The ground was littered with brass. 5.56 x 45mm NATO rounds. M16s.

Dez looked around and saw muddy impressions from truck tires and boot marks from at least a dozen men.

The National Guard. Had to be. Hope flared in her chest. If the Guard was here, then someone was using their head. Someone asked for some serious backup and the Guard had come in here to kick ass and take names.

She kept moving and as she ran questions filled her head. How much did the government know? Did the government know anything? The Guardsmen could have been here to sandbag the riverbanks or evacuate the townsfolk. They might have fired as a response to an attack. If so … did the Guard take any injuries? Were any of them bitten and possibly infected?

That was the ugliest thought of all, because they went everywhere in the state. It would be a real bitch if the good guys riding to the rescue were the ones to spread this.

She realized with a sinking stomach that she had already seen that. That’s what happened to Andy Diviny and the others. And Chief Goss. Probably Trooper Saunders, too.

Somebody had to warn them.

“Oh, shit,” she growled and increased her pace. Running hurt her head, but she didn’t care. She slogged through the mud as fast as her weary legs would carry her.

She got answers to some of her questions a quarter mile down the road. She saw the smoke first and as she rounded a curve in the road she saw the burning car. It was a Toyota RAV4. The vehicle was completely gutted by fire, the tires melted, the windows gone, bullet holes everywhere. Spent brass all over the muddy road.

There were six bodies there. Two of them were still inside the Toyota, both strapped into car seats in the back, burned to charred lumps.

“God, no.”

She turned away in grief and horror. The bodies on the road were all adults. Two women and two men. Dez knew the women. Katie Gunderson and her sister, Jeanne. Both of them were married, both had kids in preschool.

Had.

“God…”

Lying partly under Jeanne was a man Dez vaguely recognized from town events. A farmworker. She had no idea what his name was. The three of them were riddled with bullet holes. The farmworker was clearly one of the infected. His face and throat had ragged bite marks; but Dez couldn’t see any trace of bites or the black goo on the women.

The last body was a real puzzle, and again it made Dez’s heart sink.

It was a National Guardsman in a torn white hazmat suit. Dez squatted down and gingerly lifted his gas mask to reveal a young face, maybe twenty. He had a bite on his left hand, but it wasn’t the disease that had killed him. Someone had put three rounds through his forehead.

But … why hadn’t they taken the injured man into quarantine, given him some kind of treatment? Why leave his body here? Even if he’d died as a result of the bite, or if they’d killed him because they were terrified of the disease, why leave his body? Leaving a soldier behind is against everything soldiers are taught. They didn’t even take his dog tags. They blew his head off and left.

That made no kind of sense.

Unless …

“Oh … shit,” she said and she could hear the panic in her own tone.

It made no sense unless the Guardsmen were that afraid of the plague. Unless the plague was so desperately dangerous that even the respect for a fallen soldier had to be prohibited.

Dez licked rainwater off her lips. How bad was this thing? She looked at the bodies and then down at the dead soldier.

Do I have it?

The dead kept their secrets, but their silence seemed to mock her, to promise awful things.

Then she heard a squawking sound. At first she couldn’t understand what or where it was, and then she heard it again, and she knew. It was squelch from a walkie-talkie.

Dez found it under the man’s hip. Dez tore off a handful of leaves from a roadside bush and wiped the device clean of blood and mud. She began fiddling with it as she jogged down the road toward her trailer park. When she found a channel where there was some chatter she slowed to a walk and pressed the device to her ear, sticking a finger in her other ear to block out the sound of the storm. There were a lot of voices, lots of overlapping chatter, a lot of emotions running high. The result was a jumble from which Dez could only harvest a few scraps.

“… last of state cops are in the holding pen … primary shooting line with a fallback at twenty yards … helos grounded … two cars of farmers tried to run the south barricade … CDC Wildfire team delayed by storm…”

Only bits and pieces, but it was enough for Dez. And more than enough to convince her not to say anything into the walkie-talkie. If they shot their own and shot civilians …

She heard the phrase “Q-zone” at least a dozen times. Quarantine zone. Had to be. That was both good and bad. Good for the rest of the state, or maybe the rest of the country. Bad as shit for her and her fellow citizens in Stebbins County. It wasn’t a surprise, but it confirmed her worst fears.

Almost her worst. There was another phrase that was peppered through the chatter. Three words. Three terrible words.

… shoot on sight …

Dez stuffed the walkie-talkie into her jacket pocket and began running again. Faster.

