Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (18 page)

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

When Gerry Dunphries could walk again, Trout took him back to the big classroom and turned him over to Mrs. Madison. The principal wrapped a blanket around Gerry’s shoulders and led him away.

Billy Trout looked at the children. Despite the sound of hammering and people shouting as they worked in teams to fortify the school, some of the kids were actually sleeping. It amazed him. As exhausted as he was, he was absolutely certain that he could not fall asleep. Not now and maybe never again. Too much possibility of things waiting for him in the dark shadows behind closed eyelids.

There was still no word from Goat, and with every passing minute Trout grew more convinced that it somehow meant that everyone in the school had slid from the frying pan directly into the fire.

Just for the hell of it he tried the satellite phone once more.

Nothing.

“Fuck,” he said, then immediately apologized, though none of the kids seemed to have heard or reacted. He spent a few minutes wandering around checking on the kids, tucking blankets more securely around them, studying their faces to fix them in his mind, pulling names out of the air for as many of them as he could. He saw one face, a black-haired chubby little girl with a beautiful face who slept with her arms wrapped around a small pillow, holding it to her chest as if it was a trusted teddy bear. Trout realized that he knew this girl very well but hadn’t seen her in the crowd before. He’d been to her first birthday party, to her christening. To at least five barbecues at her aunt’s house. Her name was Belle, and she was the only niece of Marcia Sloane, the woman who had handled phones and done research for Regional Satellite News. Marcia was a curvy retro-Goth woman, north of forty but always possessed of a timeless sexual appeal that was a legend throughout Stebbins County. Fiercely intelligent, saucy, and the very best of company under any circumstances.

That realization brought with it the memory of the last time he’d seen Marcia. It was yesterday afternoon while Trout was coming back to Stebbins after interviewing Dr. Volker. By then the outbreak had cut all the way across the town. His last image of Marcia was her pale, torn, snarling face as it vanished below the level of his car’s hood while the Explorer ground her into the mud. That had been the start of it for him, the point at which the wild story he’d gotten from Dr. Volker became the irrefutable reality of Billy Trout’s life.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, uncertain whether he was saying it to the girl, for all she’d lost, or to her aunt for what he’d done to her. Or to everyone, for what they were enduring and what lay ahead.

More deeply saddened than ever, Trout turned and drifted back into the hallway. He caught sight of Dez and called out to her. She turned and began walking toward him. They met at the hall’s midpoint, by a 4H trophy case filled with photos of kids with their awards for best piglet, biggest sow, largest pumpkin. Brightest future.

“Is … is Gerry okay?” she asked tentatively.

“He was in bad shape to begin with, Dez. I don’t think this did him any extra harm.”

“You’re a bad fucking liar, Billy.”

“With the very best intentions.”

Dez considered him for a moment. “Guess you do. And I guess I don’t burn up a lot of calories giving you credit for it.”

They looked at the trophies and listened to the hammering. Echoing down from the second floor they heard Uriah Piper and the teacher, Clark, yelling at each other.

“Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“What happens if we can’t get in touch with Goat?”

“We will.”

“No, what if we can’t. What if something’s happened to him? I mean … if the stuff on those flash drives is that important…”

“I don’t think it matters,” said Trout.

“Why not?”

“When I interviewed Dr. Volker yesterday, he seemed to be pretty sure that Lucifer 113 was unstoppable. If there was a cure, or even notes about a possible treatment on those drives, I’m pretty sure he’d have told me.”

“Then why’d he give them to you at all?”

“So someone would have a record.”

She turned. “A record of what?”

Trout didn’t want to answer the question.

“Of what, Billy?”

He could see the ghost of his own reflection in the glass of the trophy case. “A record of how it all ended.”

“How
what
all ended?” she demanded, and then she got it. She grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard enough to hurt. “Jesus Christ, are you saying that Volker thought this was going to
spread
? I mean, really spread? Like a pandemic and shit?”

