Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (36 page)

“You’re saying this is my fault?” demanded Trout.

“No, sir. I’m not in the business of assigning blame. Neither, I might add, is Scott Blair. I’m a response to a threat. Blair is probably the clearest-thinking person in Washington. When Volker first defected and gave Lucifer to our government, a set of response protocols were written that appropriately addressed the level of threat. If you spoke with Dr. Volker, Mr. Trout, then you understand how incredibly dangerous this plague is. Look at what happened to your town because of a single person being infected. Homer Gibbon. The spread was immediate and exponential; however, it reached that moment when the window could have been closed on the spread.”

“By killing children?” demanded Mrs. Madison.

Sam gave her a flat stare. “No. By killing everyone in this town. Every single living person. And, ideally, every animal, bird, and cockroach. Anything that could possibly carry the disease beyond these borders.”

“That’s insane.”

“No,” said Sam, “creating a doomsday weapon was insane. Using that weapon in an attempt to punish a death row prisoner was insane. That’s where the guilt and blame are, ma’am. If Dr. Volker’s handler—the CIA operative assigned to oversee his actions—had done his job, then we would not be having this conversation. If Dr. Volker has been properly assessed, he would have been put into a psychiatric facility and kept far away from any materials with which he could do harm. But, as I said, that was yesterday’s news. The truth is that the disease was injected into Homer Gibbon and now it’s loose.”

Mrs. Madison and several of the others were shaking their heads.

“Tell me,” said Sam with dwindling patience, “if you were in charge of the military response to this outbreak, tell me how you would have handled it differently. What could you—what could
anyone
—have done once this thing was known to be out?”

“Not killed children.”

“Which is what Mr. Trout told the world we were doing, and the president pulled back. The bombs never fell and the kids in this school are alive. Okay, that’s a wonderful thing. No one wants to kill kids. Not even the most extreme hawks. I’ve got a younger brother and a baby stepbrother. It would crush me if anything happened to them. If they were in Stebbins County, I know I would feel exactly the same way you do. It’s impossible for a sane and moral person to feel anything other than outrage, shock, and horror.”

“If your brothers were in Stebbins and it was on you to order the bombs,” asked Trout, “what would you do?”

“The soldier in me would order the drop,” said Sam. “But me—Sam Imura—I’d never want those bombs dropped. I’d hesitate and hope for another solution. That’s what anyone would do. And that is what they call fatal hesitation. Emphasis on ‘fatal.’ That human connection skews the logic and in these situations the logic cannot be skewed. That’s why we have so many procedures in the military—in everything from basic training to missile launch sequences—that are designed to separate the human element from the necessary action.”

“But the
children
…” said Mrs. Madison, leaning on it, forcing awareness of the implications.

Sam looked around at the faces. “This is the problem. You don’t understand the implications of what you’ve done. Of what you still think is the right thing. You want to save these children, and that’s beautiful, that’s so wonderfully human. But if we can’t get ahead of Lucifer
,
then these children are going to die anyway. If not today, then when your food runs out. You’ll have to leave the building and all you’ll find out there will be more dead. Dead adults and dead children. That’s the only other way this works out. If we can’t stop Lucifer then everyone will die. Everyone. Everyone’s children. Here in Pennsylvania and everywhere else. Listen to me; hear that word.
Everywhere
. There is no way this disease can stop on its own. It will continue to spread exponentially. The most conservative estimates of a global pandemic of this disease is total human annihilation in ten weeks, with the deaths of all three hundred million Americans occurring during the first five to ten days.” He looked at Billy Trout. “Tell me … how many children are you willing to kill?”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

THE NORTHERN LEVEES

STEBBINS COUNTY

Burl and Vic lumbered toward Jake and with every step the world tilted further and further off its axis. Nothing here made sense. Not in any way.

Three teenage girls walking in a storm like they couldn’t even feel the weather. One of them naked.

Then those same girls attacking Burl and the other guys.

Biting them. Eating them.