A few cars and trucks appeared in the gloom, but each time they were ordinary. Parked where they should be parked, no sign of further violence.

Until she found the second state police cruiser.

It was smashed into a telephone pole half a block from the road that led to her trailer park. The front end was wrapped like a cruller around the shattered stump of the pole. Wires lay across the road like broken spider webs. Chunks of safety glass sparkled as raindrops struck them.

Dez raised the shotgun as she approached the vehicle from a quarter angle. The windshield was spiderwebbed out from a black impact hole. The driver, seat belt notwithstanding, had hit the windshield hard. From the degree of damage, and the lack of skid marks, it looked to Dez as if the driver had been driving at high speed and never touched the brakes.

There were multiple lines of bullet holes stitched along the passenger side of the cruiser. The brass in the middle of the road were from M16s. All four doors were open.

She darted forward and aimed her gun inside.

The front seat was torn and slashed, and there was an inch-deep puddle of bloody rainwater sloshing around the puddles. Standing like bleak islands in the puddle were small lumps of meat and a man’s left thumb.

Dez’s mind cruelly supplied a name for what she was seeing.

Leftovers.

She swallowed a throatful of acid and checked the backseat. Blood there, too.

Whose blood? The thumb had been from a white man, not from JT.

“C’mon, Hoss,” Dez murmured. “Give me a happy ending here.”

But there was no more to this story.

She moved around to the back of the vehicle. The trunk hood was bent and had popped out of the lock. The shotgun was gone. She tried on a smile, hoping that JT had been the one to cowboy up and blast his way out of there. The backseat was bloody, though.

“No…,” she breathed, and hearing the word drove a spike of doubt and fear into her heart. “C’mon … no…”

The rain was so loud that she never heard the wet footsteps behind her, but suddenly icy fingers clamped around her arms and dragged her backward.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

STEBBINS COUNTY LINE

Billy Trout suddenly swerved the Explorer off the road and pulled behind a billboard for a year-round Christmas store.

“What’d you do that for?” demanded Goat.

“Look!” Trout said, pointing.

Goat peered through the storm. A hundred yards ahead, almost invisible in the relentless rain, a line of military vehicles was barreling along Hank Davis Pike, the road that cut across the county line and went directly into Stebbins. There were at least a dozen troop trucks and two Humvees with top-mounted machine guns. They were bucketing along, and when they hit the crossroads they didn’t even slow down, burning straight through the red light. Only the last vehicle slowed to a stop, slopping through mud onto the shoulder. Immediately soldiers piled out and began removing sawhorse barriers from the back of the truck. They erected them across the road that led into town. The guards were dressed in rain ponchos, but their M16s were visible on slings.

The soldiers were dressed in white hazmat suits.

“Oh man,” said Goat. “This shit must be totally out of the box.”

“Yeah,” murmured Trout dryly. “God, this story has to get out. Damn … I wish the phones worked. Fucking storm…”

“Screw the storm, Billy. Our calls were going nowhere before the rain even started. Those goons cut the lines and jammed the cell towers and you know it. We’d need a satellite phone or the broadcast uplink to get the word out.”

“Don’t suppose you brought that stuff?” Trout asked hopefully.

“Pretty sure I’d be fucking using it right about now if I had.” Goat stared at the Guardsmen down the road. “We’re screwed, Billy. We’ll never get in.”

“Maybe, maybe. Let me think.” Trout turned and looked the way they’d come, and then looked farther up the road, chewing his lip in thought. “Okay, they’ve got this road blocked, and there are four other significant roads that lead to town. Hank Davis becomes Doll Factory once you pass the reservoir. Then there’s Sawmill Road at the west end, Brayer Bridge Road at the southeast corner, and Sandoval Road that crosses into Maryland. They’re going to block those, no doubt about it. How many other roads does that leave?”

“Including farm roads?” asked Goat. “About a million.”

“Right. So, if they’re just now blocking the big roads, we can still get in on a farm road. What’s close? Forest Lane … or that crappy little utility road by the Miller place.”

Goat looked uncertain. “Wait, man, let’s think this through. Why exactly are we trying to get into town.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack. Think about it, man. Doc Volker infected a psycho serial killer with a bunch of parasites that are probably going to make him even more of a murderous whack job than he already was, and which are likely to spread like wildfire. He said that the infected would be—what’s the word he used?—suborned by the parasite’s need to replicate and feed. We’re talking full-on zombies running around, maybe biting people, maybe doing who knows what to spread the parasite.”