“That’s what he was afraid of. He thought Homer Gibbon would go right into the ground, buried in a numbered grave behind the prison. Volker planned it that way. The parasites that drive the plague would consume him and then die off for lack of food. It would have ended right there. But when Homer’s aunt claimed his body that changed the dynamic. What should have been some kind of sick punishment for a serial killer became something that kicked open the door to an outbreak.”

Dez’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

ROUTE 653

BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS

They had no names.

Not anymore.

There were names on cards and licenses in wallets and purses, but those things no longer related to the things that moved and milled inside the coffee shop. Even the faces no longer matched the pictures on the cards. On the driver’s licenses and university IDs, none of the faces was missing flesh, none of the smiles showed broken teeth. None of the clothes were torn and splashed with blood. These figures weren’t those people anymore.

The feeding was done, the hungers shifting from the flesh at hand to the potential of fresher meat elsewhere. The parasitic urges that drove them lost interest when it could no longer detect the signs of life. Breath and rushing blood and a beating heart. Genetic manipulation had ensured this, built it into the organic imperatives that drove these things. Just as the brain chemistry and nerve conduction was repatterned to kill and infect, to feast quickly but not completely, to spread the disease.

That was the only goal.

That was everything.

Though the body ached for food. The minimalized brain moaned in desperation for it, even though there was meat right there. But there was not enough intelligence left even for frustration at the collision of immediate need and driving force.

They bumped into each other without rancor or argument. It happened. They lost balance, recovered, moved on, either toward another collision or toward the door. Eventually it was all toward the door. Toward the movement outside. Lights in the rain. The stink of gasoline fumes, and beneath that was the smell of living meat.

One by one they collided with the heavy glass door, rebounded, hit it again until it open, stepping into the teeth of the storm with their own teeth bared. Unaware of the stinging rain or the hands of wind that tried to push them back. They moved toward the parked cars, sniffed the air, found only trace scents—old scents—but nothing alive. They staggered on through the small parking lot, spreading out, some heading toward the line of red taillights, others toward the line of white oncoming lights.

The first of them that stepped onto the highway was a man with a green apron and a matching billed cap. He had no fingers. They’d all been bitten off. Some by Homer Gibbon, though this man had no idea who that was. He had no thought at all, about Homer or anyone, anything, except the hunger. He stepped off the grassy verge and walked directly into the hazy dark gap between two bright headlights of a UPS tractor trailer going seventy miles an hour.

The impact smashed him into the air and hurled him thirty feet away. It exploded him. Parts of him were flung all the way over the truck. One arm struck the window of a blue Subaru hard enough to crack the glass. The rest of him was pulped beneath the semi’s wheels as the UPS truck tried to brake.

There was a moment when the truck seemed to defy gravity, to rise like a balloon as mass and momentum and the storm-slick road conjured bad magic in the night. The semi slewed sideways and the trailer hunched up and over it, snapping cables and tearing metal. The two cars behind it, the CNN van, and the Walmart truck behind it punched one-two-three into the twisting truck and into each other. The storm was too violent for that kind of road speed. Everyone knew it, and everyone drove that fast regardless. The storm and the plague killed them for it.

The air above the eastbound lane was filled with a scream of metal and the popping of safety glass, the hiss of tires that were finding no genuine purchase on the wet roads, and the whump-crunch of vehicle hitting vehicle.

Thirty yards away the same vehicular gavotte was imitated on the westbound lane as three of the infected walked into the traffic. Cars and trucks slammed each other into accordion shapes. Other vehicles tried to swerve but there was nowhere to go in that kind of traffic.

On another night when there was no storm and no major crisis, the roads would have been far less crowded. There would have been no rubberneckers, no press, no emergency vehicles, no troop transports, and no cars filled with family and friends trying to get to their missing loved ones in Stebbins.

