“Officer, please repeat. What is the nature of the—”
“People are going crazy down here, Lieutenant. Everyone’s attacking everyone. People are fucking eating people. Cops, too. ”
“Officer Fox, did you make contact with Chief Goss?”
She took a breath. “Chief Goss is dead. ” Tears boiled out of her eyes and fell down her cheeks. “Christ … they’re all dead. ” A sob hitched inside her chest and suddenly she was crying. She leaned against the side of the cruiser and slid down to the ground, the sobs wracking her, the pain in her soul doubling her over. She buried her face against her knees and banged the microphone against her head. Over and over again.
“They’re coming!” JT yelled and she jerked her head up to see him rising to lay the shotgun atop the mailbox.
“Christ,” Dez said, and realized that she was still holding the radio send button. “Lieutenant … with the storm the emergency evacuation center is the elementary school. There’s going to be hundreds of kids in there. Old folks, too. It’s only a couple of miles from here. Please … get some people over there. You can’t let any of the infected in there … those kids…”
With sudden horror Dez realized that she was yelling into a dead mike. She clicked the button, jiggled the handset, and this time she could not even raise a whisper of static.
“Shit!”
Her mind was filled with a terrible image of all those kids crouched in the cavernous old school as the storm pounded on the walls and the hungry dead clawed at the doors to get in.
She threw the microphone down and pulled her piece. She had eight bullets left and one extra magazine. JT had the loaded shotgun, nine extra shells, and two full magazines—one in his Glock, the other on his belt. Dez used her bloody sleeve to wipe away the tears.
She was not going to let the infection reach the school. No way. If she had to kill every one of those monsters … if she had to break their necks with her bare hands, she was not going to abandon those kids. Not the little ones. Dez knew what it was like to feel abandoned. To feel like the people who were supposed to be there just left you in the dark. With the boogeyman. With the monsters.
Despite what Billy had said on the phone, Dez knew the shape of her own damage. It wasn’t particularly obscure, and she even understood how it warped her. Big deal. She could see it right there every time she looked in the mirror. That was a couple of grand saved on therapy, and it didn’t provide a magic pill any more than it gave her a road map to a brighter future. To hell with that Dr. Phil shit.
The simple truth was that parents let down their kids. It was a fact of life. It happened all the damn time. But there was no way that she would become another statistic in that drama. She was going to get to those kids. End of story.
Dez Fox was not a religious woman. She lost a chunk of it in second grade when her father was killed by friendly fire in the first Gulf War and the rest when her mother died of cancer a few weeks later. She believed in God, but hated Him for His cruel indifference. However, as she racked the slide on her Glock, she murmured a small and almost silent prayer.
“God help us,” she whispered.
She kept listening, hoping to hear sirens, but all she heard on the breeze was the faint moans of the dead and the splats as the first fat raindrops fell from the leaden sky.
“God help us all. ”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE
Everything should have looked familiar. The Grove, the wide green lawn, and tall trees were the same. The main funeral house and the mortuary work building, all the same. But nothing was familiar. Cars and emergency vehicles were parked haphazardly on the roads and the lawn. The grass around the mortuary was splashed with wild swatches of red and puddles of black in which larvae squirmed and writhed.
And everywhere were the Hollow Men.
Dozens of them. In uniforms, in ordinary clothes, in farm clothes, and work clothes. Several of them had cameras hung around their necks and plastic press credentials clipped to their jackets. Two of them were twins, girls of about seventeen, unique now because of the individuality of their wounds. This wasn’t like the crowds who gathered for funerals. There were no tears, no suppressed laughter, no broken sobs, no whispered conversation. Their shoes whispered across the soft, wet grass.
The hollow ones milled, bumping into one another or against the fenders of cars. One of them tripped over something and Hartnup saw that it was the fat body of Marty Goss. The chief lay sprawled and silent, a big black hole punched through his forehead. His white fingers did not twitch, he did not try to get up. He looked … dead.
Dead.
Hartnup felt suddenly and irrationally jealous of the dead man. How could a fat putz like Marty Goss deserve an actual death when Hartnup had to go on and on, floating like a dust mote inside a stolen body? It was wretchedly unfair.
How did Goss die? A lot of the creatures here had gunshot wounds. What was different about Marty?
Hartnup’s body kept shuffling forward. Hartnup screamed for it to stop. He wanted to examine the body, determine the answer to this mystery. From the blood smears on Goss’s face it was clear that he had reanimated and become what Hartnup still was. So … how had that curse been broken for the chief?
His body moved on and on, shambling toward the road, just as some of the others were turning that way. There was a sound coming from around the bend. A car was coming.
More flesh for this feast.
God, no!