and I know that if I explain the situation, he’ll help us. And if we need to, he’ll let us stay there.”

Trout began to fire back a crushing reply, but the driver called out, “We’re coming up on it.”

The bus rounded a curve in the road and there it was. A tall double fence encircled a plot of land that had to be a mile per side. The heavy-gauge rolling gate was peeled back on its hinges, the pipe frame twisted into a useless curl. The vehicle that had hit it, a Staples delivery truck, was still wrapped inside the gate like a spider caught in a web. The driver’s door was open and splashed with black blood.

“No … no … no…” said Dez under her breath.

In the middle of the property was a massive one-story building made from dull gray stone blocks. As Dez had said there were no windows at all, but along one side there were bays for fifty trucks. A dozen trucks were backed into bays. There were a dozen cars parked haphazardly in the lot, some crumpled together. One sat there burning in the dying drizzle.

“Oh … shit…” breathed Trout.

There were zombies everywhere.

Dozens of them.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

151 FIRST SIDE

FORT PITT BOULEVARD

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Alex Jay Berman stood on the balcony of his high-rise apartment and watched Pittsburgh burn. His wife held his hand and her grip was like a vise. So tight that he knew she would never let go.

Never.

Screams rose up from below, and Alex bent forward to look down. Twenty-three stories below, moving through patches of sunlight and shadow, the crowds surged. From up here it was impossible to tell who was infected and who was not.

Or at least not yet.

Everyone was in motion.

Cars and trucks moved through the crowds and from up here they looked like leaves buffeted along atop a moving stream. Alex wondered how many of those people the vehicles rolled over. Up hear you couldn’t hear the sound of breaking bones.

Only the screams.

And the gunfire.

And the explosions.

Those were continual.

The rains had dwindled to nothing and then faded as the sun burned through the clouds. The sky above was pretty and blue. A bright blue. Like the summer skies of his boyhood. Pretty. Birds fly up there, far above the sounds of dying from below.

Behind him, on the other side of the closed French doors, fists beat on the glass. Small sounds made by small fists.

Alex did not turn to look. He had done many things in his life, some brave, some crazy, but he was absolutely sure it would take a greater insanity and far more courage than he possessed to turn and look through that glass. He could not do that.

His wife sobbed.

Once, a deep sound that was filled with everything either of them ever needed to say.

Except for one more thing.

Alex turned to his wife and smiled at her.

“I love you,” he said. “And I always will.”

Her tears glittered like jewels in the sunlight.

Still holding hands they stepped off the balcony ledge.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE

SAPPHIRE FOODS

ROUTE 40

FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

“What do we do?” asked the driver of the bus.

The lead bus idled in the short curving driveway, the others were still around the bend. So far the infected in the parking lot had not reacted to the bus. They were all close to the building, which was hundreds of yards away.

“We have three choices,” Sam said quickly when Dez joined them. “First choice is we bug out now and take our chances with the supplies we have. It’s less than a day to Asheville.”

“Sure,” said Dez bitterly, “if the roads are clear. If people are going apeshit—and you know damn well they are—then those roads could be jammed and those buses can’t exactly go off-road. It could take a day or it could take a week. And we don’t have a week’s worth of food and water. Nothing close to it. Most of that stuff got left behind at the school.”

“Okay … second choice is my team draws the dead off to one side, away from the building while you park the buses and off-load everyone through the loading bays. Then we make this home base.”

“Good call,” said Trout. “Right, Dez? You said this place has plenty of food and water and their own generators.”

Dez chewed her lip as she considered it. “There’s probably enough fuel in the generators for maybe a week. Ten days at the outside. After that the lights and heat and everything else shuts down. There are also no windows. Good for security, but once the lights are out it’s a big, black box. And there are two bathrooms but no showers. If it was a week, maybe, but since we don’t know how long … and since we have no way of telling how many of those
things
are going come sniffing around, we could be well and truly fucked if we get trapped in there.”

“Agreed.” Sam sighed and nodded. “Then that leaves the third choice. Plan A, I guess. We load as much as we can and we get back on the road.”

They watched the zombies in the parking lot.

“Can we actually
do
that with them hanging around?” asked Trout.

“No. We’d need to take them out. I count—what? Thirty, thirty-two? They’re spaced out … we can take them down.”

“And how many more will come looking to see what all the shooting’s about?”

Sam nodded. “Which means we need to work mighty damn fast.”

“Hey,” said Trout, snapping his fingers. “You black ops guys do assassinations and stuff, right? Don’t you have silencers?

“First,” said Dez impatiently, “they’re called sound suppressors.”

“And second,” said Sam, “we didn’t bring them because this wasn’t that kind of job.”

“Oh.” Trout felt foolish, but then something else occurred to him. “Don’t we have to check the building first before we go in? Who’s going to do that while you clear out the yard?”

“My team gets to do both,” said Sam wearily. Then he brightened. “And I think I know a way to speed the process.”

He outlined it to Dez, who approved. Then Sam touched his earbud and explained the situation and the plan to his remaining team members. Trout couldn’t hear their replies, but he doubted they were any happier about this than he was.

But it all began happening very fast.

Dez told the driver of the first bus to go into the lot. The other buses followed. Sam jumped out and began walking alongside the bus, which proceeded at a pace slow enough to keep pace with him. Boxer, Shortstop, and Gypsy did the same.

The plan was simple. The buses would enter, cut right, and follow the inside of the fence all the way around the building, staying so close that none of the infected could get between the fence and the buses. The engine sound drew the infected like a bright light draws moths, and soon the dead were shambling across the lot toward the lead bus. Sam and the Boy Scouts walked without haste toward them and as each zombie came within twenty feet, one of the soldiers put it down with a single shot to the head. It quickly became a rhythm. Easy and mechanical. Though to Trout, watching from the lead bus, there was a different kind of horror to this. The zombies closed in, they were shot, the convoy inched along, over and over again. Aboard the buses, people started cheering with each kill. As if this was a game and the number counter jumped up with each death. As if the infected were no more real than animated monsters in a video game. As if each of those infected had not been a person hours ago.

It shocked and repulsed Trout.

Lucifer 113 had stolen the life from these people. And this … the necessary killing took away their posthumous sham of being alive. But the reaction of the people on the bus, the cheers like spectators at the Roman circus, seemed to strip away the humanity of each infected. It reduced them to things rather than people.

Somehow this indifference, or detachment or madness or whatever it was, frightened Trout every bit as much as the plague itself. As each cheer went up, louder than the first, Trout thought he could glimpse a future where the survivors of this placed no value whatsoever on human life.