“Yes, I fucking well do, because you have me cuffed in the back of your cruiser when I should be out there. Somebody’s made a big goddamn mistake and we’d better do something before it bites us all in the ass … and that is not a frigging joke. Now pull over, undo these cuffs, and put me on the radio with someone who doesn’t have his own dick in his ear.”

The trooper sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For whatever happened to you. For whatever’s wrong with you. I heard you were a fuckup off the job, but I always heard that you were pretty good on the clock. What happened? No … wait. Save that for when we’re doing this right. I don’t think I want to hear it.”

Dez leaned as far forward as the cuffs would allow. “What’s your name?” she asked.

There was no need for him to stonewall her on that, so he answered, “Trooper Brian Saunders.”

“Trooper Saunders. Good. Brian. I’ve seen you around. People call me Dez.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know how or why they think that I’m responsible for anything that’s happened today, but I want you to hear me on this. I was protecting the public at all times. I was defending myself at all times. I am not irrational, and I have committed no crimes.”

“Okay.” His tone was neither encouraging nor dismissive. Merely an acknowledgement that he heard her.

“There are people out there who are acting irrationally. They’re sick, possibly as a result of a chemical agent or some kind of toxin. It might be a disease. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it hits hard and it hits fast. I saw it hit one of the locals. Kid named Diviny from Bordentown PD. Diviny went apeshit and attacked fellow officers. We restrained him and my partner, Sergeant JT Hammond, and I transported him to the hospital. This is a matter of record. Check with the hospital. Immediately after that we received a call from dispatch to return to the Hartnup crime scene. Dispatch said that people were killing each other. Understand that? Killing each other. Whatever this thing is, it must have spread. That dispatch call is also a matter of record. Call the station. Talk to Flower, she’s the dispatcher. Let her play the tape.”

Saunders said nothing. The sound of the windshield wipers seemed unnaturally loud.

“When my partner and I arrived at the scene we were attacked by the infected. Some of those infected were police officers, including state troopers. We tried everything—verbal control, beanbag rounds—and then the situation forced us up a rung on the force continuum, so we defended ourselves to the best of our abilities and training. As any cops would. As you would, Brian.”

Saunders was shaking his head, but he didn’t say anything.

“Brian…” Dez pleaded. “Please. Just check.”

“They are checking,” said Saunders with exasperation. “They did check, and that’s not how we’re reading the scene. We didn’t find any ‘infected.’ All we found was evidence that two officers went batshit and began killing people. Killing cops. We found Chief Goss with half his head blown off. Burn marks around the wound look like the barrel was right against his flesh. His own gun was still in its holster. How would a cop let someone get that close unless he knew the person?”

“He was infected!”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about the hospital? Have your people talked to them? Dr. Sengupta?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“At least let me talk to—”

“Hey! Watch out!” Saunders suddenly yelled and turned the wheel violently to the right as a pregnant woman stepped out from behind a farmworker bus that was parked on the shoulder of the road. The fender of the cruiser missed her by an inch and Dez screamed in the back seat, sure that the woman was going to be smashed.

“Goddamn!” Saunders stamped down on the brakes and the cruiser slewed sideways on the wet asphalt, kicking up a wave of dirty rainwater. Dez was thrown forward as the car rocked to a jarring stop. Saunders jerked open the door handle. “Stupid bitch.”

“Don’t!” cried Dez, but Saunders ignored her as he got out. Rain chopped in through the open door. Dez twisted around in the seat to see what was happening. The pregnant woman was looking the wrong way, but she had stopped in the middle of the road; her hair hung in wet rattails and her clothing was disheveled.

Saunders crammed his Smokey the Bear hat on his head, hunched his shoulders against the cold rain, and stomped toward her, his back rigid with anger and stress, one stiffened finger jabbing the air as he yelled at her.

Dez knew this was all wrong even before the woman turned.

It was wrong because the day was wrong. Because the world was wrong. Because everything was wrong.

“Don’t…” she said, her voice much smaller. She knew that the moment was already rolling downhill.

The woman turned just as Saunders reached her. Her body was heavy with a late-term pregnancy. Her dress was a pretty farm country frock with a cornflower pattern. She was young, maybe twenty-five, with long blond hair. She had dark eyes and nearly every scrap of meat had been torn from her face and mouth.

