Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (8 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Desdemona Fox pushed herself back from Billy. The movement was abrupt, as if she’d suddenly reached the limit of the grief she allowed herself, though Trout knew it was more than that. People were watching. Civilians. And Dez was the only person of any authority left, even if that authority no longer carried any official weight. There was, after all, no Stebbins County Police Department anymore. All of the other officers and even all of the support staff were as dead as the mayor, the town selectmen, the director of public works, and the chief of the fire department. There was, in fact, nothing left of Stebbins except the small knot of people here and the real estate on which they stood.

Even so, Dez had to play her part. She knew, as he did, that her badge and gun, her uniform and the personal power everyone knew she had, formed the rails in a frail fence between order and chaos. If she lost it, then these people would likely lose it, too. And if that happened, then none of the children upstairs had a chance.

Not one chance.

Dez kept her face averted while she went through the mechanical process of removing the magazine from her Glock and thumbing in fresh rounds to replace those she’d fired. She did not bother to pick up her spent brass. Everyone stood mute as they watched this, and when she slapped the magazine back into place they all flinched. The face Dez showed them as she holstered her gun was composed, hard, uncompromising, and totally closed. If anyone noticed the drying tear tracks on her face they dared not mention them.

Dez nodded to two men who stood slightly apart from the group. “Bob, you and Luke get some of those big plastic trash bags from the kitchen. We have to wrap the bodies and get them out of here.”

The men stared at her and then past her to the room where the killing had been done. They didn’t move.

“Now,” she snapped, and they flinched again.

Bob opened his mouth, maybe to protest or maybe to ask a question, but then he caught the look in Dez’s eyes and answered with a curt nod. He tapped Luke on the arm and they turned and hurried across the gym floor.

Dez appraised the rest of the group.

“Listen to me,” she said in a quiet, dangerous tone. “The rest of you are going to search this place. Again. I don’t know who searched down here, but because some assfuck didn’t look in a closet or a closed office another kid’s dead. You hear me? Someone killed that kid and I’m not talking about the dead son of a bitch who bit him. For now I don’t give a shit who searched down here. But we need to search this whole building again and that means every nook and fucking cranny. You hear me? And if another kid gets hurt because one of you jerkoffs didn’t do your job, then God help you because when I get done with you there won’t be enough left to feed to the fucking zombies. Anyone think I’m joking, anyone has anything to say about that, say it now and I’ll shove it down your throat with your teeth. This isn’t a debate. Now move!”

They scattered like scared birds. As they moved away, Trout saw that their eyes were now filled with a different kind of fear. Not of the dead but of the living. Of her. Everyone in town knew Dez Fox. Most of the people in Stebbins didn’t like her, and Trout knew that a lot of them wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire, but no one could say that she wasn’t a good cop. There were a lot of stories floating around town about how Dez treated wife beaters and child abusers. None of those stories were exaggerations, Trout knew.

Add to that the things she’d done here in the school. She and JT, her partner. Partner, mentor, best friend. Father figure.

JT was outside, his body infected by a bite and torn by heavy-caliber machine-gun bullets. He’d sacrificed himself to help clear the school of the infected, and he’d gone down fighting to keep the infected children from being mauled by the dead before the military could use their guns to end all pain for them.

Trout wrestled with that, understanding on one level that the slaughter was necessary and even merciful in a twisted way, but on all other levels it was perverse. No matter from which angle it was viewed, the innocents were the victims.

Now the last surviving children of Stebbins County were here in this building. No more of them should have died.

The men hurried away, splitting into two-person teams, not saying anything until they were in the stairwell on the far side of the cavernous gym. All of them were bigger than Dez. Most of them were tough, hardened farmers and factory workers, some were even combat veterans. No one said a damn word to Dez Fox.

Dez stood there and watched them go. Trout saw that her whole body was trembling. Rage and pain.

He wanted to take her into his arms again.

That would probably earn him an ass-kicking, too.

So instead he said, “Dez—what do you want me to do? How can I help?”

It took a long time before she reacted, as if she was off in some distant place and there was so much distance to travel to get back to where he was. Her head turned slowly until she faced him, but even then there was no immediate recognition in her eyes.

She said, “What?”

“How can I help?” he repeated gently.

“I…” she began, but faltered. She shook her head, then without another word, Dez crossed the big empty room and vanished into shadows.

Billy Trout stood watching the emptiness of the open doorway to the stairwell.

“Shit,” he said softly.

He found a chair and dragged it over to a spot near where the child and the dead Mr. Maines lay. He didn’t want to see them, but he felt it was important to stay with them until Bob and Luke returned with their makeshift body bags. When he tried to understand this self-imposed vigil he found no useful answers. No insights.

He checked his sat phone to see if there was anything from Goat, but got no signal down here in the basement. It made him wonder how the story was spreading. Was it time to do another broadcast.

This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse.

That was what he’d said. It hadn’t sounded silly at the time. He meant it to be shocking. Now it sounded strange to Billy. It was less than one hour since the military attacked the school.

And yet it felt like forever. Like he and Dez and the others had always been here; like this was one of those nightmares he sometimes had where he felt trapped in a twisted funhouse experience that never ended.

Reporting live from the apocalypse.

Shock tactics or straight reporting?

The line seemed badly blurred right now.

Goat had told him that the whole thing had gone viral, but Trout didn’t know what that actually meant in terms of the survival of the people here and the handling of the outbreak. Was it all over?

Was his part in it over?

