Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (51 page)

Price closed his eyes and swayed. He murmured three words he would have mocked anyone else for saying.

“Thank you, God…”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY

ROUTE 80

FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

When they were sure it was safe, the convoy stopped in the middle of the road.

Trout nearly collapsed over the wheel. Strange, bad lights were bursting all around him and he saw darkness trying to close in around the edges of his vision. He took several long breaths and gradually—gradually—reclaimed himself.

Jenny jerked the door open and went running toward the front-end loader. Big Jake DeGroot climbed down, snatched her up and swung her around. She was like a toy in his massive arms. Their simple joy seemed to put a tiny swatch of color into the day.

Behind him, children were snuffling and crying. With fear and perhaps with relief.

Thumps atop the bus told Trout that Dez and the soldiers were climbing down. He hauled himself out of the seat and staggered outside to find Dez.

She was the first to come down and she ran to him and wrapped her strong arms around him. She was stained with gunpowder residue and sweat, and Trout could not help kissing her lips and her face over and over again. Then he held her as Gypsy and Boxer climbed down.

Trout looked up, waiting for Shortstop and Sam.

Waiting.

“No,” said Dez, and there were tears in her eyes. Gypsy leaned her head on Boxer’s shoulders and they sobbed quietly together.

He stared at her without understanding what she meant.

“What—wait, Dez, where are they? What happened?”

“Didn’t you see? Back at the loading bay?”

“See what?”

“They
died
, Billy,” she said wretchedly. “Both of them. We climbed up onto the bus, but they didn’t have time. Those bastards were all over us. God, Billy. I tried to pull Sam up. I tried…”

She sobbed brokenly and beat on his chest. It hurt, but he did not care.

Sam Imura?

Gone?

Trout didn’t know how to process that. Imura was so tough, so capable. Trout was sure that he was the leading man in this drama, the hero that would save everyone.

Gone. Off screen.

Simply edited out of the story.

Shortstop, too, and Trout realized that he didn’t even know the man’s name. But Sam … even though the soldier had only been with them for a few hours, he’d become a friend. They trusted him. They knew him.

Now he was gone, and Sam was gone.

The heroes of the story were gone and Trout had not even seen it. Somehow that was worse than if he’d witnessed it. These men was simply gone from the world. Dragged down. Consumed.

No … worse …

Even now the thing that had been Sam Imura would have risen. What was left of him would have risen and maybe it had been part of that horde of things that had pursued the convoy.

It was too horrible to imagine.

It was all too horrible.

Who would be the heroes now?

He held on to Dez, who was frayed and worn and nearly spent.

Who was going to ride to the rescue now?

While the sun burned through the last of the clouds and painted the landscape with yellow light, Dez and Billy clung to each other and wept.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE

ZABRISKE POINT BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION AND PRODUCTION STATION

DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

Dick Price and his senior staff sat in a silent line, each of them bent forward, their faces washed to a pale blue by the lights of computer monitors. On each computer pages of data flashed by. Research notes. Developmental procedure records. Laboratory tests on animals. Formulae. Data on the transgenesis of a dozen parasites. Dosage tables. Biological warfare applications. Modifications for use on death row prisoners. A complete medical history of condemned serial murderer Homer Gibbon.

It was all there.

All of it.

One hundred and ninety-two thousand pages of information.

Some of it was in Russian. Some in Lithuanian. Some in Polish. Some in Latin.

Some in English.

Some written in the hieroglyphics of molecular chemistry.

Parts of the data were old, scans of handwritten documents dating back to the early 1970s. Other parts were very recent, as new as five days ago, which meant that it was one day before Homer Gibbon had been given Lucifer 113 instead of the drugs meant to kill him during the court-mandated lethal injection.

Two days before Homer Gibbon woke up in the mortician’s suite at Hartnup’s Transition Estate.

Three days before the army dropped their fuel-air bombs.

Four days before Pittsburgh was overrun and subsequently burned.

