Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (46 page)

Pain was the next thing Trout became aware of. Intense pain, and in many places. His nose, his chest, his ribs. His shoulder.

Oddly, his back no longer hurt, as if somehow whatever had been dislocated before had slid back into place. What a small and random mercy that was. It felt cheap and out of place when so many others were so badly hurt and needed comfort more than he did.

A shape moved above him and it took Trout several seconds to focus his eyes.

Woman shape. Blond, haggard, filthy.

Beautiful.

“Dez…” he breathed.

Dez Fox bent and kissed his forehead, and his eyes, and his lips. Then she bent and whispered into his ears. “Don’t ever leave me, Billy Trout. Don’t you dare.”

He constructed what he hoped was a smile. “Not a chance.”

The bus—for that’s now what he realized it was—jounced and bounced as it rolled. Trout tried to sit up and nearly passed out again. He took a ragged breath and tried it again, this time with her help.

“Where are we?”

“Center of town,” she said. “Doll Factory.”

Trout saw Sam Imura sitting with Gypsy near the front of the bus. They sat in identical postures, forearms on knees, heads bent. In weariness or defeat?

No, he realized. In grief.

“Moonshiner?” Trout asked quietly.

Dez shook her head. “No.”

“Damn.”

“We … we lost Uriah Piper, too. And Mrs. Madison. Ten others.”

He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the way those words twisted her mouth. “Any of the kids?”

“No,” she said. Tears cut silvery scars through the grime on her face. “We saved the kids, Billy. We saved them.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Homer Gibbon said, “You get it all done? You upload all the film we did? The interviews and such?”

“Everything,” said Goat weakly. “Everything’s out there.”

It was true. All of the video files had been uploaded to YouTube, with crosslinks on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Goat could only imagine the feeding frenzy.

He’d also sent Volker’s notes out. By now it had been received by thousands and thousands of news sources. He even sent it to the White House, the CDC, and the Department of Homeland Security. Maybe it would do some good.

But he had his doubts.

While he waited for Homer, Goat checked the online news services. Lucifer 113 was already spreading beyond Stebbins. The president was set to address the nation, and the Emergency Broadcast Network had replaced most of the regular stations.

This was it. This was the actual end.

Volker had called it a doomsday weapon, and tonight was the first night of the end of the world. Goat was sure of it.

He was certain for two reasons.

First, because of the news stories of the infection spreading. He didn’t know—nor, apparently did the reporters—whether the “viral outbreak” as they were calling it, could be contained and eradicated. Maybe it could. There were some pretty extreme measures the government could take.

The other reason Goat believed that the doors to hell were swinging open—the reason that filled him with true despair—was the insight he’d had while waiting for Homer to come out of the comedy club. It was a process. It was an analysis of character motivation, and Goat dissected it the way he would with actors playing roles in a movie. His training, after all, was movie direction.

“I think I understand now,” said Goat.

Homer grunted. “What?”

“I understand. I get it.”

The killer glanced at him. “What is it you think you get?”

“Your plan.”

“My plan? I don’t have a plan.”

“Okay, let me put it another way,” said Goat. “I think I understand what the Red Mouth is telling you to do. I think I can envision what the Black Eye wants everyone to see.”

Homer smiled. It looked like a genuine smile, too. “You had a vision?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what? Did the Red Mouth start whispering in your ear?”

“Maybe,” said Goat, “it sort of came to me.”

“What do you mean? What are you seeing?”

“You’re just going to drive across country, stopping every once in a while for a bite, and then keep going. You want to spread this thing as far and as wide as possible. You want to kill the whole fucking world, don’t you?”

Homer thought about it for a while as they drove on through the rain. “Yeah, that about says it.”

“Is any of that stuff about the meek inheriting the earth true? Was any of that what you believe or was it all bullshit for the camera?”

Homer’s smile was slow and sly. “Does it really matter, boy?”

“I need to know.”

The lights of the big rigs in the opposite lane illuminated Homer Gibbon as he smiled again and shrugged.

“Wait … that’s it?” demanded Goat. “You put me through all this shit and then you brush me off with a fucking shrug?”

“What’s it matter to you?” asked the killer. “It’s all going to work out the same whether it’s true or not.”

Goat made a disgusted sound low in his throat.

“Dr. Volker told me what I am and you know what that is, don’t you, boy?”

Goat said nothing.

“I’m a fucking zombie. I’m already dead. You ever wonder why I move like I got arthritis? You don’t know your basic medicine? I got rigor mortis. That means I’m already rotting. I may hear the Red Mouth speak to me, but when I look into the future with the Black Eye, you know what I see? I see me fucking dead and gone, motherfucker.” Homer suddenly struck the steering wheel with the heel of his palm. “That’s what I fucking see. Me. Dead. So I figured what the fuck. I might as well turn this into a party town. If I got to go then everybody’s got to come with me. Every-fucking-body. And, yeah, to answer your question, I
do
believe. And what I believe is that life’s a bitch and then we all fucking die. But not alone, boy. Not alone.”

Homer punctuated his remarks with a brutal laugh. Totally without mirth or humanity. A dead man’s laugh. A killer’s laugh.

“It’s the end of the world, boy. Just like the song says. And you know what? I feel just fine.”

Goat stared at him and something in his head seemed to break. To snap. To tear open. Maybe it was the Black Eye opening so he could see his own future. Maybe it was that. If so, the future that Goat saw was that of a desolated world. It was a wasteland of disease and rot, and there, standing amid an endless crowd of unmoving, unthinking, undying dead, was his own body. Robbed of life, of hope, of any possibility of anything. It was the ugliest thing he could imagine. Bleak and pointless.

