“God, Dez,” Trout whispered, kissing her hair.
The teachers lowered their guns. And Trout slowly, reluctantly released Dez. She did not move away from him, and he was glad of that.
JT still stood in the hallway, apart and alone, his shotgun held in his bloody hands. The expression on his face was indescribable. It was a bottomless sadness mixed with a realization of the worst horrors.
“We heard from the National Guard,” he said. “They called Dez on her walkie-talkie. They offered us a deal. ”
The crowd pressed close to listen.
“What kind of deal?” asked Trout cautiously.
“A bad one,” said Dez softly. “But it’s all we’re going to get. ” Trout watched her eyes as she looked out at the sea of faces. Most of the little children were backstage now, but there were teenagers here, and babies in the arms of people who had probably rescued them from the things that had been their parents.
“Tell us,” said Mrs. Madison.
She told them.
That’s when the weeping began. Shock from the helicopter attack crumbled in the face of this new grief.
“How many bite victims do we have here?” asked Dez.
Mrs. Madison shook her head, refusing to say.
One of the other teachers put her hand on the principal’s shoulder but looked at Dez. “Fifteen adults. Three … children. ”
Dez sagged back against Trout and he caught her.
“You can’t send the children out there,” insisted Mrs. Madison. “It’s inhuman. ”
“It’s a plague,” snapped JT so harshly that it silenced everyone. “If the infected stay in here they will get sick and die, and then they will reanimate. Even if you keep them locked up, you can’t save them. All you can decide is whether they die a slow agonizing death or go … more quickly…”
His voice broke at the end, but his words hung in the air.
Mrs. Madison turned to the other teacher and buried her face in her shoulder and wept. Everyone stood there and watched her thin back hitch and buck with each terrible sob.
* * *
JT, Dez, and Trout went to do what had to be done. They asked for volunteers and got none. Not one.
The three of them closed the auditorium doors and walked down the hallway to the classrooms where the infected were being kept in isolation. Trout thought that it felt like walking that last mile from a jail cell to the execution chamber. It had the same sense of finality at the end of it, the same enormous dread of the unknown.
But what he said aloud was, “With everything that’s happened, we’ve kind of lost sight of how this started. ”
“Volker?” asked JT.
“No … Homer Gibbon. Volker said that he’d be different than the other infected. That he might still have some conscious control over his body. I wonder … could he be out there now? Is he the reason this spread so fast? Is he going around like some monstrous Johnny Appleseed, spreading the plague?”
JT said nothing.
Dez shook her head. “If he is, then the Guard will have to hunt him down. ”
“Right now,” JT said softly, “it’s hard to say who’s worse. Gibbon, Volker, or the people in the government who allowed anyone to work on the Lucifer thing. They’re all monsters. ”
Dez nodded, and Trout agreed wholeheartedly.
* * *
The bite victims were in one room; those sick from the black mucus were in another.