Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (52 page)

“I’ll lose my place in line,” he said.

Dez shook her head. “No, you won’t.”

She backed away from the car and turned in a slow circle to look through windshields at the other drivers. The shotgun was in her hands, barrel sweeping along at the level of headlights and grills.

“We’re getting off this road,” she said, pitching her voice very loud. “This car is going to pull off to let the buses out. Anyone else in the way needs to do the same. Once we’re out of here, you can all fill in, but the cars that move get their places back.”

Trout thought it was one of the most surreal things he’d ever heard. It was like Dez was announcing the rules before a school-yard game of dodgeball. It was all done in an otherwise absolute silence.

Dez seemed also to realize how absurd it was and Trout saw different expressions war on her face. Dez took a breath and in her best cop voice, her voice of officialdom and authority, said, “This thing isn’t here. No one in these cars is infected. If they were we’d know it already. You’re safe. Your families are safe. Stay in your cars and when the road clears out keep heading south. There’s a big safety camp in Asheville, North Carolina. Head there. You hear me? Head there.”

No one said a thing. The windows stayed up. Hands gripped steering wheels. Eyes were fixed on her.

“You’ll be okay,” shouted Dez. “Everyone will be okay.”

Nothing. Not a word, not a toot of a horn, not even a nod from the watching people.

In a quiet voice, Trout said, “Come on, Dez. You did what you could.”

Behind her the Tundra revved its engines and began a turn between the tightly packed cars. At first it looked impossible in the nearly bumper-to-bumper crush. Then the car in front of it rolled forward a couple of feet; and the car behind it did the same. Even with that it was still tight, but the Tundra began the turn. Dez walked past it to the forest service road. She swung the shotgun up, aimed it at the lock and blew it to shiny metal splinters. The chain fell away and the sound of the blast echoed along the road.

Trout watched people flinch, but otherwise they sat in their eerie, watchful stillness.

The shoulder was blocked with cars, too, but with Dez calling directions and banging on hoods with the shotgun, the cars shifted by slow, painful inches forward and at angles until after ten excruciating minutes there was a lane just big enough for the bus. She waved to Jake, who put it in gear and crept with infinite slowness around the wall of cars on his right. At one point his bumper scraped the trunk of a VW, but if the driver of the car cared about it, he kept it to himself.

“Come on, come on,” Dez said between her teeth as she walked backward, guiding Jake’s turn. Trout had gotten out of the bus to watch the other side.

The stillness of everything else except the big yellow bus continued to gnaw at his nerves. As the first bus finally cleared the road and rambled through onto the access lane, he realized what it was. Nothing about this fit into any workable scenario for a world he understood. This slow-motion panic, the absolute fear of human contact, the weight of the disaster that pressed down on them, the terror of what might be behind them—all of that was new. Sure, there were corollaries to different elements of it, but as a whole this was a new thing. A new pattern. And he greatly feared that it was part of a new world.

Or, perhaps, a new world order.

A new age of the world. He was sure it was something like that, though his mind rebelled at a specific definition because it all felt too big, too grandiose.

Except that it wasn’t.

It was unprecedented.

This was no longer the world he and Dez and the children on the bus and the people in these cars knew.

Since the release of Lucifer 113 it had become a different world. And in every bad way that mattered, it seemed to him that this new world did not belong to these people. Or to any people. This world now belonged to the Devil.

Maybe it wasn’t the biblical Devil, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure if that distinction even mattered.

Lucifer
,
by any definition, in any form, owned this world now.

“God help us,” he murmured as the line of buses moved slowly past. He saw the pale faces of terrified children, and the blank and vacant eyes of those for whom terror was a minor milestone left behind in a distant country. “God help us.”

But if anyone listened to that prayer, no voice offered even the ghost of a promise to Billy Trout.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

HUNGRY MOTHER STATE PARK

SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA

They bumped and thumped along the access road for nearly five miles until they came to a forest service station near the crest of the mountain. There was a small building and a large parking lot with various pieces of heavy equipment. A road grader, flatbeds for hauling downed trees, a dump truck piled with gravel.