He leaned closer to Homer Gibbon, wanting to see the killer’s face clearly in the whitewash of headlines. As each of the big interstate truckers whisked by he saw that evil face in a stark strobe. Each blink, each flash image, was identical. Inert, eternal, irredeemable.

He said, “Fuck you.”

Then he grabbed the steering wheel in both hands, shoved it to the left with all his strength, and sent the Escalade careening into the headlights of a monstrous eighteen-wheel Freightliner pulling a full load of steel I-beams. Right into eighty thousand pounds driving at eighty-two miles an hour.

Although the impact opened a thousand red mouths in the flesh of Homer Gibbon, they whispered no secrets; and the Black Eye went forever blind.

PART FOUR

FIRST NIGHT

“… So, when the last and dreadful hour

This crumbling pageant shall devour,

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the living die,

And Music shall untune the sky.”

—John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

No one at the bar knew his last name. When asked he said that his name was John. It wasn’t exactly true, but true enough.

John sat at the end of the bar, drinking red wine, making it last, paying for it with money he’d taken from the biker he’d killed. He would have more money when he sold the motorcycle. John was not a biker type. He disliked machines and especially loud ones. Noise irritated him. It was hard enough to listen to all of the voices in his head without those kinds of distractions.

The bar was quiet, especially this early in the day. The bartender, two other early-bird customers, and John. He’d come in as soon as it opened, found his favorite stool, and sat down to watch the news. So many wonderful things were happening in the world.

Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio had all clearly been touched by the hand of God.

He wondered if that meant that
it
was starting.

The Fall.

The collapse of the false world of idolatry and sin.

It was something for which he’d prayed every day of his adult life.

It was something he always believed would happen one day.

The Fall.

Then the news station interrupted its own broadcast to play another video clip from a reporter named Gregory Weinman. The reporter, who was somewhere in the affected area, had been sending videos all night, and at first the press had dismissed them as elaborate fakes and the worst kind of practical jokes.

As the night burned away and the morning dawned with fear and promise, the reaction to those reports changed. Now they were being trotted out as hard news. News that terrified everyone at the bar.

Except John, who found them so incredibly comforting.

The TV reporter warned that the footage they were about to show was disturbing and contained images not suitable for children. John saw the predatory gleam in the reporter’s eyes. Then the footage began, showing a man that John immediately recognized as the supposedly executed serial killer Homer Gibbon as he went into a 7-Eleven and began attacking people.

It was all very messy and crude. John did not like biting. He always preferred knives.

Knives held within them a purity of purpose. They were instruments of God’s will. John had several of them in special pockets he’d sewn inside his clothes. He was never without his knives.

The video played out and then it cut to the interior of a car as Homer Gibbon spoke about why he was doing what he did.

He spoke about seeing with the Black Eye.

He spoke about hearing the secrets of the Red Mouth.

The Red Mouth.

That was something John understood, though he had never used the exact phrase before. Red Mouth. How perfect. How apt.

He mouthed the words, and they felt like ambrosia on his tongue and lips.

He knew right then that he would forever use those words to describe what he, in his holy purpose, had done so many times and would continue to do if God willed it.

Then Homer said something else that struck to the very core of John’s personal faith.

“
In the Bible Jesus talked about how the meek were going to inherit the earth. I forget where he said it, but it was important, and I think this is what he was talking about. The way people are when they wake up after I open the Red Mouths in their flesh…”

“Yes,” said John.

He said it a little too loud, a bit too emphatically, and the two other patrons turned to him.

“What?” asked one of them. “You agree with that bullshit?”

John said nothing.

“I asked you a question,” demanded the man, sliding off his stool. “I have friends in Pennsylvania. I have some family there.”

John considered how to play this. He could construct a response that would dial the man’s outrage down to a simple misunderstanding. He could do that because he’d done that sort of thing many times before, and with sharper people than this. He’d managed conversations with psychiatrists and parole review panels.

And yet …

On the screen Homer Gibbon continued to talk about the meek inheriting the earth, and about how he was helping them have eternal life. About how it was God’s will for a peaceful planet. A world without war, without hate. A world of the silent, mindless, meek. A world of people emptied of everything except the grace of a loving and generous God.

John understood and agreed with everything Homer Gibbon said.

“Yo, asshole,” said the loudmouth, moving down the bar toward John. “I’m talking to—”

His last words were gone, trapped inside the man’s chest, unable to get past the blood that now filled his throat. The man stared in uncomprehending horror at the glittering steel that seemed to have appeared as if by magic in John’s hand.

The other patron and the bartender gaped at what was happening, their incomprehension every bit as great as the dying loudmouth.

“John?” asked the bartender. “What the hell did you just do?”

Explaining would take too much time, and John did not believe either of these men would truly understand.

He killed them both.

They tried to make a fight of it. As if that mattered.

As they lay bleeding, with red mouths opened in their flesh, John watched the face of Homer Gibbon.

This was the face of the chosen of God, the rock upon which a new church was being born in the farmlands of Pennsylvania.

“You are my god,” he told the killer on the TV. “And I will be a saint of your church.”

Smiling, filled with great joy, Saint John wiped his knives clean and stepped out into the morning sunlight, knowing with total certainty that the noisy, cluttered, sinful world was about to fall. It was all going to become quiet.

As God so clearly intended.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

ROUTE 40

FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

The buses painted a long line of yellow through the gray of the predawn morning. Dez, Trout, and Sam sat in a huddle in the front of the lead bus. They passed a few cars, but they were all driving too fast. Panic speed, thought Trout. A UPS truck lay on its side at a crossroads and several figures were hunkered down around a ragged red thing that twitched even as it was consumed. Off in the distance, on the far side of a massive cornfield, a farmhouse burned, flickering its souls to the winds.