Cars spun and danced, lifting from the asphalt as big trucks hit them. Airbags popped like firecrackers. Seat belts restrained and they broke and they cut into flesh. The last of the bloody figures from Starbucks moved onto the highway and were crushed by the colliding cars.

Then the symphony of impacts faded out, replaced by the blare of horns and the rising chorus of screams.

For a short time—a precious short time—the infected were unable to attack, each of them defeated by the metal things they had tried to attack to get at the soft food within. The victims of Homer Gibbon’s attacks were crippled and mangled, every last one of them.

It would be nearly six minutes before the first ambulances arrived, filled with EMTs who would see hurt people in the wreckage. Badly hurt and yet somehow still alive. Still moving. The EMTs would work shoulder to shoulder with ordinary civilians, survivors of the wrecks or people who’d been able to stop their cars and rushed forward to help. The EMTs and the civilians would work like heroes to pull the mangled people from the wrecks. To triage them, to stabilize them. To save them. Driven by professional responsibility, they would do everything they could to preserve the lives of the suffering wounded.

All of this happened less than one mile outside of the Stebbins Q-zone.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHECKPOINT #43

STEBBINS COUNTY LINE

Lonnie Silk saw the soldiers up ahead and his heart lifted in his chest.

They wore the same kind of combat hazmat suit he did, but their’s were intact, and they still had weapons. Both of the soldiers had they hoods off, though. Lonnie recognized them. The sergeant, anyway. Rodriguez. Lonnie couldn’t remember his first name. The other guy was a stranger. Some white kid.

It was the best thing he could see.

Someone he knew.

More important, soldiers. People who could help him.

Lonnie raised his hand, took as deep a breath as his aching lungs could manage, and called out to them.

Except that’s not what happened.

It took Lonnie a few seconds to realize that what he thought he did and what he actually did were slanting downhill in different ways.

It wasn’t one hand that he raised. Both hands came up. Not in a signaling gesture. Not a wave at all. His hands came up and reached toward the two soldiers as if, even from this distance, he could touch them.

No.

Not touch.

Grab.

Grab?

Was that right? Lonnie struggled to understand it. His fingers splayed open and then clutched shut as if trying to grab the image out of the air.

Why?

To do what?

He could feel his lungs expand as he drew in the air for his yell, but the ache was gone. There was pain, but it was different. A totally new kind of discomfort that felt oddly distant. It was like feeling someone else’s pain, though that was totally nuts. Impossible.

The most confusing thing for Lonnie was how his words sounded as they issued from his throat.

They weren’t words at all.

He didn’t hear his voice call Rodriguez’s name. He didn’t hear words at all.

The sound was so strange. So weird.

So wrong.

It was a long, sustained sound of complaint. Of need.

Of …

Of.

Oh God.

Of hunger.

He tried to stop that sound from coming out of him. He tried to pull down his reaching hands.

He tried.

Lonnie Silk tried.

The infection within him did not allow his voice or his hands to obey.

The soldiers stood there, looking the wrong way, looking past the sawhorse barrier to the road on the other side of the Q-zone. As if they needed to see that. As if that road was important.

Idiots.

Fucking dumbass idiots.

Lonnie screamed at Rodriguez.

But the scream was another moan.

Deep and plaintive and filled with a different kind of pain than Lonnie felt. Not the pain of bites and torn flesh and damaged muscle. This was the ache of pure hunger.

The winds and rain tried to tear the moan out of the air, and for a moment Lonnie thought that the soldiers wouldn’t hear it.

Then the white kid turned.

Turned, stared, let his mouth drop open, and then he screamed.

“Tito! Jesus Christ—Tito!”

Tito Rodriguez, that was his name. He spun around, bringing his gun up. He stared, too. He screamed, too.

They both fired.

Lonnie Silk heard the first bullets burn through the air around him and then vanish into the storm. Then he felt his body—what had once been his body—shudder and tremble as something hit him in the chest, the stomach. The thigh.

There was pain, but only of a kind. So far away, so small, so …

Meaningless.