“What the hell was that?” yelped Corporal Nick Wyckoff as he fought to control the troop truck after the impact.
Sergeant Teddy Polk was in the passenger seat. He cranked down the window and craned his head to look down the road. “Nice one, Nick. You got one of those fuckers. ”
His voice was cocky, but his eyes were filled with terror.
Wyckoff licked his lips. “Are you sure? You sure it was one of the infected?”
“Has to be,” said Polk. Despite the cold, he was sweating inside the hazmat hood. “You heard what the captain told us. Everyone in this damn town is already dead. ”
“Dead,” echoed Wyckoff. He crossed himself and touched the medal of Mary beneath his clothes.
The truck raced along a side road, kicking up plumes of mud behind it.
A figure suddenly appeared in the headlights, running along the shoulder of the road.
“Christ, there’s another one,” said Wyckoff. In the pale glow of the dashboard the sergeant looked ten years old.
“Get her,” urged Polk.
“Are you nuts?”
“Hey—the captain said that we can’t let any of them out of here—”
“I know, Teddy, but she’s just a—”
“Run her the fuck down, Nick!”
However, when the driver swerved to clip the figure, it was gone, vanished into the woods beside the road.
Wyckoff did not stop. He kicked down on the gas and headed toward the center of town.
* * *
As the truck’s taillights dwindled into the distance, the figure stepped out of the woods. She was panting, drenched, bedraggled, and furious. She held her Glock in a two-handed grip and her lips were curled back from gritted teeth.
“Fuckers,” growled Dez Fox. Then she lowered her gun, asking herself if she would have fired on them if they’d stopped and gotten out of the truck. Could she have drawn down on soldiers who were out here doing their jobs? Even if that job was the systematic extermination of everyone in town?
Could Dez even be sure that she didn’t have the plague? She wasn’t sick, but she knew that people could carry diseases that didn’t make them sick. Typhoid Mary.
She touched the walkie-talkie in her jacket pocket. If she called them and tried to explain things to them … would they even listen?
At some point she was going to have to find out.
She checked the road for more vehicles, but there was nothing.
Dez holstered her pistol and kept running. She was almost there.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
REGIONAL SATELLITE NEWS
Billy Trout sat in his Explorer and watched most of the people he knew and worked with at RSN close in around the office gopher, Jimmy, and drag him kicking and screaming into the shelter of a parked news van. Trout almost got out of the car to try to help, but as he reached for the door handle he could see that Jimmy was already pretty far gone. The actual kill
ing was over quickly. So quickly that it left Trout breathless.
They grabbed Jimmy from all sides. The weatherman, Gino, had his teeth buried in Jimmy’s cheek. Wilma had both arms wrapped around Jimmy’s waist and was tearing at his thigh with bloody teeth. The young man’s screams were as high and shrill as a girl’s.
There wasn’t a goddamn thing Trout could do about it, and, as he watched, the scene collapsed down into a feeding frenzy more savage than a pack of hyenas around a downed zebra. Trout reeled back from the sight, squeezing his eyes shut and wincing as if he could feel the pain of those bites. How had it spread so far so fast? His mind kept replaying the image of Marcia falling slowly under the wheels of his Explorer.