Trout was a career reporter, even though that career had dumped him back into his hometown of Stebbins. A one-stoplight dirt stain on the Pennsylvania map. Rarely had he gotten so much as a whiff of a significant story. Even his coverage of the execution of convicted serial murderer Homer Gibbon was not star-making. There were too many better-known reporters there. At best the pieces he filed for Regional Satellite News were folded into stories by bigger—and very likely better—journalists around the country.

But now he was the story, and that was a paradigm shift so radical it stripped all the gears.

He sat on the rickety folding chair, staring at the shadows, listening to the sounds of an old building settling into its own grave. He could still feel the dried tear tracks on his own cheeks. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the school, out there in the black night, he could hear the heavy drone of helicopters, the menacing
throp-throp-throp
of their blades.

“Ah, Dez…” he said softly. He thought about what this was doing to her. Hurting her, aging her.

Desdemona Fox was the most beautiful woman in the world to Trout. Tall, fit, powerful, blond, with great bones and every curve on his personal must-have list. Curves he knew more intimately than anyone. Granted he was far from the only person—or even the most recent person—to have explored that landscape, but he was the one who loved them and loved her. Not in that order.

They’d been an item more times than he could count, and they’d both logged mileage in breaking each other’s heart. The last time had been a doozy. He’d proposed marriage and the next day he walked in on her with a biker. That was her reply to the proposal. Classic Dez. Why cross a bridge when you could burn it?

Since then, she’d been a raging bitch to him. And, to hear others tell it, she’d been a raging bitch to the whole world. Even more viciously defensive than normal, which was saying quite a lot. There was, however, a corresponding increase in her efficiency as a police officer. She wrote more tickets, arrested more drunks, broke up more bar fights, and kicked more ass than before, all of it with a nasty fuck-you smile on her pretty lips.

Then the devil came to Stebbins County.

Even now Billy found it hard to reconcile the fact that his town was being destroyed by something conceived half a world away during the Cold War. It was spy movie stuff. It was horror movie stuff.

He wondered what the death toll was here in town. Seven thousand people had lived here. Were all of them dead now?

Was that even possible?

Add to that the kids bused in from neighboring districts and the parents who had come to get them out of the path of the storm. What was that—another thousand, maybe two?

Someone else’s madness had brought wholesale death to town.

Except in Stebbins County “death” wasn’t death anymore.

He put his face in his hands. Not to weep, but to try and hide.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WHAT THE FINKE THINKS

WTLK LIVE TALK RADIO

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Gavin muted the mike and hit the intercom. “How are we on calls?”

“We have them lined up from here to next year,” said Gavin’s producer, happy with this kind of call-in volume. “Sending you a hot one now.”

Gavin Finke punched a button to take the call. “And we’re on with Brenda from Harrisburg.”

“Hi, Gavin, longtime listener, first-time caller.”

“Glad you picked up the phone, Brenda. So, tell me, what do
you
think is happening in Stebbins County?”

“Zombies,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Zombies.”

“You’re saying ‘zombies.’”

“Yes. Zombies.”

“In Stebbins County.

“Oh, yes. They’re all over Stebbins County.”

“Zombies?”

“Zombies.”

“Oooo-kay, this a new one even for
What the Finke Thinks.
Tell me, Brenda, what makes you think there are zombies at large in western Pennsylvania?”

“My nephew told me.”

“Your nephew? And does he see zombies on any kind of regular basis?”

“Oh, no. He’s a soldier. He’s with the National—”

“Sorry, Brenda, I have to cut you off,” said Gavin. “I’m being told we are going to have a statement from the president of the United States. Going live to Washington…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE OVAL OFFICE

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

“Mr. President?” said the cameraman. “We’re on in five, four…”

He finger-counted down the rest of the way and then pointed to the commander in chief, who sat at his desk, neat and tidy and severe.

“Hello, everybody,” said the president, his voice deep and sober. “There are two issues confronting us this evening. The first is the major storm that has developed in western Pennsylvania. This storm, now being called Superstorm Zelda, has exceeded the predictions made by the National Weather Service. The severity and duration of the storm has caught everyone by surprise. However, I just received a full briefing from our emergency response teams, including FEMA, and agencies that are going to be helpful in the response and recovery efforts—the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”

Behind the teleprompter, Scott Blair nodded. He’d helped write this announcement, using his typical hands-on approach. The president had raised objections about much of the content, but in the end had been persuaded to handle things a certain way. In the way that Blair and the Joint Chiefs all agreed was the only way to keep the train on the rails.

“Obviously,” continued the president, reading it verbatim, “everybody is aware at this point that this is going to be a big and powerful storm, and that it is far from over. What were originally estimated to be a line of smaller cells moving behind the main storm front have taken an unfortunate turn and are strengthening. However, all across the region, I think everybody is now able to make appropriate preparations and everyone is taking appropriate actions. I’ve spoken to the governors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia. They have issued emergency declarations. Those have been turned around quickly here in the White House. We have prepositioned assets so that FEMA personnel are working closely with state and local governments. We’re making sure that food and water and emergency generation is available for those communities that are going to be hardest hit. But because of the nature of this storm, we are certain that this is going to be a slow-moving process through a wide swath of the country, and millions of people are going to be affected.”

Beside Blair, Sylvia Ruddy stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest, wearing what the French would call a mouth of disapproval. Blair disliked her because she was far more concerned about party politics and the president’s legacy than she was about actual national security.

“So the most important message that I have for the public right now,” said POTUS, “is please listen to what your state and local officials are saying. When they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate. Do not delay. Don’t pause; don’t question the instructions that are being given, because this is a serious storm and it could potentially have fatal consequences if people haven’t acted quickly.