Dead of Night

As they came closer she raised her gun, tried for the more difficult head shots. She caught a state trooper on the cheek, tearing a huge chunk of his face away, but he kept coming. She shot him again, right over the right eyebrow and he abruptly crumpled.

She fired two more shots and the slide of her pistol locked back. She began backpedaling as she swapped out the magazines, letting the spent one fall—against all training and instinct—and slapping the fresh one in. The new mag was heavy with bullets. Reassuring.

She fired.

JT was back to back with her, firing at the things she could not see. Dez had seen the beanbag round drop Scott, but that had been a neck-breaker. JT tended to go for body shots with the shotgun. Dumb, she thought. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

She heard JT mumbling something over and over again.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

He fired and fired.

And fired the gun dry.

“I’m out,” he said, as if surprised that a gun could commit such a heinous act of betrayal in so obvious a time of need.

“Get to the car! I’ve got a box of buckshot under the seat,” Dez said, turning, shoving him, and then they were running.

Dez did not even remember walking this far from the cruiser, but it was a dozen yards away. Some of them were in the way. All of them were closing in, some moving much faster than the others. Distantly Dez wondered if they were the more recently dead.

Another part of her mind wanted to laugh at that thought.

And still another part was whispering her three choices. Chin, temple, mouth.

JT used the shotgun like a club. An EMT grabbed at his sleeve and JT hit him in the eyes. The blow was savage and the sheer force of it pitched the EMT onto his back, but the young man immediately started struggling to get up. Another state trooper lunged at JT and clamped his teeth down on his shoulder. Even through the Kevlar the pain was immediate and excruciating, but JT channeled it into his rage as he swung the shotgun stock up under the trooper’s chin so hard that it snapped his neck. The thing fell backward, colliding with two others who had been reaching to grab.

That gave JT a tiny window and he leaped for the car door, opened it, threw the shotgun in, and pulled his Glock. “Dez, get in! I’ll cover you.”

He began firing spaced shots at the creatures that had been closing in on Dez. He dropped a few—a bullet through the forehead or sideways through an ear. Most of them merely staggered but still came on. It created a window for Dez and she jerked open the driver’s door, dove in, and slammed it shut. They rolled up the windows.

“Get us the fuck out of here!” JT bellowed as he fished under the seat for the box of shotgun shells.

Dez jammed the key into the ignition and turned it so hard that it fired the car and began stripping the starter. She released it, threw it into drive, and stamped on the gas. The road was filled with shambling bodies and the car went four feet before it slammed into two of them. Even with the windows closed they could hear leg bones break. The car rocked to a stop, lacking the momentum to roll over the two bodies that now tried to crawl out from under.

She threw it into reverse and slammed backward, crushing others. Sheldon Higdon tried to claw open the door, but he could not master the mechanics of the door handle. He pulled the gun out of his holster and used it like a club. There was enough intelligence left in him for that, and the heavy pistol smashed through the rear driver’s side window. JT pivoted around in his seat and fired at Sheldon, but the bullet merely punched through his chest. Dez cried out at the blast—it felt like someone was smashing her head with hammers.

A dozen of the creatures began pounding on the car, some with empty hands, some with stones or sticks. The rear window dissolved into a lace pattern of cracks.

Dez threw the car into drive again and kicked the pedal to the floor. There was a ten-foot lead in front of them, and she gave the car all it could take. It surged forward, the big engine howling. As the front wheels hit the crippled dead, the car bucked and lifted and crashed down—but it did so on the backs of the creatures. The wheels spun and the car thumped down over them. As the back wheels dropped onto the gravel, Dez kicked the gas again and the cruiser shot forward toward a line of the dead. At the last second she cut hard to the right, clipping a dead reporter on the hip and sending him flying into the air.

The mass of dead behind her were still coming. Some were trying awkwardly to run. Some could only crawl. But all of them kept coming.

“Go … go!” yelled JT as he fed shells into his shotgun.

She swerved around parked cars and smashed through hedges. She hit two more of the things and then angled down for the service road. There was a thump and when she looked in the rearview mirror she saw that she had just run over the bumper and part of the grille. The whole front of the car was torn apart and the steering alignment was shot. She had to fight the wheel to keep it under control.

She rounded the buildings and angled down toward the exit road.

And slammed on the brakes.