Jake’s friends—big men—screaming and falling. Dying.

And …

And getting the fuck back up.

It was all so wrong that for a broken handful of seconds Jake forgot about everything else. He lay there in the mud and didn’t think about the pain in his leg, the ache in his chest from coughing up mud, or the need to flee. He lay on his stomach, hands pushed into the mud to raise his chest and head, and watched things come toward him that used to be his friends.

“No.”

He heard the word but for a moment he could not tell who’d spoken it. Jake never felt his lips move to form the word, didn’t feel the push of air as it escaped his throat.

No.

The word hung in the air, telling him everything he needed to understand about the moment and about the future. It answered every question he had.

No.

The rain fell in great slanting lines, popping on every surface.

“No,” Jake said, trying to explain it to the day, trying to be reasonable about all this. “No.”

Burl and Vic opened their mouths. They had nothing to say, though. Instead they shared with Jake the only thing they understood. The only thing that mattered now to each of them. They uttered a deep, resonating, aching moan of appalling hunger. It did not matter that the hunger was new. The sound of their moans made it clear even to Jake’s tortured mind that this hunger ran as deep as all the need in the world. A strange and alien hunger that could never be satisfied.

Behind the two men, the girls raised their heads. Then, to his deepening horror, Jake saw that Richie and Tommy—what was left of Richie and Tommy—were climbing to their feet. All those pale faces turned toward the sound of that dreadful moan.

And joined it.

With broken jaws and shattered teeth, with torn throats and dead mouths, every one of them—all of them—raised their voices in a shared expression of that endless hunger.

Jake DeGroot clapped his hands to his ears to stop the noise, but he could hear it all the way down to the pit of his soul. He screamed.

At the sound of his scream, Burl began moving faster. The sticky suction of the mud tried to slow him, but Burl’s face became a mask of bestial hunger and he tore his feet free, step by step, and reached with hooked fingers toward Jake.

That’s when something in Jake’s mind snapped.

The tethers anchoring him to the civilized man he was parted and that part of him floated away like a mask being removed to reveal his true face. It was an older, simpler, far less evolved face, and the eyes of the ultra-primitive saw the oncoming threat and the synapsis of the ancient lizard brain triggered unthinking and immediate reaction.

Jake screamed again, but this time it came out more as a growl, as a snarl of denial and fear and determination. He pushed himself backward, his legs kicking at the mud for purchase, finding it, taking his weight, propelling him into a crouch on fingers and toes. He skittered backward like a dog, hissing at the pain instead of with it, then he slewed around and launched himself away, rising into a sloppy run, falling, getting up again, running. And all the time screaming.

Burl and Vic and the others followed like a pack of rabid dogs.

Jake angled toward his front-end loader, putting it between himself and the pack. The keys were inside the cab. If he could only get to them.

But Burl and Vic split, each one heading toward one end of the machine as if this was something they had rehearsed. On some level Jake knew that they were simply taking the shortest route for each of them, but it felt like a coordinated attack. Jake glanced up at the cab and then to each side.

He wasn’t going to make it.

If he got inside, would the reinforced safety glass keep them back?

Even if the glass held, the door didn’t lock from inside.

He began backing away from the machine. The trailer they were using as a temporary office was forty yards away. Jake spun around, deciding to make for it. If he could get inside, the doors had locks. There were desks he could push in front of the door to block it. The windows were tiny, too small for someone like Burl to climb in through.

All of that flashed through his brain as he took the first step toward the trailer. Burl lunged for him, actually jumping like an animal to try and grab him. Then suddenly Burl’s head snapped to one side and his leap turned into a twisted tumble that send him splatting down to the mud, where he slid to a twisted stop.

His face was gone.

Simply gone.

Jake stared at Burl, trying to understand this new mystery, this new insanity. Even his lizard brain didn’t know how to process this.

Then something pinged off the bucket of the front-end loader and went whizzing past his ear with a sound like an angry wasp.

There was a second ping. A third.