Saunders juddered to a stop. Frozen by what he was seeing. By the impossibility of someone so badly injured still standing.

Through the open front driver’s door Dez could hear the patter of raindrops on the wide brim of his hat. She heard him begin to say, “Jesus Christ. Lady, are you—”

“Don’t!” Dez’s shriek bounced off the closed windows of the cruiser.

And then the woman was on him. She lunged at him with small, pale hands. Her lipless mouth opened wide and white teeth streaked with black blood snapped forward.

Dez screamed.

A geyser of blood shot ten feet above Brian Saunders’s head.

Dez screamed and screamed. She kicked the screen; she threw her shoulder against the door.

Saunders’s legs buckled and he dropped to his knees as the woman bent over him, her teeth locked on the side of his throat.

There was movement on the bus. Beside the bus. Behind the bus.

More of them.

A busload of them.

They converged on the trooper and dragged him to the asphalt.

Dez screamed one more time. And then she tried to stop it, realizing far too late what that scream would do.

Several of the things looked up from their unspeakable feast. Looked in the direction of the scream. Looked at her.

“Don’t…” Dez whispered softly as one by one a dozen of the monsters rose from the thrashing body and shambled toward the cruiser. The front driver door was open. Dez was in cuffs. She twisted around and popped the catch on her seat belt, but there was no way out of that car. She was trapped.

No … she was preserved. Meat in a locker.

“Don’t…” Dez begged, even though Saunders was long past hearing her. “Don’t leave me…”

They shuffled toward her.

There was no need for silence now.

Dez screamed again, and again.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

AROUND STEBBINS COUNTY

“What scares you?”

The waitress working the counter at Murphy’s Diner looked up from the coffee she was pouring. This wasn’t the first odd question this customer had asked. He was a thriller writer and he had been round annoying other customers with questions for the last couple of days. Today he was the only one crazy enough to brave the storm.

“Slow days and bad tippers,” she said.

The writer smiled. He was a blocky man with white hair and a gray mustache that was at odds with a youthful face. He wore an expensive leather jacket over a sweatshirt that had the emblem for the Northern Illinois Huskies college football team.

“Serious question,” persisted the writer. He fished in his pocket and laid a business card on the counter and pushed it toward the waitress. The card read SHANE GERICKE. The waitress, who wore a white plastic name tag with SHIRL on it, picked up the card and flipped it over. On the back was a full-color picture of his latest novel.

“Torn Apart,” she read, then set the card down. “I don’t read horror novels.”

“It’s not a horror novel,” said Gericke as he poured cream into his coffee. “I write thrillers.”

“What’s the difference?”

“No monsters.”

“Then who’s tearing who apart?”

“Serial killers, mass murderers. No vampires, no werewolves, nothing like that.”

The waitress made one of those faces that suggested that she wasn’t likely to be interested in anything this guy wrote about. At least, not until she saw how well he tipped. If he dropped twenty percent or better, then she’d be a lot more interested next time. She knew a couple of writers. They were always broke. Only people who tipped worse were college students.

“You ready to order?” she asked, setting the pot down and pulling her order pad from her apron.

“If I do, will you answer the question?”

“You taking a poll?”

“I’m researching a book. The lead character in my novels is out here from Illinois to participate in a multistate manhunt for a killer. I’m trying to get a sense of what people are like here. Moods, politics, relationships, personalities.”

“Why not just make it up?”

He shrugged, blew across his coffee cup, sipped, and set it down. “Better to draw on real life.”

“Small-town color,” she said, “is that it? Make sure the hicks are properly redneck and uneducated?”

Gericke laughed. “I grew up in the burbs outside of Chicago. Not exactly ‘big town.’ And, no, I’m not profiling everyone as a redneck. It takes all kinds of people to make a town. There’s no one ‘type.’” He ticked his head toward the street outside. “I’ve met some interesting people so far. Chief Goss, a reporter named Trout, and—”

“Billy Trout? You met him?” Shirl managed a smile for that. Without the smile she looked north of fifty and off the radar for personality vitality, but the smile dropped fifteen years from her and chipped away a lot of the gray clay that seemed to have been built around her.