Then they opened fire.
Mud popped up in lines all the way to his car and then Trout was down, cringing and curling himself onto the seat, screaming as the bullets tore into the grille and hood and punched holes in the glass.
“Jesus Christ! What the fuck are you crazy bastards doing?” he yelled.
There was a lull in the gunfire.
The entire windshield was a lace curtain of cracks and holes.
Trout raised his head, risking a glance over the dashboard.
The soldiers were advancing on him, their barrels smoking in the rain but still aimed his way.
Trout reached out and threw the car into reverse and then shot upright in the seat and kicked down on the gas pedal. The Explorer lurched and jumped backward, rolling fast away from the soldiers who immediately opened fire.
“I’m not infected!” he screamed.
He knew that they could not hear him over the roar of their own guns, but Trout was furious. He kept yelling that as he hit the brakes, shifted into drive, spun the wheel and went diagonally across Doll Factory Road. More bullets stitched a line of ragged holes in the passenger side. Both side windows blew out and Trout was peppered with flying bits of glass; but the car was gaining speed now, clawing across the gravel parking lot of a closed down Denny’s, cutting over to a side road and blasting away from the soldiers. Bullets continued to whang and ping off the back of the car for a quarter mile.
Trout was panicking now. Wind and rain battered his face as he drove. He kept thinking, They didn’t care if I was infected or not. They didn’t care. God Almighty, they don’t care.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
THE SITUATION ROOM
WASHINGTON, D. C.
The president of the United States sat in his big leather swivel chair, fingers steepled, brow knitted, staring at the satellite map of Stebbins County. Phones rang all around the crisis room as his staff worked to implement the Wildfire protocols. Above the main screen were several smaller screens, one of which was a Doppler radar display of the storm. The National Weather Service was giving a fifty-fifty chance that the storm could veer northeast or continue to stall over Stebbins County. If the latter happened, the computer models estimated that it might be as much as six hours before helicopters could fly. Six hours during which ground visibility was compromised.
Another screen showed men working in a raging storm to load thermobaric devices onto a row of parked Apache gunships.
The president’s mouth was dry, and he sipped water. There were a lot of people in the Situation Room, and it took effort to keep his emotions off his face as he studied the weapons being installed.
Thermobaric devices. Fuel-air bombs. Massive cluster bombs that explode in two stages, the first of which creates a cloud of explosive material which is then ignited. As a general had told him once, “Mr. President, this is the most powerful nonnuclear weapon currently in existence. It is, I can assure you, the very definition of hell on earth. ”
Those words had been said with pride by an officer fighting the endless war in Afghanistan. Now, however …
He picked up a file from the table and opened it. The top page was a printout of the estimated rate of infection if Lucifer 113 could not be contained within Stebbins County. The numbers were impossible. They were bad science fiction. They were a horror story.
The president closed the folder and leaned forward to watch the loading of the fuel-air bombs.
“Dear God,” murmured the president.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK
Dez looked up from the arms chest and snarled at the sound of hands beating on the thin skin of her trailer. She hurried to the window, peered out, and looked right into the face of her landlord, Rempel. There were others out there, too. Half the goddamn residents of the trailer park were out there.
“You fuckers,” she said, but the bravado was thin and fragile, nailed to the walls of her heart by rusty pins. She tried not to think about what she was seeing in rational terms. None of them were friends, but she did not even want to see them as her neighbors. She could not afford to pay that kind of coin, not if she was going to get to the school … and right now everything was about the school.
If the school is even there.
A nasty inner voice whispered it to her every few minutes, but Dez could not afford to hear that, either.
She tore open a closet and pulled out a big gray canvas ski bag, threw it onto the floor, and began stuffing as many guns and boxes of ammunition as she thought she could carry. She strapped on an extra gun belt, crossing it with her regulation belt so that both draped across her hips like a gunslinge
r’s rig. Dez pulled on a nylon shoulder rig and snugged a Sig Sauer nine into that. Magazines were stuffed into every pocket. They were so heavy that she had to cinch her trousers belt tighter. The last thing she pulled on was a heavy leather biker jacket Billy Trout had given her for Christmas two years ago. She pinched the thick leather.