Fists pounded on the door from the other side. Trout tore off his jacket and flung it into a corner then pawed at his shirt, looking for traces of the black mucus.
Nothing.
“God almighty,” he wheezed. Another gunshot made him turn and he saw Turk, the little guy who owned the Getty station, go tumbling to the ground.
“Turk,” Trout murmured. “Danny Turkleton. ”
Dez stood with her back to him, her shoulders heaving with exertion. Four other zombies lay on the steps. Trout knew two of them and he spoke their names aloud. The others were strangers. A corrections officer and an Irish guy Trout recognized from Dez’s trailer park but couldn’t name. Trout pulled the wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open to the driver’s license.
“Kealan Patrick Burke. ”
“What?” Dez asked sharply, then saw what he was looking at. Her expression changed slowly, and Trout could see that she somehow understood what he was doing. She looked down at the bodies around her and nodded.
“Did you know them?” Trout asked.
She nodded. “All of them. ” She said their names, and he repeated them.
They looked at each other for a fractured moment, the stink of cordite, blood, and human waste in the air, the steady pounding on the door, the bodies sprawled in what, for them, was a “second death. ”
“It’s all impossible,” she said. “You know that, right?”
“It’s worse than impossible,” he said.
Dez narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I know how this started,” he said. “And it’s a lot worse than you think. ”
A voice spoke from the shadows behind Dez. “Then you’d better tell us everything, Billy. ”
They turned and stared as a big man came walking out of the shadows. His clothes were torn and he had makeshift bandages wound around his head and left arm. His face was battered and bruised, and his eyes were haunted by the things they had seen. But for all that, he looked powerful and dangerous, and he had a hunting rifle held in his strong brown hands.
“JT!” cried Dez.
As Trout watched, she ran to him and wrapped her arms around him and buried her face against his chest, and sobbed.
Son of a bitch, Trout thought with an inward rueful smile. That’s my goddamn scenario.
JT
Hammond gave Dez a fierce hug and he kissed her hair.
Then Dez pushed herself away, glared up and him, and slapped him across the face.
“You asshole!” she yelled. “You fucking left me!”
And that’s my girl, Trout thought, and this time his smile reached his lips.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
OUTSIDE OF STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
He stood as silent as a tombstone. A few of the Hollow Men pounded on the door, some of them milled around, drawn by trace scents of fresh meat that were tricks of the storm winds. But Doc Hartnup and most of the others stopped moving and stood staring at the closed door.
Hartnup had recognized the two people his body had been chasing. Desdemona Fox, whom he’d known for years, and the reporter, Billy Trout. Even as his hands tried to grab them and tear them apart, his mind tried to communicate with them. He screamed their names. His screamed his own name. He begged them to shoot him. Dez Fox had shot so many of the others, and now they lay still and unmoving. Hartnup wondered—hoping, praying—whether they were really and completely dead now. He had seen others gunned down by the police and later by the National Guard. Taken down with bullets to the brain. He believed that this was the trick. Any bullet was a magic bullet as long as it struck the brain. He had to believe that or there was no God, no hope, and all was red madness forever.
Dez Fox had not shot him. Each time she fired in his direction there was another one of the Hollow Men to take the bullet. Some died, some were with him now, pounding or milling or standing.
Please, he cried within his darkness. Please …