There were no people and no personal cars.

Dez, Boxer, and Gypsy approached the building, guns up and out, but they found nothing. The door was open, the lights were on, but the station was deserted. Jake led the way and the buses pulled into the lot and lined up in a row. Somehow Trout found it disturbing that the row was so neat. Each of the adults driving the buses parked in a precise line with the other vehicles. There was something wrong about that, but he couldn’t decide what it was.

A disconnection from reality, perhaps. He kept it to himself.

The last vehicle in the convoy was a flatbed truck they’d stolen from a construction site a few miles from Sapphire Foods. Jake had loaded his Big Bird onto it and one of the parents helped him and drove the big rig. He parked the rig with the same precision.

Maybe they’re trying to impose order on chaos,
thought Trout. That was probably it, though it felt a bit like tidying the furniture and vacuuming the rugs during a house fire.

Trout got off the bus and waited for Dez to come out. He watched the parents and teachers begin lining up the kids for trips to the bathroom in the station. Some—those that couldn’t wait—were escorted to the tall grass on the far side of the parking lot. Jake, his niece Jenny, and a few of the adults who had guns, began fanning out to stand perimeter watch. As if that was something they’d always done. As if that was somehow normal.

It is now,
he told himself. And that wrenched the knife in his heart another quarter turn.

Dez came out of the station, looked around for him, then came over, her shoulders slumped, face haggard.

“Anything?” he asked. “You were in there a while.”

“There’s a radio,” she said.

“And?”

She simply shook her head.

They walked together to the edge of the drop-off. He could barely walk and needed to lean on her for the seventy paces to the bench that offered a beautiful view of the mountains and the sky. On any other day it would be breathtaking.

Down below, the traffic on the highway crawled.

“At least it’s moving,” said Dez.

“Yeah, there’s that.”

Neither of them could manufacture any convincing optimism.

“What did the radio say?”

From where they sat they could hear the sobs of the children and the constant murmur of adult voices as the parents and teachers did everything they could to convince the kids that it was all going to be all right.

Trout marveled at how similar a promise sounded to a lie. Or was it all just wishful thinking?

“Dez?”

She removed the walkie-talkie from her belt and turned up the gain. It babbled at them in a dozen overlapping voices. Military and civilian authorities, and even some militia groups whose shortwave signals were breaking into the flow. It was all hysterical and most of the voices were asking for backup, for relief, for medical attention, for emergency services, for help.

For answers.

“The radio’s the same. No one has any answers,” she said. “Most people don’t know about Homer or Volker or any of that. All they know is that there’s a plague and nobody seems to be able to stop it. There’s a lot of bullshit, too. People saying it’s the Rapture, shit like that.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

“Don’t start, Billy.”

“Sorry.”

He bent forward and put his head in his hands. Some of the glass cuts on his scalp and arms hadn’t yet been seen to, and he didn’t care. Dez sat beside him, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, her arms mottled with powder burns, her knuckles as raw and red as her eyes as she methodically reloaded her pistol and shotgun.

Slowly, painfully, Trout raised his head as a flight of six fighter jets screamed overhead into the northeast.

“Thunderbolts,” said Dez automatically.

“Where do you think they’re headed?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “Charleston, maybe.”

He nodded.

There were more than a hundred thousand people in Charleston.

Maybe
, he corrected himself. He didn’t really know if that was true anymore.

Dez got up and went back to the bus, then returned with a bottle of water, his camera bag, and a map. She set the bag down in front of him.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“In case you want to use it.”

He shook his head.

They left it there as she opened the map and spread it out over their laps.

