It was a staggering idea but he knew that this was true. The Guard were not here on a rescue mission. It was a hard, ugly truth but it was irrefutable. If he had any doubts, then what he saw over the next few minutes clarified things for him.
As he turned onto Beaver he saw a silver Lexus askew in the middle of the road, both front doors open. Heather Faville, mayor of Stebbins, lay sprawled in the street a few feet from her husband, Tony. Neither of them bore the signs of infection: no bites, no black goo, nothing. However, they had been gunned down so comprehensively that the car and both bodies were ripped apart. Hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings covered the road. Trout stared. He knew the Favilles, liked them. He wondered if he would live long enough to grieve for them.
The scene was almost a duplicate of what had almost happened to him. The Favilles had seen the Guardsmen and had stopped, probably relieved. They’d gotten out of their car … and died in a hail of bullets.
This wasn’t an attempt to contain the infection … this was murder. The genocide of an entire town.
From then on, Trout went slower, checking each street to make sure there were no soldiers. White-faced things kept coming out of the rain and most of the time he managed to veer around them, but several times he saw them too late and the big SUV slammed into them. After the third impact he felt some eccentricities manifesting in the steering, and there was a disheartening knocking under the hood. However, the tires hadn’t blown and the motor still worked, so he kept going.
There were so many of them on the streets, though. Block after block he saw the infected staggering toward the sound of h
is engine. He did not see a single living person. Not one. That tore at his heart. This thing was spreading so fast. Even with the rain. It was far worse even than Volker had suggested, and he prayed that the National Guard barricades would hold. That thought felt weird in his head. On one hand he hated the soldiers for what they were doing, and on the other hand he was glad they were there.
He had his doubts, though, about whether the soldiers could adequately monitor and defend the perimeter of the entire town. After all, he had been able to sneak into Stebbins without detection. That thought conjured a flicker of horrific memory—Marcia sliding inch by inch beneath the Explorer’s wheels.
God.
He was almost to the center of town when he heard more gunfire. Trout slammed on the brakes and the SUV skidded forty feet into a sideways stop. He cranked down the window and stared at the scene unfolding before him in the big parking lot around Wolverton Hospital. A mass of about a hundred of the infected, most of them wearing lab coats, surgical scrubs, and pajamas, was lumbering its way toward a pair of National Guard Humvees. Soldiers stood atop each vehicle, alien in their white hazmat suits, and fired pedestal-mounted machine guns at the crowd. Trout didn’t know models or calibers of machine guns, but these brutes were tearing the front rank of the crowd to pieces. Literally to pieces. Arms and hands and heads flew into the rain and were sent flying by the gusting wind. The mass of the dead never paused though. Their bodies soaked up the bullets, and the ones that didn’t fall kept moving, kept reaching.
A figure came staggering out of a side street. He was heavily tattooed and dressed in the uniform of a corrections officer. Trout knew him. Michael McGrath, the sergeant in charge of the county lockup. McGrath staggered jerkily toward the soldiers, a pistol in one hand and the other raised. He called out to them in a voice that was completely human, and with horror Trout knew what was about to happen. He’d once done a story on this man. McGrath always walked like that. He had spastic cerebral palsy and yet was able to maintain his job as a tough corrections officer.
The soldiers did not know this. They turned and saw another shambling, twitching figure coming toward them. Trout tried to yell a warning, but his cry was drowned out by bursts of gunfire. McGrath’s body shuttered and danced as the bullets tore into him. His pistol felt from his hand and his face drained of expression. He took a single, final step, and then fell.
The wave of the infected pressed forward, and the soldiers abruptly yielded ground to them. Maybe they were low on ammunition, or maybe this kind of butchery was becoming intolerable for those poor young men in the hazmat suits, Trout didn’t know which; but the Humvees began rolling backward, and then in the parking lot of a Burger King they turned and raced off along a side road.
Heading where? Trout wondered, though he already knew.
There was only one thing down that road.
The school.
He cursed, threw the car into gear, spun the wheel, and headed down a small side street.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
SCHOOLHOUSE ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
As she drove, Dez listened for news on the walkie-talkie. None of it was good. Squads and platoons were encountering pockets of the dead, and several of the teams were overrun. Dez knew that each soldier who died would rise as one of the dead, adding to their numbers.
The chatter between NCOs and officers was increasingly hysterical. Some of the soldiers were refusing to gun down innocent civilians. These weren’t terrorists. They didn’t look different from the soldiers, which made it even harder. No difference in skin color, no difference in dress. No way to separate us from them, Dez knew. The soldiers were looking down the barrels of their guns and seeing men, women, and—worst of all—children. Pulling the trigger on them, whether or not they were infected, was simply not something every man could do.
The officers were alternating between trying to sound inspirational with a lot of “God and Country” stuff and using flat-out threats. Dez knew that it was all breaking down. The only chance to maintain control was to pull everyone back to the perimeter. The Q-zone. Pull back and wait for the rain to end so they could bring in helicopters. It was so much easier to kill from five hundred feet in the air. Hellfire missiles and Sidewinders didn’t have hearts that could break.
Dez was tempted to cut in and say something on the radio, to beg them to protect the school, but some of what she heard made her doubt that civilian protection was any part of the operational plan. She heard the phrase “contain and sterilize” several times, and that sent chills down her spine.
She busted through some backyard fencing and drove completely off the street grid, angling toward the school. Schoolhouse Lane was the only road that went to the school, but not the only way to get there. Dez broke through a white picket fence and was on the ninth hole of the Stebbins Country Club. The grass was still green despite the cold, but the Tundra’s wheels tore apart the perfectly maintained lawn. Fuck it. She agreed with Mark Twain that golf was a “good walk spoiled. ”
Over the next rise she could see the upper floor of the school. There were columns of smoke rising to meet the black storm clouds, visible only by reflected firelight, but they were in front of the school, and as she bounced over the hill she saw trees, buses, and cars on fire. The school was untouched.
She rolled to a stop and considered what to do. Schoolhouse Lane and that part of the fence line was completely blocked by National Guard vehicles. It was hard to see through the rain to tell what they were doing, but it looked like they were erecting a sandbag barrier. Muzzle flashes were continual and in their glow she could see the thousands of dead in the school compound.
Dez’s heart sank. So many?
There were fewer than eight thousand people in the whole county, and it looked like at least half of them were down there. Then she realized that it wasn’t just the county folk, but kids from neighboring counties who were bussed in to attend the regional schools. And the families of those kids who’d come to the shelter to fetch their children. Lambs to a slaughter.
There was an army of the dead inside the gate, and an army of the living outside.