Five days before the mass outbreaks that turned Manhattan into a war zone. Before Paris was carpet-bombed by the French Air Force. Before the prime minister of Great Britain ordered all of the bridges spanning the Thames to be blown.

Five days before the Air Force began exploding missiles packed with payloads of raw Reaper over Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, and a dozen other cities. Each bomb was precisely timed to detonate in the path of prevailing winds that would carry it over large portions of the most densely populated areas.

That was today. The Reaper mutagen was in the wind now and soon they’d all know if it would slow Lucifer’s spread. Or, if God had any mercy left for His children, stop it.

Price’s team had worked without sleep for days. Reading Volker’s information, making sense of what was clearly the work of a man who was both brilliant and insane.

An actual mad scientist.

Price had tried to laugh at that, to find one moment of comic relief in which the irony would vent some of the crushing tension. But he couldn’t. When he’d tried to laugh he cried instead.

Scott Blair kept calling. Over and over and over again, demanding answers.

Demanding hope.

Price’s cell rang again and Price snatched it up with a snarl and very nearly smashed it on the floor. Instead he pushed the green button with a trembling thumb.

“P-Price…”

There was no immediate reply.

“Hello?”

The only thing he heard from the other end of the all was the sound of someone quietly weeping.

“Mr. Blair?” said Price gently. “Scott…?”

He heard a sniff and then Scott Blair’s voice. “Price … Jesus Christ, what have you done?”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Before Blair could answer someone screamed. Price and everyone turned away from their line of computers and saw one of the techs—a woman whose name Price couldn’t remember in that moment—standing before the bank of TV monitors on the far wall. She wrapped her arms over her head and sank slowly to her knees. She kept screaming.

Each of the monitors was set to local news in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Newark, Omaha, Chicago, and Miami. The cities with the largest populations where there were outbreaks. The cities most heavily hit by Lucifer. The cities over which Reaper missiles had been detonated a handful of hours ago.

Until now there had been a pattern to the outbreaks. A predictable speed.

Until now there had been a splinter of hope buried in Dick Price’s soul.

Until now.

In those areas where Reaper was interacting with Lucifer, the rate of infection had shot up. The degree of murderous ferocity had doubled. Tripled. The reporters on the ground were letting the pictures tell the story that they were no longer able—or perhaps willing—to report.

The cycle of bite to infection to death to reanimation was now so much faster.

Too fast.

Way too fast.

The infection was out of all control.

Out of any possibility of control.

Reaper, inadequately tested, not at all ready for deployment, had been used by the military in a desperate gamble to introduce mutation to a perfect weapon. If something was perfect then any change would, by definition, create flaws in that perfection. That was the logic, and it was as flawed as the science.

Dick Price stared at the screen and now he understood the last secret in Volker’s science. The most important secret.

Lucifer, for all its power and aggression, had not been perfect.

Better than all generations before it, but far from perfect.

Until now.

Until something allowed—even encouraged it—to mutate further. That one step further until it was, without doubt, perfect.

Until Reaper.

The phone fell from Price’s fingers and shattered on the floor.

The woman kept screaming.

Everyone else began screaming.

It seemed like the only possible response. The only appropriate response. So Dick Price screamed, too.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

ROUTE 81

NEAR HUNGRY MOTHER STATE PARK

SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA

The traffic on the highway started off as bad, became worse, became impossible. Dez and Trout crouched in the exit well and studied the road through the big windshield. Jake DeGroot was behind the wheel of the first bus, and Dez touched his arm and pointed to a small side road blocked by a chain and a sign saying that it was reserved for forestry service vehicles only.

“There,” she said. “Let’s get out of this shit. Pull off.”

“What about the chain?” asked Trout.

“Fuck the chain,” she said. “Jake, get us out of this shit and I’ll deal with the chain.”

Jake edged the bus that way, but the traffic was jammed tight and moved forward an inch at a time. He hit the horn, got nothing, then jammed his hand down on it in a continuous blare. Still got nothing.

Jake shook his head. “It’s too tight, there’s not enough room.”