The cruiser skidded thirty feet, kicking up plumes of dust and sending gravel flying into the nearby trees. The road ahead was completely blocked. Two cruisers had been parked nose to nose to keep the press and civilians out, and beyond that were dozens of cars and trucks. There had to be three hundred people there. Most of them were still alive. Most were trying to flee. But at least sixty or seventy of those things were seeded through the crowd. It was a madhouse of struggle and red carnage. Screams filled the air, but there were few gunshots. Unlike the police, who had been the first to be overwhelmed, these people had no way of fighting back except with hands and feet and whatever they could pick up.

“Dez,” said JT.

“I know,” she said.

“We can’t help them.”

“I know.”

“They’re coming!”

She turned and saw the mass of troopers and county cops coming around the side of the building. There was no clear exit.

“Dez…”

“I know,” she said again.

And floored it.

The cruiser was up to eighty miles an hour when it hit the two parked cars, and the impact flung the cars apart. It also rocked Dez and JT back and forth in their seat belts so hard that pain exploded in their necks and backs and the air was driven from their lungs. Both front-side windows shattered.

Dez kept pressing the gas.

The car rolled forward now, barely moving at twenty miles an hour. Smoke curled up from the engine. All the dashboard service lights were lit. People tried to jump on the car, desperate for a way out; but the creatures reached for them, biting and clawing at them, dragging them down. Dez steered with her right hand and fired her Glock with her left through the ragged window. JT filled the interior of the car with thunder and smoke as he worked the shotgun.

The cruiser crept forward and finally caught the edge of Doll Factory Road. The road curved into a long slope down to the crossroads, and Dez steered into the arms of gravity. The dying car picked up speed. One man, his leg bleeding from a bad bite, held on to the roof of the car, his fingers grasping tightly and his mouth open in a continuous scream. When the car crossed the train tracks at Mason Street, the man fell off and went crashing down on the rails.

Behind them, dwindling in size, at least thirty of the dead things continued to follow. The man who had fallen off was trying to get to his feet, but his bitten leg buckled under him. Before he could crawl away, the creatures swarmed over him.

The car rolled down and down and around a curve. Big pines blocked the road behind them, but Dez knew that they were still coming.

Then the engine coughed and died, but Dez kept steering until it rolled all the way down to the crossroads by Turk’s Getty. She turned the wheel and the car drifted to a stop in the exit lane.

Dez and JT piled out of the car and stared up the hill. The curve and screen of pines was four hundred yards away. So far they could not see any of the dead.

Were they all clustered around a red thing that no longer screamed? Or were they still coming?

God, Dez cried, her voice a shriek inside her own head, are they still coming?

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

MAGIC MARTI IN THE MORNING

WNOW RADIO, MARYLAND

“This is Magic Marti at the mike with new tidbits for travelers. Okay, kids, the storm is here. Batten down the hatches and make your peace with Jesus, ’cause this one’s a doozy. National Guard units are being deployed to those areas where high floodwaters are anticipated, and we’re already getting reports of small stream flooding in Fayette and low-lying towns to the north and west of Stebbins. If you live near a stream or river and still haven’t gotten to high ground, you better do it now or wave at Aunt Marti as you go swimming by.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

GREEN GATES 55-PLUS COMMUNITY

“Zombies?” Trout whispered. The word was so strange. It didn’t fit into his mouth. Zombies were movie stuff. Bela Lugosi and Hal Leighton. Old black-and-white late night stuff. The Ghost Breakers with Bob Hope. I Walked with a Zombie.

Zombies did not belong in the real world. Maybe in a National Geographic article. Not here in Pennsylvania. This was a serial killer story. This was Silence of the goddamn Lambs, not King of the goddamn Zombies.

“Wait, wait … you’re saying you guys were dabbling in black magic?”

“No, no, of course not,” said Volker, wiping the tear from his cheek. “There is nothing supernatural about this. Though, by your standards, it is perhaps unnatural. Neither the devil or Mother Nature had a hand in what we were doing.” He paused. “In what I did.”

“What did you do?” Trout and Goat asked at the same time.

Volker said, “Homer Gibbon.”

“Oh, man…” breathed Goat.

Trout licked his lips. “Okay … tell us.”

“As I said earlier, I have committed my fair share of sins. Not sins in the same way as Gibbon, but sins nonetheless. Ethical sins, not religious. I have no faith. It died with my family. And that is how I came to make the decision I made.” He drank the rest of his coffee but still held onto the empty cup. “My handlers did not place me at Rockview by chance. It was one of several prisons in states where capital punishment was technically still on the books. I would have preferred a less liberal state … say, Texas, but they use the electric chair. That did not fit my needs.”