That’s when he heard the sounds.

Distant. Small. Hollow.

Pok-pok-pok
.

He whirled and crouched, staring into the rain.

Someone was firing.

Cold hands suddenly grabbed him from behind and Jake was falling. He twisted violently around to see Vic right there, tearing at him with torn fingernails, snapping at him with cracked teeth.

Vic was tall, over six feet, and nearly two hundred pounds. Jake towered over him, though, standing six-eight and packing an extra hundred pounds of muscle and mass on his frame. With power born of fear and desperation, he swung a punch into Vic’s face that knocked the man five feet back. Teeth and blood flew. Vic hit the side of the bucket, spun, fell to his knees, and then was abruptly flung sideways as a fusillade of bullets tore into him, punching holes in thigh and hip and ribs and skull. Vic dropped and lay utterly still.

Jake wanted to stand and stare. He needed to take a moment to reset all of the dials in his head. However bullets pinged and whanged off the machine and behind him the other … things … were still coming. Jake cut them a single quick look and realized they were paying no heed to the bullets that pocked the mud around them. Or to the bullets that tore into their own flesh. Jake saw clothes puff up as rounds struck them. He saw chunks of bloody skin go flying into the rain.

It was insane.

It was like they didn’t care. Or couldn’t feel.

Or were …

His mind teetered on the edge of saying what he thought it was or might be.

Instead he turned and dove for cover as more bullets hammered into the yellow skin of the Caterpillar. The bucket was still low to the ground where he’d paused it when everything started turning to shit. Beneath the bucket was a trench cut by the scoop, and Jake wriggled into that. Big as he was, the trench was deep enough for him to get below ground level, but it was already half-filled with muddy water that was stingingly cold.

Dozens of bullets hit the front-end loader and went ricocheting off into the storm. Jake could hear men shouting.

Richie came splashing through the puddles, still moaning, still hungry, and then he was falling backward, bits of flesh and bone exploding from his chest, his throat, his face, his skull.

Then one of the girls fell with a big hole in her lower back. As soon as she hit the ground she began to crawl, as if the pain she had to be feeling didn’t mean a goddamn thing to her. She saw Jake and began crawling toward his hiding place. She made it halfway there before a bullet struck her in the side of the head and blew brain matter five feet across the mud.

Jake saw it all from his hole.

The shouts were louder now. Men calling to each other as they came running across the construction site. Men in white hazmat suits and combat boots. Men with rifles and belts hung with grenades.

Soldiers.

Jake frowned, unable to understand this. Why were the soldiers in hazmat suits like on TV? That was the stuff they wear when there’s some kind of toxic spill. Only this was a hurricane, not a spill. Or whatever they call a storm this bad this far inland. Supercell. Something like that. It wasn’t any toxic spill. At least not as far as Jake knew.

Unless …

He blinked rainwater out of his eyes. Suddenly a lot of things tumbled together into a single pattern. Ugly, but glued together by some kind of logic.

What if there was a toxic spill?

The radio had been crazy all day with weird shit. Something about a riot out at Doc Hartnup’s funeral home. Something else happening at the school.

Jake only caught bits and pieces of it because you can’t really listen to the radio while operating heavy equipment. Too much noise.

Now he wondered what he’d missed.

And he wondered what kind of trouble he was in.

He almost called out to the soldiers.

Almost.

It was not his lizard brain that made him hold his tongue. No, it was the civilized part of his brain. The part that believed that if things were this bad—if they were sending in soldiers in germ warfare gear and letting them kill people this randomly—then things were already in the shitter. Those soldiers never called out a warning. They never checked to see if Burl and the others needed help.

They’d simply opened fire.

“Oh, God,” he breathed. But he did it very, very quietly.

As the soldiers hunted down the last girl and Jake’s other friends, he sank down into the water until just his eyes and nose were out. He breathed as shallowly as he could, and he closed his eyes.

In order to try and stay alive, he did his level best to pretend to already be dead.