He studied her blue eyes for a few moments. He saw so many things in those eyes. A fear so deep that it looked like it was cracking the hinges of her sanity. He saw ghosts in her eyes. JT, the dead children, her colleagues and neighbors in Stebbins, the people who had died on the buses. Each of them had left its specter in her mind, polluting her, driving fissures into her. Trout knew with absolute certainty that if Dez had to live on this edge for much longer, she was going to break. Those qualities that made her so strong—compassion, her love for the children, her need to save as many as she could—they were each failures waiting to happen. A person cannot be sustained on a diet of their own failure, even if that failure is not their fault. This thing was so big, so vast that it even consumed people like Sam Imura. What hope did Dez really have?

He almost took her in his arms, almost made the unforgiveable error of offering comfort and a shoulder to someone who was right there at the edge of her control.

Billy Trout almost made that mistake, but he didn’t.

Some instinct stopped him even as he began to raise his hands. It was as if JT Hammond stood behind him and bent to whisper advice in his ear. JT, who was more of a father to Dez than her real one had been. JT, who was, very likely, the best person either of them had ever known.

She needs to be strong,
Trout imagined he heard JT say.
She needs to take these kids home.

Trout took a breath and let it out.

“Asheville, huh?”

“That’s what Sam said.”

“Okay,” said Trout, “then it’s Asheville.”

He did not dare ask what they would do if the infection had reached Asheville. That was a war they could fight on another day. If they had the chance.

For now, Asheville was a direction.

It was far away from Pittsburgh.

It was in the mountains, so maybe that would be something.

Trout didn’t know and really couldn’t make any guesses. It was a direction, a place to head to. And that felt much better than having a place to run from. So much better.

They heard a sound like thunder and looked up to see more aircraft. Helicopters this time. Dozens of them.

Maybe hundreds.

Black Hawks and Apaches. And the big cargo choppers, the Chinooks. An armada of the air. Powerful, threatening. They filled the sky, flying in waves, heading north, and the clouds seemed to fall back before them, revealing blues skies that offered at least the illusion of promise.

Trout wanted to feel hope when he looked at them, but it was slow in coming.

“The storm’s over,” he said, hoping it meant more than a weather report.

Dez watched the helicopters fly across the clearing sky.

“Will it be enough?” Trout asked.

Dez shook her head. “I don’t know.”

After a thoughtful moment, Dez nudged the camera bag toward him.

“I told you, I don’t—”

“You need to file a report,” she interrupted.

“Why? What’s the point?”

Dez bent and unzipped the case, removed the camera, studied it, and found the record button. She rested a finger over it. “This isn’t everywhere yet,” she said. “It’s spreading, but it isn’t everywhere yet.”

“I know, but—”

“You need to tell people, Billy. You need to
keep
telling people. You need to tell them everything we know. What it is. How it spreads. How to fight them. Everything.”

“Who’s going to listen?”

Dez shrugged. The drone of the helicopters was fading to a rumor in the sky. “What does it matter? Somebody will. Maybe if all we do is get the word out to a few, that’ll matter. Maybe we’ll help some people get through this.”

“
We’ll
get through it.”

Dez smiled faintly and nodded. “Then it’s on us to help whoever we can. However we can. Everything’s going to shit, Billy. We can’t be a part of that. We can’t be a part of the end. We have to be a part of whatever survives. We have to help people so they know how to fight back. Am I … am I making sense?”

He stared at her for several seconds, watching her eyes, seeing the lights deep inside the blue. Loving her for this.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re making sense.”

After a while Dez took his hand. Then Billy Trout reached out and pulled her gently into his arms. Not to comfort her.

He kissed her with all the heat and hope and love that he had left inside.

The kiss she gave back was scalding.

When they stopped, gasping and flushed, Trout murmured, “I love you.”

She said, “Now, Billy? Really? God, you’re such a girl.”

Laughing out loud, she walked back to the bus.

CHAPTER ONE-HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR

SUNSET HOLLOW GATED COMMUNITY

MARIPOSA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

Tom Imura ran and the night burned around him.