Dez snarled and jerked the handle that worked the door, snatched up a combat shotgun and jumped out.

There was a big Tundra to the right of the bus, blocking their way. Dez used her scuffed knuckles to rap on the driver’s window.

“Hey, buddy, how about pull off so we can get through?”

The driver, a big man with a John Deere cap, refused to even look at her. He had snow-white hair and a mean-looking face. The man riding shotgun was equally muscular and twice as ugly. He felt for the pistol in his pocket.

Dez tapped again, much harder. “Yo! Dickhead, you deaf or something?”

The driver raised one hand, forefinger extended and still didn’t look at her.

“Dez,” called Trout as he stepped down from the bus, “be careful.”

Dez ignored him. With a grunt of angry effort, she slammed the shotgun’s stock into the driver’s window. It imploded, showering the driver and the man in the passenger seat with safety glass.

That did it.

Both doors opened and the two men got out.

“The fuck you think you’re doing, you cu—”

That was as far as he got before Dez Fox hit him across the face with the rifle stock. The blow ripped a bloody gash in the man’s jaw and whipped his head around so hard that he spun into the side of the Tundra. His forehead hit the open doorframe and he dropped right onto his kneecaps.

The other man came running around the car, fists raised to smash Dez.

Billy Trout shoved the barrel of his borrowed pistol into the man’s ear.

“Touch her and I’ll blow your fucking head off,” he said.

He heard himself speak the words, felt his mouth say them, and he did not recognize the voice. It was him and it wasn’t. There was such cold honesty there and in that moment he knew that he would, if he had to, shoot this man.

It sickened him to realize that he’d come to this point.

But it made him feel stronger, too.

For maybe the first time since this thing started.

His arm was out straight, the gun in his fist, and it was rock steady.

Dez turned and saw the gun and then looked at him. Into his eyes. A tiny smile flickered across her lips. There and gone.

To the passenger, Dez said, “You’re going to help your butt-buddy into your car, and then you’re going to pull off and let us pass. That’s not a request. We got a couple hundred kids in those buses.”

The man with the gun to his head looked terrified. He licked his lips. “We have to get out, too. I got a kid at home. Barney has three kids. We’re just trying to get home.”

Dez’s eyes stayed hard. “All you had to do was pull over and let us pass. The fuck’s wrong with you?”

“God … don’t touch me,” begged the man, shrinking back from her. “Please. Don’t touch me.”

That’s when Trout noticed that no one else had gotten out of their cars. With all of the traffic stalled for so long, somebody should have gotten out. There were always people who viewed traffic jams like this as impromptu tailgate parties. But everywhere he looked, everywhere Dez looked, the people were hunched inside their cars, the windows up, eyes wide with fear, faces locked into expressions of desperation. Trout almost laughed at the absurdity of it. These people were fleeing in slow motion. Unwilling to get out of their cars, they sat there, waiting for the traffic to move, maybe praying for it to inch forward, and every single one of them terrified at the thought of contact with the people around them. Who was infected? Was the thing on the radio here?

Slow motion panic.

It was a brand-new concept, and it kept turning over and over in Trout’s mind until he couldn’t help but laugh.

Dez shot him an angry, worried look. So did the frightened passenger, and the people in the closest cars.

The only sound on the whole road was the sound of that laugh.

And, without support to prop it up, Trout’s laughter slowly collapsed. Almost into sobs, but he coughed his throat clear and stepped back until he sat down hard on the entrance step of the bus, the pistol hanging limply from his hand.

“Billy?” ventured Dez. “You okay?”

He wanted to explain it to her, to see if she’d laugh, too; but he didn’t. It would be too much like telling a dirty joke in church.

“Don’t hurt him” was all he said.

The passenger looked from Trout to Dez.

“Move the car,” said Dez quietly.

The man nodded. He picked up his friend and helped him around to the passenger side, belted him in, closed the door, and came around to the driver’s side. While he was doing all of that, Dez leaned in and used her palm to brush the glass off the seat. She stepped back to the let the man slide in behind the wheel.